#48
Post
by Hail_Cesar » Wed Jul 13, 2011 2:18 pm
Having always been curious about text translating and seeing Epstein work is only in French (and being a french Canadian), I tried to translate the beginning of Le cinéma du diable (cinema of the devil). I stopped after one page but you may have a first impression of what the text is about and the tone of it if I did my "job" well...
Accusation (first chapter)
In the years 1910 to 1915, going to the movies was an act to be a little ashamed of, almost degrading, the accomplishment which a noble person could do only after having found forged pretexts and excuses. Since then, film showings, probably won a few titles of nobility or snobbery. However, until now, there are still cantonal regions where the passage of a fairground cinema raises concerns and disapproval among honourable people. There are even small towns, where cinemas, few and poor, are disreputable places, where a notary blush to be seen.
In fact, in the mid-twentieth century, few people, even believers dare to pronounce the name of the Devil, as this skillful has taken advantage of the clumsiness of his enemies and his followers, to be surrounded by a thick ridiculousness like ink in which you have to wade, to reach a cuttlefish. But how many moralists, even unbelievers, argue vociferously that cinema is a school of stupidity, of vice and crime! However, in Christian terms, what is there to say except that the phantasmagoria of the screen are inspired by the devil to the degradation of the human race?
No wonder, moreover, that the Devil could be held for the inspiration of the moving image, as he has so often been blamed on success of human ingenuity? Diabolical invention of the telescope, which, approached by Roger Bacon, had him thrown in jail for twenty years, the old man who exhibited Galilee to the rigors of the ecclesiastical court and the prison that shook up the cautious Copernicus until his death. Evil, the invention of printing, which religious authority and secular hastened immediately for long centuries that have not yet been of age, to control the use perniciously. Evil, the study of the human body and medicine, condemned by St. Ambrose, the anatomy and dissection, forbidden under penalty of excommunication by Pope Boniface VIII. Evil, the secret plans of Vinci, dreaming of a machine to rise into the sky. Artifices of the devil, the automatons, be they the work of a saint, that another saint broke with sticks, the first Papin’s steamboat that could not escape the furious terror of the fanatic people; the first car, the burden of Cugnot, who suffered a similar fate; the first balloon that pious peasants tore with their forks; the first railroads, that distinguished scholars accused of spreading plague and madness, and finally - to limit a list that could be endless - the cinema.