“Jean Epstein is one of the most interesting figures of French film history. Initially a poet, he made forty-one films between 1922 and 1948...(and his) radical vision of cinema was articulated in seven brilliant books.... He combined two Edgar Allan Poe stories, ‘Usher' and ‘Ligeia' in this masterful depiction of the darkest aspect of the artistic imagination. It is a Pygmalion story in reverse, where the painting draws away the life of the beloved model. No other film of this period so powerfully uses the visual representation of a sound. Here, the Orphic music of the artist, who plays a guitar, and the forces of nature continually shift between cause and effect, imitation and inspiration, benign and demonic. Epstein portrays a hopelessly obsessive aesthetic vision as a wild confusion of the mind and the exterior world, through the marvelous use of differing degrees of slow motion.” P. Adams Sitney (Audio Brandon Catalogue)