In 1923, Jean Epstein traveled to the island of Sicily to film Mount Etna's latest eruption. Stuart Liebman's pioneering research on Epstein has confirmed that the resulting film produced by Pathé Consortium, La Montagne infidèle, is now lost. Yet, the eponymous first chapter of Epstein's book, Le Cinématographe vu de l’Etna (1926), survives not only as one of the most evocative texts about an encounter with the live volcano. It also persists as one of the most powerful early texts on film aesthetics and technological mediation – the epicenter of the modern aesthetic experience according to Epstein.

Throughout the “Etna” chapter, Epstein uses the classic convention of anthropomorphosis not unlike the humorist cited in the epigraph, but toward far more philosophic ends. Etna is described first as a “great actor” whose molten incline later took on “an obstinate, human face.” The volcano's fullest human incarnation in the essay is also its most startling. It is followed by a phrase that continues to strike film scholars with its signifying force: We felt ourselves to be in the presence of someone lying in wait for us. The laughter and the stunning cries of our eight mule-drivers quieted. We marched in the silence of a thought that was shared until I felt it before us like an eleventh, gigantic person. I don't know if I can communicate the degree to which this, this is cinema, this personage of our preoccupation. ” In this passage, Epstein neither posits a facile comparison of Etna to the cinema nor simply shifts to a cinematographic discourse; nor does he, in my view, describe this experience “as if he were in a film,” as the phrase has been otherwise interpreted.