Finis terrae (1929)
Directed by Jean Epstein

Film Review

The entirety of Jean Epstein's career can be summed up as an unending quest to capture the essence of life through cinema.  No existing term could describe this hard-to-define 'essence' and so Epstein invented a new word for it - photogénie.  His dedicated, some would say obsessive, attempt to grasp this elusive chimera was what drove his impressionistic approach to cinema through the 1920s and made him the most rigorously experimental of the French avant-garde filmmakers.  Epstein made his mark with such films as Coeur fidèle (1923), Le Lion des Mogols  (1924) and La Glace à trois faces (1927) but his primary goal eluded him.  By the end of the decade, he was ready to concede defeat.

Having exhausted his personal resources and driven his film production company to bankruptcy, Epstein was left feeling dispirited and drained.  He had served his stint making commercial films, but this had not been to his liking.  The artistic films he then made off his own bat had mostly failed to make a decent return and he was unlikely to find a backer willing to let him carry on in this money wasting vein.  Maybe it was time to call it a day.  Once the editing of La Chute de la maison Usher (1928) had been completed in May 1928, Epstein fled from Paris and headed west, to the furthest reaches of Brittany for a long, well overdue holiday.  It was here, at the World's End (the literal translation of Finistère), that the 31-year-old filmmaker had his epiphany.

It is easy to see why a man of Epstein's maverick, wildly artistic temperament should fall in love with Brittany.  First there is the savage, untamed beauty of the Breton coastline, its rocky shore stretching on forever in defiance of the sea - a capricious lady if ever there was one, alternately assailing the land with the most tender of caresses and the fiercest of molestations.  Then there are the unspoiled God-fearing folk who somehow manage to live here - the Bretons who eke out the toughest of lives in the most inhospitable of settings, and appear to be as content with their lot as any other man or woman in France.  A mystical rugged land inhabited by a mystical rugged race.  This is what spoke to Jean Epstein's romantic core and awoke something deep inside him.  He had at last found the ideal subject for his photogénie. 

It was with a sense of triumphant revelation that the director returned to Paris to raise the funding for his next film, one that would be filmed entirely on location in what was soon to become his adopted homeland, Brittany.  Once he had persuaded La Société Genérale de films to stump up the cash, Epstein found himself on the Ushant group of islands at the extreme northwest corner of France, with a crew consisting of just three camera operators and an assistant director.  The cast he recruited from ordinary people living in the region, one of whom acted as his production manager.  Epstein must have looked like a being from another planet, and it took a while before this eccentric outsider gained the support and confidence of the superstitious islanders.

The simple lives of ordinary working folk had always interested Epstein - his earlier film La Belle Nivernaise (1923) had revolved around barge workers - but from this point on it became his overriding inspiration.  Finis Terrae marked a definitive turning point in the director's career, the first of his Poèmes Bretons in which he expressed his profound love for a region of France so remote, so disconnected that it scarcely seemed to be part of France, or indeed the world.  Brittany - the landscape and the people, two perfectly matched halves of an indivisible whole - became central to Epstein's art.  Over the next twenty years, the director would make several films in Brittany, developing a unique style of documentary poem that many consider to be his greatest artistic achievement.  These include L'Or des mers (1932), Chanson d'Armor (1934), Le Tempestaire (1947) and Les Feux de la mer (1948).

Finis Terrae (the title derives from the original Latin name for the Breton department Finistère) is not a pure documentary but rather a drama filmed in a documentary style (what we now term a docudrama).  Epstein is following in the footsteps of  Robert J. Flaherty, whose famous Nanook of the North (1922) introduced to the developed world the Inuk Eskimos of North America.  Unlike Flaherty, Epstein makes no attempt to hide the fact that what he is filming is a scripted piece of fiction (apparently based on a true story that was told to him shortly after his arrival on Ushant).  In fact, it hardly rates as a piece of drama, just a simple fable revolving around two young fishermen who make their living by processing seaweed on the tiny remote islet of Bannec.  The story's purpose is merely to provide a crude framework that allows Epstein to film the fishermen at work and bring us into their basic way of life.  The durability of a friendship, which is strained by accident, mistrust and misfortune, is just one manifestation of the resilience of the Breton folk that Epstein manages to capture on film.

The most surprising thing about Finis Terrae is the impression it conveys of how thoroughly Epstein had managed to immerse himself in the landscape and culture he was filming.  There is no sense that he is the metropolitan interloper, smiling down on the quaint Breton folk with a patronising regard as he films their funny ways.   He doesn't look at the coastline and turn it into a pretty painting.  The film is as fantastically raw and alive as the things it depicts, with stark, often inexpressibly beautiful images that show the dual character of Man and Nature at its worst and most benign.  It is hard not to be appalled by the cruelty that the youngest of the fishermen, Ambroise, is subjected to - ostracised after a silly mishap and then mocked when he is visibly ill - but this as nothing compared with the cruelty that Nature then unleashes, marshalling its elements in a bid to assert its supremacy over man.  Few filmmakers have evoked the might and caprice of Nature as vividly as Epstein does in this film.  In some shots, the sky and sea seem to seethe with murderous intent; in others, they are a picture of smiling beneficence.

Equipped with a hand-held camera, Epstein shows the seaweed gatherers at work, braving life-threatening currents as they harvest their precious crop and then haul it back to land to be dried and burned in a time-honoured manner.  It is this documentary aspect of Finis Terrae that is its main interest, making it a valuable ethnological document.  Whenever the drama comes to the fore, the film appears a tad staged and self-conscious, the unfortunate result perhaps of Epstein trying to coax performances out of his actors rather than simply letting them behave as they normally would.  Luchino Visconti's similar La Terra Trema (1948) has more or less the same strengths and weaknesses but doesn't quite achieve the same intensity of poetic expression that fills virtually every frame of Epstein's film.

Sitting comfortably alongside the stark realist images are some inspired impressionistic touches, such as the dreamlike sequences depicting Ambroise's collapse into delirium.  The camera and editing techniques that Epstein mastered over the previous decade are employed to stunning effect, making this his most perfect film so far.  Finis Terrae is a work of breathtaking beauty that doesn't merely record a way of life that has long since passed away.  Rather, it seizes a fragment of history and preserves it forever in a capsule.  When you watch the film, you find yourself being transported right into the heart of an unfamiliar culture - and somehow you are made to feel that you have come home.  Maybe this is what Epstein meant by photogénie - life preserved in aspic.

Film Synopsis

The Ushant archipelago is a group of small islands situated off the coast of Brittany at the northwest extremity of France.  Each year, four fishermen from the most populated island Ushant set up camp for three months on the uninhabited islet of Bannec to gather and process seaweed, producing a valuable soda-rich resource for factories along the coast. Jean-Marie and Ambroise, the two youngest members of the four, fall out when the latter drops his friend's last bottle of wine.  Ambroise finds himself ostracised when Jean-Marie accuses him of stealing his pocket knife and then develops a fever when infection sets in on a hand wound.  The other fishermen mistake Ambroise's sudden illness for laziness, and by the time they realise the truth the weather is against them.  If Jean-Marie is to save his friend's life he must get him back to Ushant as soon as he can, but the strong currents and thick fog will ensure a hazardous crossing.  Meanwhile, the people of Ushant are becoming concerned by the apparent lack of activity on Bannec.  A party of fishermen is hastily assembled to undertake the perilous journey and arrives just in time...