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The Intelligence of a Machine
The advent of the cinema radically altered our comprehension of time, space, and reality. With his experience as a pioneering avant-garde filmmaker, Jean Epstein uses the universes created by the cinematograph to deconstruct our understanding of how time and space, reality and unreality, continuity and discontinuity, determinism and randomness function both inside and outside the cinema. Time, he says, should be regarded as the first, not the fourth, dimension—and the cinematograph allows us, for the first time, to manipulate it in directions and speeds of our choosing. The theoretical work of Jean Epstein greatly influenced later generations of cinema philosophers, notably Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Rancière, but the bulk of his work remains unpublished. The Intelligence of a Machine , his first major title published in English, is one of the earliest philosophies of cinema.
- GenresFilm
111 pages, Paperback
First published February 1, 2014
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About the author
Jean Epstein
74 books3 followersJean Epstein (March 25, 1897 – April 2, 1953) was a French filmmaker, film theorist, literary critic, and novelist.
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
February 16, 2023
at once phenomenological and transcendent, esoteric and psychoanalytic, theoretical and poetic (even in translation!), scientific and spiritual, yin-yang, mutual arisement, &c. much much more than i ever expected from a work of film theory or writing on other (perhaps artificial...) intelligences and very seriously the most beautiful work of theory i have touched. any book that makes me stop every 10 pages in order to contemplate God is 6/5 goodreads stars. thanks
one paragraph for reference:
"Indeed, whether we call it God or Quintessence of Energy, the unique essence of all things divided into appearances remains unapproachable. It is not entirely impossible to hope that one day we will spend our vacations on an astro-port of Venus or Mars, that we will manufacture armies of homunculi, that truth and lies will be electroscoped, that we will buy tubes of fluorescent thoughts and pill bottles full of the toxins of love and courage, leniency, and friendship. But even if the universe may be stripped of all its other mysteries, it will more than likely, through the quiddity of its nature and down to the last analysis of its substance, always keep asking a question that has no answer. This is not an unresolved problem: we feel that it is insoluble. It amounts to a notion that dwindles, disintegrates, and vanishes into understanding the more the latter tries clearing it up. Among so many hunts for the ungraspable, that of Descartes is perhaps the defeat in which the inanity of a chimera transpires the most clearly, escaping through the sieve of thought which we realize contains, at last, nothing that may be expressed. All we can guess of this nothing is that it is everywhere the same: this is because, depending on its movement in space-time, it sustains all appearances indifferently" (90-91).
one paragraph for reference:
"Indeed, whether we call it God or Quintessence of Energy, the unique essence of all things divided into appearances remains unapproachable. It is not entirely impossible to hope that one day we will spend our vacations on an astro-port of Venus or Mars, that we will manufacture armies of homunculi, that truth and lies will be electroscoped, that we will buy tubes of fluorescent thoughts and pill bottles full of the toxins of love and courage, leniency, and friendship. But even if the universe may be stripped of all its other mysteries, it will more than likely, through the quiddity of its nature and down to the last analysis of its substance, always keep asking a question that has no answer. This is not an unresolved problem: we feel that it is insoluble. It amounts to a notion that dwindles, disintegrates, and vanishes into understanding the more the latter tries clearing it up. Among so many hunts for the ungraspable, that of Descartes is perhaps the defeat in which the inanity of a chimera transpires the most clearly, escaping through the sieve of thought which we realize contains, at last, nothing that may be expressed. All we can guess of this nothing is that it is everywhere the same: this is because, depending on its movement in space-time, it sustains all appearances indifferently" (90-91).
July 14, 2016
Un libro genial. Jean Epstein examina el cine como una máquina de pensar. Ninguno de los problemas importantes de la filosofía del cine escapa al ingenio de Epstein en este libro. La brecha entre lo continuo y lo discontinuo, la relación entre el espacio y el tiempo, la articulación del azar y lo determinado, la relación entre lo real y lo irreal, la dialéctica entre la idea y el número, entre tantos otros enigmas, son revisados, acelerados, ralentizados por el cerebro-robot de Epstein. Opino que es muy interesante la integración de conocimientos sobre cine y sobre filosofía y ciencia que ha logrado este autor-cineasta. También creo que la propuesta de una filosofía de la irrealidad a partir del cine es brillante. Creo que las conclusiones provisorias a las que llega son convincentes: el cine promueve una poética matemática que rescata al platonismo y al pitagorismo. Un componente inusual en este libro de filosofía es el conocimiento que tiene Epstein de la ciencia de su tiempo -publicó este libro en 1946-. Los aportes por entonces recientes de la teoría de la relatividad general, de la física de partículas, de la astrofísica, de la teoría axiomática de la probabilidad, de los límites del determinismo, de la biología humana y de la historia, entre otros, han sido analizados por Epstein. Si bien algunos modelos son de época, sus análisis son siempre correctos. Pienso que este libro es muy recomendable junto con El Cine del Diablo, del mismo autor.
