La Belle Nivernaise

Jean Epstein, 1924, from Alphonse Daudet's novel of the same name: a boy adopted by a bargeman on the Nivernais canal falls in love with the bargeman's daughter, then has to survive the river, the law, and the man who raised him. Photographed on the water. Epstein's impressionism is quieter here than in Coeur fidèle (current, mist, the hull as a moving room), but the method is the same. The Belle Nivernaise is the boat. The film is about what a family looks like when it is also a vessel.