Le Tempestaire

Deploying local villagers in the central roles, Jean Epstein’s last major film is the story a woman worried about her fiancé’s fate on a fishing boat caught in a raging storm. S visits a local lighthouse and employs a “storm tamer” to ensure her lover’s safety.

Another of Epstein’s strikingly shot and poetic portraits of Breton life explores concrete sound as well as the techniques of varied filmic motion that marked his earlier work. This haunting, oceanic and hallucinatory work is a formative example of “environmental” cinema.