October 4, 2025
Epstein’s The Intelligence of a Machine (written in French in 1946 and translated into English by Christophe Wall-Romana in 2014) is often slotted into film theory, but it belongs with philosophy. Just as the microscope revealed microbial carnivals smaller than the eye could ever register, cinema revealed new dimensions of time. Slow motion stiffens a man into stone, draining vitality from his body. Reverse motion breaks causality open with dinner plates reassembling themselves and rising into a waiter’s open hands. The close-up magnifies an eye until it seems to detach and live as an autonomous creature. Even though audiences had seen these effects on film, it took Epstein’s synthesis with modern physics to show what they revealed — that perception itself is unstable, that time and causality are not fixed but elastic.
“Microscopes and astronomical instruments have multiplied the penetrating power of sight… The cinematograph, though barely fifty years old, also begins to provoke important revelations, especially in the analysis of movement. Yet spectators see only theater renovated. Beneath that glory, other possibilities escape notice. To discover always means to learn that objects are not what we thought they were: to know more requires abandoning the most clear and certain part of established knowledge.”
In his hands, cinema became a tool for unlearning, an instrument that forced reality to shed its disguise.
Epstein pressed further into the relation between quantity and quality, in direct contrast to Henri Bergson, who argued that quality and lived experience were always primary and that number or measurement could never capture the essence of time. Epstein reversed the emphasis: for him, scale itself was the driving force, the way number produces new realities.
Ten trees form a clump, a thousand gather into a forest with moods of its own. A single grain of sand sits quiet in your palm, but billions roar into a desert that swallows entire civilizations. “A few neurons trigger a reflex arc; a thousand reflex arcs become a character, an intelligence, a soul.” He never used the word emergence, yet the principle hums through his sentences: number tips into novelty. As a pharmacologist, it reminds me of a mantra “the dose makes the difference,” a reminder that a molecule heals at one scale and kills at another, that even water becomes lethal when forced in excess. Quantity alone makes nature change its costume.
Epstein closes with a flourish that still startles: reality’s great binaries — space and time, determinism and freedom, matter and spirit — lose their edges, dissolve, and drift. “All in all, it becomes poetry.” Cinema appears here as philosophy spliced into frames of light, and Epstein gestures toward the terrain we now circle as consciousness, though he never named it outright. He didn’t need to.
“Microscopes and astronomical instruments have multiplied the penetrating power of sight… The cinematograph, though barely fifty years old, also begins to provoke important revelations, especially in the analysis of movement. Yet spectators see only theater renovated. Beneath that glory, other possibilities escape notice. To discover always means to learn that objects are not what we thought they were: to know more requires abandoning the most clear and certain part of established knowledge.”
In his hands, cinema became a tool for unlearning, an instrument that forced reality to shed its disguise.
Epstein pressed further into the relation between quantity and quality, in direct contrast to Henri Bergson, who argued that quality and lived experience were always primary and that number or measurement could never capture the essence of time. Epstein reversed the emphasis: for him, scale itself was the driving force, the way number produces new realities.
Ten trees form a clump, a thousand gather into a forest with moods of its own. A single grain of sand sits quiet in your palm, but billions roar into a desert that swallows entire civilizations. “A few neurons trigger a reflex arc; a thousand reflex arcs become a character, an intelligence, a soul.” He never used the word emergence, yet the principle hums through his sentences: number tips into novelty. As a pharmacologist, it reminds me of a mantra “the dose makes the difference,” a reminder that a molecule heals at one scale and kills at another, that even water becomes lethal when forced in excess. Quantity alone makes nature change its costume.
Epstein closes with a flourish that still startles: reality’s great binaries — space and time, determinism and freedom, matter and spirit — lose their edges, dissolve, and drift. “All in all, it becomes poetry.” Cinema appears here as philosophy spliced into frames of light, and Epstein gestures toward the terrain we now circle as consciousness, though he never named it outright. He didn’t need to.
July 12, 2017
Stunning work of film-philosophy, as insightful as it is provocative.
October 14, 2017
I have a hard time with theory generally but this translation is lucid and clear, and it's thought-provoking, even though I still need to parse it out.
November 23, 2025
Really good!!
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews