La Chute de la Maison Usher [The Fall of the House of Usher] is an adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s story and the best-known film of French Impressionist director Jean Epstein. Roderick Usher obsessively paints his ill-stricken wife, Madeline, alone in their mansion. When an unnamed friend of Usher visits, Madeline appears to die and is quickly buried. It is revealed that she remains alive and with her return destruction consumes the manor. The film is heavily influenced by German Expressionism, while also exemplifying some of Epstein’s most important formal innovations. Epstein was fascinated by cinematography’s proximity to human perception, and in his theoretical writings on photogénie, he argued that film is an artform uniquely capable of vivifying the material world by revealing sensibilities otherwise hidden. In one particularly atmospheric sequence, Epstein animates a funeral procession through double exposure, slow motion, hand-held camerawork, and impressionist editing patterns. Epstein used these methods to endow objects with psychological qualities and, in the film’s conclusion, a dangerous vitality. Surrealist Luis Buñuel worked on the film as an assistant to Epstein but quit after a creative disagreement, setting the stage for Buñuel’s formal disavowal of impressionist aesthetics apparent in Un Chien Andalou (1929).