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| Images courtesy of Eureka Entertainment |
French film theorist, literary critic, screenwriter and film
director Jean Epstien, born in Warsaw, Poland when it was still part of the
Russian Empire, was indisputably one of France’s most important key figures in
what would evolve into the French Impressionist movement. Starting somewhere around the 1920s, it was
an avant-garde movement focused on pictorialism, montage and diffusion involving
experimental superimpositions, high-speed photography and hyperkinetic
editing. Reportedly one of the early
building blocks that led to the proliferation of film criticism, the
Impressionist movement resulted in a number of visually striking innovative
pictures that left more of an overall impression or vibe than a clear narrative
line.
Epstein’s work is largely remembered for his collaboration
with Spanish surrealist Luis Buñuel in his 1928 adaptation of The Fall of
the House of Usher. Though prolific,
many of his films remain unseen by worldly cinephiles, a status quo Eureka
Entertainment and the Gaumont Film Company are fixing to change with their new
4K restoration of Finis Terræ, a silent film progenitor of sorts to
Robert Eggers’ The Lighthouse or Mark Jenkin’s Bait which is
among the most picturesque, ravishing and tactile screen portraits of rural
rocky terrain since Hiroshi Teshigahara’s Woman in the Dunes or Alain
Resnais’ Hiroshima Mon Amour.
The premise and how it plays out seems simple enough: four
fisherman venture out on a three-month journey to the islet Bannec in search of
harvesting seaweed to be burned and processed into an ash that can be bought
and sold. However, young Ambroise and
Jean-Marie get into a squabble over dropping the last bottle of wine left on
the island. Ambroise cuts his thumb open
on a piece of broken wine bottle glass which gradually becomes infected, a
detail he hides from his coworkers who don’t know he’s succumbing to illness
and assume is lazy when he begins laying around and washing his injured hand in
drinking water.
Meanwhile people on the Island of Ushant start noticing the plumes
of smoke coming from Bannec have died down, causing the villagers to plead with
the island doctor to send a rescue team which itself proves almost as
insurmountable as it is for anyone to leave Bannec. Up against high tides and sharp currents, the
other three fisherman catch wind of Ambroise’s condition and also spring to
action in an effort to bring the boy emergency medical attention. With both parties from each side racing
against time and tide to reach one another, will either group make it out of
this stranding predicament alive or in one piece?
Fleeting, ethereal and dreamy with a neorealist underpinning
replete with local non-actors cast in all the principal roles and frequent handheld
camerawork lensed by four cinematographers, Finis Terræ bears the
characteristics of a Soviet avant-garde experiment. With vast vistas of foamy oceanic waves
crashing on the shoreline against rock and sand, frequently shot in high speed
to give a smooth slow motion photographic effect, captured by Joseph Barthes,
Gosta Kotulla, Louis Nee and Raymond Tulle, the film framed in 1.33:1 restored
in 4K by the Gaumont company looks dreamt rather than photographed.
Including a striking vista of a small boat emerging from a
thick cloud of fog, low-angled shots gazing up at the towering lighthouse and
many tight closeups of faces worn and weathered by the region, Finis Terræ is
an intersection between documentary and fiction where the lines between fantasy
and reality are near impossible to differentiate. One of many films the director would make on
the subject of the coast of Brittany, watching the film is as much of a shared
endurance with the workers and islanders trying to survive as it is an
immersive atmospheric exercise.
Released on a deluxe limited edition blu-ray (only 2,000
copies) with a collectible slipcover by John Dunn and a collectible booklet
featuring both archival director notes as well as a newly written essay by Jean
Epstein aficionado Christophe Wall-Romana, the disc for Finis Terræ also
includes video essays on both the film and particularly its director from
Pamela Hutchinson and Joel Daire. For
newcomers (myself included), Finis Terræ represents one of the early
examples of what would or wouldn’t develop into the aquatic survival drama as
well as serving as a benchmark for the aforementioned Robert Eggers period
epic.
As a silent epic, it is one of the more Earthy and physical
screen offerings of its day, pushing the envelope for how narrative
storytelling could be meshed together with nonfiction in a lyrical manner. As an introduction to the cinema of Jean
Epstein, this was a fabulous blu-ray package of one of silent French
Impressionist filmmaking’s greatest examples and I’m very hopeful this means we
will receive more works of his in lavish boutique special editions like this one
in the future.
--Andrew Kotwicki
