Jean Epstein / Claude Dalbanne: Bonjour cinéma, 1921. 6th book of the "Collection des tracts". Éditions de la sirène, Paris 1921. First edition (edition on ordinary paper). 8˚ (18 x 11.5 cm). 118 pp. (including front endpaper), 5 leaves with film credits style illustrations and copyright notice. Illustrated red-brown original paperback with printer's stamp "M. Audin/Impr./Lyon" on front inside cover. Futuristic Dadaist typography and graphic design by Claude Dalbanne. Text in French. Reprinted are the earlier texts on cinema by Jean Epstein "Le 14me Épisode," "Le Sens 1bis," and "Grossissement," revised for this edition. The intervening poem-like sections are dedicated in part to individual actors such as Douglas Fairbanks, Charlie Chaplin ("Charlot"), Charles Ray, or Sessue Hayakawa, followed by a "litanie de toutes les photogénies." With full-page collages, typographic layouts and drawings partly in cubist-dadaist style after motifs of contemporary film ephemera (posters and programs).
"[A] witty parody of a film program.... More important was the book's correlation to the work done by Apollinaire, Blaise Cendrars, and even the Dadaists during the war and the postwar period.... Epstein was already playing with the idea of 'editing' together the diverse strands of modern life into something analogous to a film. And in his essays was the germ...of a cinema of discontinuity..." (Richard Abel, French Cinema, Princeton: 1984. p. 249)
"The most significant book on the cinema of the period" (Abel, French Film Theory and Criticism, vol. 1, Princeton: 1993. p. 197)
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