France 1928
Language: Silent
Director: Jean Epstein
Music: In the Nursery
Lenght: 63 Min.
Color: sw
Age Limit: <

This is the first and still the best interpretation of Edgar Allan Poe’s classic tale of paranoia and suspense. Polish-born director Jean Epstein was heavily influenced by French Impressionism, as well as the conventions of German Expressionism. His film is a heady mix of all these ingredients: a disorienting and disturbing tale of love, loss and decay. The wide floors of the almost-empty sets conjure the deepest darkness, punctuated by a candle flame, or a glimpse of a bridal veil trailing from a coffin. The pained faces of Jean Debucourt as the artist Roderick and Marguerite Gance as his tortured bride convey melancholy more than fear. Epstein in 1928: “Horror, in Poe, is due more to the living than to the dead, and death itself is a kind of enchantment, and life also a spell. Life and death have the same substance, the same frailty.” In The Nursery’s new score incorporates spacial sound design along with more traditional instrumentation (inc. shruti box & sansula) to encompass the Gothic nature of Epstein’s avante-garde vision. With haunting, and at times stunning, imagery, this movie really is film as art and In The Nursery’s score helps to reinforce the art of film. This film has been restored by La Cinémathèque française.