Marie Epstein

Marie Epstein (born Marie-Antonine Epstein; 14 August 1899, Warsaw - 24 April 1995, Paris) was an actress, scenarist, film director, and film preservationist. Her career is distinguished by three important collaborations. Throughout the 1920s, she acted in and wrote scenarios for films directed by her brother, Jean Epstein. From the 1920s through the early 1950s, she collaborated with the director Jean Benoit-Lévy on sixteen films, serving variously as a writer, assistant director, and co-director. From the early 1950s to her retirement in 1977, Epstein served as a film preservationist at the Cinémathèque française.

Career

Collaboration with Jean Benoit-Lévy (1928-1940)

Epstein is best known for the films she co-directed with Jean Benoit-Lévy throughout the 1930s. Moving away from the romantic scenarios she wrote for Jean Epstein, her films with Benoit-Lévy employ many of the avant-garde techniques developed in French Impressionist Cinema of the 1920s to explore major social issues facing France in the 1930s, especially poverty, single motherhood, the struggles of oppressed women, and the plight of poor and neglected children. As film historian Alan Williams notes, Benoit-Lévy and Epstein's films "always pay careful attention to the moral choices required by particular social conditions."