Collaboratrice

Marie Epstein’s intensely collaborative film career has made her difficult to find in a film history often structured around individual auteurs. Press materials and translated credits often misattribute her co-directed films solely to her collaborator, Jean Benoît-Lévy. Feminist scholars aimed to amend this imbalance in the 1990s. But Epstein’s interview answers often frustrated their attempts to characterize her as an independent auteur. She continually insisted that she and Benoît-Lévy shared a “perfect collaboration” – a claim which scholars doubted in their analyses of her career. Consequently, film scholars have generally ascribed the focus on women and children in Epstein and Benoît-Lévy’s films to Epstein alone, at odds with Epstein’s insistence on their collaboration. This paper reevaluates Epstein and Benoît-Lévy’s archival statements, reframing Epstein’s resistance to auteurship. Recognizing the commonalities in their reflections on their craft provides insight into their aesthetic choices and offers a new understanding of authorship and co-creation.