On Le tempestaire (Jean Epstein ,1947)
(Published in Spanish on November 3rd, 2020, in Correspondencias. Cine y pensamiento http://correspondenciascine.com/2020/11/seminario-de-critica-de-cine-le-tempestaire-de-jean-epstein/)
Seas, winds, and storms move with their own force, upon which humans have no interference at all. However, these natural elements can rule the path of our lives: they can set up unbeatable distances that separate us physically from our loved ones. In Le tempestaire, Jean Epstein next to last film, a girl waits for her lover, a young mariner who goes to fish sardines amid a tempest that ravages even the most concealed intimate space. The girl’s grandmother tries to calm her by telling her a legend about some millenary characters:
In my time, they said some people could heal the wind. The storm-tamers, they called them. Old people who could command the tempest and were obeyed by it. Then the sea would calm down. But these are old stories. One should not believe them now
The old lady’s tale suggests the necessity for a certain kind of magic—one that locates in a paradoxical interstice between domination and supplication—that could alter the movement of natural forces, apparently alien to human affairs.
How is it possible to intervene in the air’s path? In which way can the oceanic streams appease? How can immensity be held? Epstein’s short film, titled after those mysterious men, arises these questions and the answer that the film provides, if any, is only provisional: the capabilities of the cinematograph are analogous to those of the tempestaire, because with the frame’s borders, the textures, the mise-en-scène, and montage’s maritime rhythm, cinema allows to handle tempests.
The opening sequence sets up the contrast between nature’s movement and the humans’ statism against it: people cannot intervene at all, even before the storm arrives. The film starts in the stillness of a marine landscape. We see water, wet sand, the coast village’s small houses, some desolated boats, a lighthouse, and the deep gray sky. The swinging of thickets and the waving of the ocean stream, though soft, are the only perceptible movements. In this sequence, there are only two shots with human figures: two frozen images that deliberately contribute to creating that tension. The first one shows three old mariners looking dolefully to the horizon. In the second one, the young girl in love and her grandmother knit next to a spinning wheel. Quietness is disrupted by a hustle announced with a pernicious screech: that of the door opening towards the inside, in the same manner as the resonant ocean waves arrive horizontally to the shore. The girl is afraid of the wind.
Then, the tempest begins. In a series of long shots, we see all its faces from multiple perspectives. The tide appears frontally, as many different layers that come and go from the shot’s lower part. The ocean expands and scatters beyond the visual field. In a way, the frame delimits the sea’s immensity within its four edges, which awakes, at least for an instant, the illusion of holding the immeasurable. This illusion can be seen in the mise-en-scène in the girl’s house. While she waits, there is a seashell and a scale model ship inside a crystal box on the furniture of the décor. The presence of these objects suggests that the sea’s domains can be reproduced in miniature and be placed in the domestic space, but all these ways of retaining are not enough to alter the tempest’s course that puts a loved one in risk.
The only way of holding the marine immensity and its storms is to contemplate them in their infinite freedom. Thus, Epstein films the waves that break against the cliff from a high angle. The aquatic surface’s brightness turns the abyss of an oceanic cave into volcanic magma inside a crater. The camera focuses on the tiniest detail in this fathomless environment. For example, a travelling follows cautiously the bubbles in the water that, like passing clouds, go away from the shore, and they immediately mix with the new coming ocean wave. Then, the camera carries on with its trajectory, indifferently. Simultaneously, the sky’s foam moves, as if mirroring the sea. The whiteness of the water can barely be seen at nightfall. Does the camera command the tempest or does the tempest command the camera? In Epstein’s film there are no hierarchies, and the storm is seen with devotion.
In the end, the young woman finds the tempestaire, who in front of the girl’s begging face takes out a crystal ball: the final instance of trying to hold immensity. The ocean superimposes on the ball. Now it is contained by the circular borders, which are even smaller than those of the frame. The clouds accelerate, while the sea decelerates and makes a move back, as if it were rewinding. The storm-tamer drops the ball, and it breaks silently. The young mariner enters the room with his lover, as if he had never been away at all. His return was possible thanks to this sortilege of images and sounds that offers the possibility of reuniting the lovers in the middle of a long shot, wandering to the horizon.
The Wonderful Country 
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