La Montagne infidèle has long been the missing piece of Jean Epstein’s oeuvre. The identification of a 28mm Pathé-KOK print in the collections of the Filmoteca de Catalunya allows us at long last to fill this gap in his work and in our understanding of 1920s French cinema.
On the night of 16 June 1923, Mount Etna erupted on its north face. Four days later, Pathé-Consortium-Cinéma had everything ready to send Epstein and cameramen Paul Guichard and Léon Donnot to Sicily with 5,000 metres of 35mm film and a four-lens Caméréclair. Once on the island, on 24 June, they received permission from the Prefecture of Catania to climb the volcano. The eruption had been filmed earlier by newsreel cameramen, and although it was beginning to subside (it would eventually stop on 18 July), lava was still flowing down the mountain. In a 1950 interview with the Commission de Recherche Historique, Epstein recalled the trip lasting about 15 days, and the contemporary press confirms his recollection (Comœdia, 5 July). The shooting seems to have been condensed into a few days, as we can gather from a two-page account by Epstein published shortly after his return in Ciné-Miroir (no. 23, 15 August 1923). Editing took place between July and early August, and the finished film was shown at a press screening on 22 August and released in October on a Pathé programme that was distributed internationally.
The film is structured as a journey and ascent to the volcano. It begins by showing Sicily as a rural, fertile, and idyllic landscape, with the volcano as a threatening monster, which the island’s inhabitants try to fight with the protection of saints. It then focuses on the destruction caused by the eruption near the town of Linguaglossa (showing houses buried by lava and filming the presence of fascist Blackshirts, who are presented as forces that guarantee order) and on the vegetation of the mountain. Finally we ascend the volcano, until we get some shots filmed a few metres from a river of lava 150 metres wide, according to the intertitles. This and other shots of the erupting volcano are not only shown at the end but also pepper the film in earlier sections. The film also shows other places in Sicily, such as the “Ear of Dionysius” (Orecchio di Dionisio), a limestone cave in Syracuse. According to the August account in Ciné-Miroir, Epstein, Guichard, and Donnot filmed in Linguaglossa and on nearby Monte Rosso – as well as a few metres further up, by the eruption crater – and in the region of Syracuse; they also stopped in Taormina, Catania, and Messina.
La Montagne infidèle was Epstein’s fourth film. He was 26 years old at the time and under contract to Pathé-Consortium. In 1923 Epstein filmed L’Auberge rouge, Coeur fidèle, La Montagne infidèle, and La Belle Nivernaise (Paul Guichard was his camera operator on all but the first of these). Although it lacks the formal experiments of Coeur fidèle, or the diverse and lyrical observation that La Belle Nivernaise dedicates to water, La Montagne infidèle shows Epstein’s lasting interest in filming in real locations (such as the port of Marseilles and the Seine in his other 1923 films). This interest, which grew throughout the 1920s, culminating in  his Breton films, here takes on the nature of the cataclysmic and the extraordinary.
Part of the aura surrounding this film comes from Epstein’s writings. His second film-themed book, published in 1926, was entitled Le Cinématographe vu de l’Etna (The Cinema Seen from Etna). In the first text of this collection, Epstein recreates the shooting of La Montagne infidèle and elaborates some of his ideas on the film medium, such as animism or the questioning of identity (as in his famous description of a mirrored staircase in the hotel where they were staying). These theoretical reflections seem to arise from the extreme experience of the volcano: “The place for me to think about the most beloved living machine was this almost absolutely dead zone extending one or two kilometres around the first craters.” Read together with the film, the text is not only a valuable piece of essay writing but also an interesting account of the filming conditions, gathering and developing some of the film’s motifs, such as the sound of the volcano.
After La Montagne infidèle was distributed as part of a Pathé programme in 1923, there are some references to special showings, such as one at the Club du Cinéma de Bruxelles in 1927, but from the sound era onwards we do not find records of 35mm screenings of the film. However, it was circulated in small-gauge formats, as Pathé continued to distribute it on the domestic and educational market (Pathé-KOK, 28mm) or in small towns (Pathé-Rural, 17.5mm). It was also available for the Pathéorama, an individual viewing device with which a person could see frames of a film via a filmstrip. Until now the only known remaining traces of the film consisted of a Pathéorama preserved at the Cinémathèque française.
It is thus exciting that a small-gauge element has been identified at the Filmoteca de Catalunya. This is a Pathé-KOK print on 1924 film stock, tinted, and with intertitles in Spanish. It was distributed by Vilaseca and Ledesma, Pathé’s representatives in Spain. The original cans also bear the seal of having passed through the CINAES circuit, a conglomerate of Barcelona companies including Vilaseca and Ledesma, which, in addition to other activities, exhibited cultural and educational films during the years of the Second Spanish Republic (1931-1939).
This film material is a distribution copy, with some usage damage but without photochemical deterioration. It coincides with the footage and intertitles of the original 35mm copies (according to preserved documents) and has no noticeable gaps, except for some splicing due to breakage, with minimal loss of frames, the lack of the title with Epstein’s name, and some incomplete dissolves.
The digitization work (scanning to 4K), digital restoration, and the creation of preservation masters and DCPs have been carried out at 2CR-Filmoteca de Catalunya, the Filmoteca’s preservation and restoration centre. The photochemical preservation of the original 28mm film is being done at ANIM (Arquivo Nacional das Imagens em Movimento), the Cinemateca Portuguesa’s conservation centre.
The identification of this print and extensive documentation research about the film has recently led to the location and identification of another element, an incomplete 35mm print with Dutch intertitles in the collections of the Eye Filmmuseum in Amsterdam. This was found thanks to networking with fellow archivists such as Emilie Cauquy, Joël Daire (Cinémathèque française), Andrea Meneghelli (Cineteca di Bologna), and Elif Rongen-Kaynakçi (Eye Filmmuseum). After a first inspection of the 35mm material with curator Elif Rongen-Kaynakçi, Eye Filmmuseum and the Filmoteca de Catalunya plan to work together on the recovery of this new 35mm item, which, added to the 28mm, will lead to more precise knowledge of this extraordinary film.

Daniel Pitarch, Rosa Cardona