Jean Epstein's Gothic-impressionist theme and variation on the motifs of several Edgar Allan Poe tales, including, in addition to the title story, "Liegia," "Berenice," and "The Oval Portrait." The film relates the story of a painter whose obsessive desire to give life to his images drains away the life of his model, his beloved wife. Epstein's poetic experiments with narrative form, his eerily lit landscapes and interiors, his complex superimpositions of positive and negative images, and, most strikingly, his fascination with slow motion photography to give, in his words, "a new, purely psychological perspective" made this film a critically acclaimed and popular feature on the Film Society circuit. MF