SOURCE: "Jean Epstein's 'La Chute de la Maison Usher': Reversal and Liberation," in Wide Angle, Vol. 3, No. 1, 1979, pp. 38-44.

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

Jean Epstein's La Chute de la Maison Usher (1928) interests me for several reasons. First of all, Epstein was one of the most important filmmakers (perhaps the most important) of what I would call the "narrative avantgarde" in the French cinema of the 1920s, and La Chute de la Maison Usher is the only example of his work currently available in the United States.¹ Second, although the film is mentioned often enough in studies of the Twenties, it probably has more detractors than advocates; and its advocates, even in France, tend to emphasize its exquisite atmosphere of gothic fantasy or its technical experimentation as "pure cinema" (the use of slow motion...