Long considered a masterpiece of French impressionist cinema, The Fall of the House of Usher’s uncanny camera effects now seem closer in spirit to the symbolist poets than the impressionist painters. Drawing upon the full raft of avant-garde strategies prescribed in his theoretical writings, Epstein evokes the frenzy of artistic obsession, the transcendental force of nature, and the inherently subjective nature of appearances. Poe’s motif of a painting so startlingly lifelike that it saps its real subject provides Epstein with an ideal vehicle for his ontological preoccupations with cinema itself. As Epstein would later reflect of the film’s mesmerizing use of slow motion, “The actor can usually perform anything: he comes in, sits down, opens a book, flips through the pages; only the camera gives him a profound gravity, burdens him with an inexplicable secret and makes him a fragment of tragedy through the simple reduction of the temporal ratio of this performance.”