This 35mm screening is part of the Fantastique: The Dream Worlds of French Cinema season at BFI Southbank. Fulll details here. The film is also being shown on November 8th.
Cine-List review:
A director and film theorist affiliated with the French Impressionist movement of the 1920s, Jean Epstein is credited with laying the groundwork for many cornerstone concepts in cinema studies, such as the notion of medium specificity, or what he referred to as photogénie. As film scholar Malcolm Turvey details in his history of the "revelationist" tradition, at the heart of the French Impressionist approach is the belief that film holds the ability to transcend the fallibility of human vision and reveal the true nature of reality via cinematic techniques like editing and close-ups. While viewers may take these ideas for granted today, Epstein and his contemporaries are responsible for no less than realizing cinema's potential as a bona fide art form. It's fitting that Epstein chose to adapt Edgar Allen Poe, a major influence for the French symbolist poets, who in turn offered a reference point for the Impressionist filmmakers. Co-written by Luis Buñuel, THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER remains just as eerie today as it was over eighty years ago. Epstein's use of chiaroscuro lighting and deep space lend the film a haunting, atmospheric quality and the actors involved (including Abel Gance's wife) give suitably hypnotic performances. The story, about a man obsessed with immortalizing his dying wife in a painting, is all too apropos for a filmmaker who wrote extensively about the boundaries between reality and representation.
Here (and above) is an extract.
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