The Prescience of Elie Faure

Élie Faure was a practicing medical doctor, as well as an art historian, philosopher, and critic who wrote essays, biographies, and even novels. His major contribution to film theory is a series of posthumously collected essays, Fonction du cinéma: l’art de la société industrielle (1953). The essays in this collection, “La prescience du Tintoret,” “La danse et le cinéma,” “De la cinéplastique,” “Charlot,” “Introduction à la mystique du cinéma,” “Vocation du cinéma,” “Affinités géographiques et ethniques de l’art,” and “Défense et illustration de la machine” were conceived between the early 1920s and the eve of Faure’s death, in 1937. All appeared initially in periodicals or as parts of other works on the history of art, philosophy, culture and ideas—a variety that is reflective of Faure’s intellectual polyvalence and the pervasive presence of the cinema in the broader body of his work.1 Like Rudolph Arnheim, Faure’s relatively slender but influential volume of essays on film is accompanied by many weighty volumes of writing in a variety of other areas, the most famous of which is the multivolume Histoire de l’art (1909-27). Besides a large group of texts on the history of art and aesthetics, Faure wrote a significant collection of texts that fall at the crossroads of “race theory” or “imaginary ethnography.”