As filmmaker and theorist, Jean Epstein has observed that the fundamental energies undergirding cinema are those that valorize both rapt attention (associated with stillness) and incessant flux (associated with movement), with a strong emphasis in his own work upon the latter. One of the cinema's most conspicuous tensions, for example, lies in the balance between its still frames and the way, when they are set into motion, that they revivify whatever these individual shots depict – a tension between stasis and change. Within his assertions about cinema as the ultimate negotiator of the state of becoming characterizing existence, we find a central connection among Epstein's theory, his films, and the world in which he conceived the theory and films. Epstein was a vigorous participant within the modern era of which he was a part and which witnessed the strengthening within intellectual circles of the idea of movement, change, and constant becoming as a means for understanding aspects of our experience. Simultaneously, that era itself witnessed immense social, technological, and aesthetic changes – changes that happened broadly and with harrowing rapidity. What better tool for comprehending such momentous transitions, Epstein argued, than cinema, born from a moment (and itself composed of the elements) of massive change?

Before attempting to answer such a question, we might do well to take a step back: first of all, who was Jean Epstein, this figure lingering on the outskirts of cinema studies’ horizons, and why should the notion of change – and its attendant figure of transgression that the epigraph above points out – matter to cinema studies as much as it did to Epstein? In the history of cinema, and in the history of theories about cinema, where does his work fit in?