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A leading member of the French cinema’s avant-garde movement and the director of the Impressionist classic Coeur fidèle (1923), Jean Epstein broke with his more modernist colleagues in the late 1920s to make documentaries and fiction films grounded in the realities of everyday life. Before that evolution, however, Epstein filmed this adaptation of two Edgar Allan Poe stories: “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839) and “The Oval Portrait” (1850). The film’s significance lies not so much in its fidelity to Poe’s stories as in its atmospheric evocation of the author’s gothic sensibility. Read More »