Introduction

L’intelligence d’une machine was published in January 1946, after more than a tenyear hiatus due to the war, when Epstein had to go in hiding. While the topic reflected in the title of the book had been a constant preoccupation throughout Epstein's previous writings, this text pursues in depth topics that will remain central to all his later publications. He here approaches cinema as a philosophy of time and space more consistently than before, and methodically construes arguments in the field of physics, mechanics, and thermodynamics. The concept of photogénie loses much of the importance it had in earlier writings, and references to film examples are almost absent. Instead, he searches in cinema for an intelligence and a philosophy of time other than those based on our brute sense impression. Because this discourse is far away from that of most “Impressionist” and avant-garde theory, his later writings have often been overlooked in France as well as abroad, where few of the post-war publications have been translated until now.

– Trond Lundemo

Excerpts from L’Intélligence d’une machine [1946]

Translated by Trond Lundemo

[Jean Epstein, L’Intelligence d’une machine (Paris: Éditions Jacques Melot, 1946). Selections reprinted in ESC1: pp. 310-16.]

The Philosophy of the Cinematograph

Cinema is one of these intellectual robots, still partial, that fleshes out representations – that is to say, a thought – through photo-electrical mechanics and a photo-chemical inscription. One can here recognize the primordial frameworks of reason, the three Kantian categories of space, duration, and causality. This result would already be remarkable if cinematographic thought only did what the calculating machine does, to constitute itself in the servile imitation of human ideation. But we know that the cinematograph, on the contrary, marks its representation of the universe with its own qualities, with an originality that makes this representation not a reflection or a simple copy with conceptions, of an organic mentality-mother, but rather a system that is individualized differently, partly independently, which contains the incitements for a philosophy so far from common opinions, the doxa, that one should perhaps call it an anti-philosophy.