Probes into the Actuality of Fantasy: Jean Epstein's "La Chute de la Maison Usher."

"La Chute de la Maison Usher" is a film adaptation by Jean Epstein of two stories by Edgar Allan Poe, "The Fall of the House of Usher" and "The Oval Portrait." This film was typical of Epstein's artistic preoccupation with the ambivalence of reality as expressed in fantasy or surrealism, in qualities of movement, and in the vagaries of seeing and hearing. There are three aspects of Epstein's work on this film that merit attention: his deployment of filmic motion and superimpositions for the purposes of both revealing and concealing, his synesthetic "playing" with the faculties of seeing and hearing, and his use of the elements of fantasy. With this film, Epstein questions both the nature of reality and the nature of fantasy. (The author's purpose is to discuss one film as an aesthetic unity.) (RN)