In his first foray into film, artist and poet Jean Cocteau created this vivid and highly personal portrait of “the poet’s inner self,” filled with signature images of beauty, suffering, and renewal. While composed in four distinct episodes, the action of the film ostensibly takes place in the brief moment between the collapse of a chimney and its hitting the ground.

The final episode in a compendium of Edgar Allen Poe stories entitled Histoires extraordinaires (Spirits of the Dead), Fellini’s Toby Dammit loosely adapts Poe’s macabre tale and transforms it into the story of a burnt-out British actor who arrives in Rome to star in the first Catholic Western.