SFCINEMATHEQUE

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Thursday, April 10, 2003

French Narratives of the 1920s and ’30s

Program 2: Jean Epstein's The Three-Paneled Mirror and Marie Epstein's Children of Montmartre

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts





One of the most prolific filmmakers from the 1920s through the ’40s, Jean Epstein is renowned for his critical writings on film, his avant-garde narrative work and his quasi-documentary explorations of rural life in coastal Brittany. His sister Marie, who collaborated with him on a number of scripts and also directed her own films, is much less well-known. Here we pair one of Jean’s films, The Three-Paneled Mirror (La Glace à Trois Faces), a tale of a spoiled young man as seen through the very different visions of his three lovers, with one of Marie’s: Children of Montmartre (La Maternelle) is a poetic-realist social drama of children in Paris’ urban ghetto, based on months of research and cast mostly with amateurs. (Irina Leimbacher)