Marie Epstein
Moving away from the romantic scenarios she wrote for Jean Epstein, her films with Benoît-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.Describing La Maternelle (1933), a film about state-run nursery education, Williams notes that the film recalls "the tradition of cinematic impressionism" by using "subjective editing" to convey "traumatic events in the life of a neglected slum child" and by presenting a woman's "attempted suicide in a rapid sequence of disparate images" to communicate the episode's violence.As film scholar Ginette Vincendeau says in her obituary for Epstein, La Maternelle offers a "useful corrective" to Jean Vigo's Zéro de conduite.[3] Whereas Vigo's film portrays the French education system as cruel and ineffectual, La Maternelle depicts "school as an instrument of social liberation rather than repression.[3][4] As a Jew, Epstein was arrested by the Gestapo in February, 1944, but avoided deportation and was later released thanks to the efforts of friends in the French film industry and the Red Cross, for which she worked.