Le lion des Mogols

The Lion of the Moguls

After leaving Pathé before the end of his contract, Epstein started working instead for Albatros, a company that had become a focal point for Russian émigrés in France. His first work there was a magnificent vehicle for major Albatros star Ivan Mosjoukine. The basic idea for the film also came from Mosjoukine: an adventure story in the Far East about a young palace officer who frees a princess kept imprisoned by Khan, and flees with her into the city. In tackling this exotic subject, Epstein emphasises the fundamental pleasures to be had in popular culture as well as those that lie in the artificial and the constructed—including temporal shifts that anticipate central works such as LA GLACE À TROIS FACES (1927). “A fairy tale for shop girls,” was Henri Langlois’s view of the film, before he immediately went on to defend…

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Jean Epstein, France, 1924, 99min, After leaving Pathé before the end of his contract, Epstein started working instead for Albatros, a company that had…