A screening in this year's Shanghai International Film Festival, prior to Epstein's feature, it is a riveting experience to watch Buñuel and Dalí's 21-minute juvenilia UN CHIEN ANDALOU (1929) on the silver screen, an archetypal surrealist disjecta membra takes its ideological and visual flights to an insuperable height, the incontrovertible forefather of experimental cinema, unprecedentedly deconstructing the subconscious undertow of human psyche. Its quixotic montages can still bowl audience over no matter how many times you are primed for its iconic razor-cutting scene in the prologue.
In THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER, adapted from Edgar Allan Poe's famed short story, a young Buñuel is credited as a co-screenwriter, but Epstein's aesthetic trademark as a master of atmospherics holds court here, an expressionist corpse bride horror, is panned out in its excruciatingly glacial pace (at least for a modern-day viewer), but graced by a hauntingly emotive score and Epstein's cracking legerdemain pertaining to the cinematic mobility of "les meubles", inside the titular unheimlich mansion, where resides Sir Roderick Usher (Debucourt) and his dying wife Madeleine (a gaunt Marguerite Gance) (in the novel they are siblings), Allan (Lamy), a friend of Roderick, nominally takes the position as the interloper, is involuntarily thrust into a paranormal revelation when a soul transmigrates, mortality subverted, and perdition betides upon the house of Usher, albeit its inevitably archaic special effects when the crunch hits.
Configuring its simplistic story with an extraordinary sense of visual and logic fluidity, Epstein basks in the narrative's eerie ambient building, rendering it with mind-bending superimposition, and burrowing deep into Roderick's stream of consciousness on the strength of Debucourt's perfervid impression, all mentioned above is vividly presented in its monochromatic flair with original fidelity, speaks volumes of Epstein and co.'s avant-garde artistic progression and undimmed cinematic prowess.
In THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER, adapted from Edgar Allan Poe's famed short story, a young Buñuel is credited as a co-screenwriter, but Epstein's aesthetic trademark as a master of atmospherics holds court here, an expressionist corpse bride horror, is panned out in its excruciatingly glacial pace (at least for a modern-day viewer), but graced by a hauntingly emotive score and Epstein's cracking legerdemain pertaining to the cinematic mobility of "les meubles", inside the titular unheimlich mansion, where resides Sir Roderick Usher (Debucourt) and his dying wife Madeleine (a gaunt Marguerite Gance) (in the novel they are siblings), Allan (Lamy), a friend of Roderick, nominally takes the position as the interloper, is involuntarily thrust into a paranormal revelation when a soul transmigrates, mortality subverted, and perdition betides upon the house of Usher, albeit its inevitably archaic special effects when the crunch hits.
Configuring its simplistic story with an extraordinary sense of visual and logic fluidity, Epstein basks in the narrative's eerie ambient building, rendering it with mind-bending superimposition, and burrowing deep into Roderick's stream of consciousness on the strength of Debucourt's perfervid impression, all mentioned above is vividly presented in its monochromatic flair with original fidelity, speaks volumes of Epstein and co.'s avant-garde artistic progression and undimmed cinematic prowess.