In the following excerpt, which was originally published in French in 1974 as part of Ecrits sur le cinema, Epstein expounds on the cinematic concepts of the closeup and the different means by which he conveys the passing of time in his films.

In the following essay, Abel examines narrative progression in several segments of The Fall of the House of Usher.

In the following essay, Thiher acknowledges Epstein 's work as a significant precursor of the cinematic avantgarde movement.

In the following essay, Wunscher praises the magical elements of Epstein's work, noting that their lack of dialogue provides a more pure cinematic experience.

When Wild Oats by Jacob Epstein appeared in 1979, I read it with pleasure. It seemed to me a typical first novel, very much in the American grain. Divorced parents, college, disastrous first love, comic ineptitude in sex; dread of acne, of unfinished term papers, of drunk and sermonizing adults; unease with the blankness of the future—one of those books in the tradition of Catcher in the Rye…. The New York Times of October 21 prominently displayed a news story from England, telling of an artic...

There's an immediacy to ["Wild Oats"] that is lacking in other, more distantly written college novels. The endless round of classes, overdue papers, packages from home that never arrive—they're all here, where usually they'd be skipped over. And most important, the sense of time seems absolutely right. The story begins at Christmas, with some puzzling references to Billy's black eye. It swings back to September and the start of his college year; then it works...

Wild Oats looks at first like a late 1970s remake of The Catcher in the Rye. Once again it's the youth who act responsibly and the adults (in this case casualties of the 60's) who have the "phony values"…. Jacob Epstein is too subtle a writer (already, already) to offer this as objective satire. Unlike Holden Caulfield, Billy is no guru. The third-person narrative is Jamesian in that, except where it treats of Russo's involved, self-conscious reflections, it is rest...

[Wild Oats] is about college—that haven of deferred responsibilities—and unrequited love and identity-crisis; in short, everything that goes along with being old enough to vote and drink yet too young to know what you really want to be when (and if) you grow up…. The oats that get sown in Wild Oats are, in fact, rather tame, and Billy Williams is hardly your traditional merrymaking rascal: Hindered by self-consciousness and a developed sense of the absurd, he looks askance at the rowdie...

Wild Oats is at one level the archetypal campus novel, with the usual set-pieces (boring lectures, dope and drinking escapades, cheating and cramming), and one outstandingly good episode in which the hero, Billy, attempts to explain 'Dover Beach' to a black fellow-student who has to write an essay on it…. The novel has a fine eye for the absurdities of academe, but because it sees all through the hero Billy, a vulnerable and fantasising freshman, its British counterpart is less The Hist...

[Wild Oats is] a slight, imperfect, but wisely funny and eminently publishable first novel…. (p. 43) [Billy's] nebbishly Galahad act, which owes rather too much to The Graduate and other touchstones of postadolescent romanticism, isn't quite enough of a story to parlay [his] charmingly low-key hysteria (at one point all his friends and relations—plus characters from The Faerie Queene—form a conga line in his insomniac fantasies) into shapely, full-length fiction. But never...