Bruce Loeb on Piano Jean Epstein, poet, film theorist and filmmaker, was one of the most fascinating and important figures in French cinema in the twenties, although only one of his films-the 1928 Fall of the House of Usher-has ever been in distribution in this country. Epstein was an early exponent of "pure cinema" through montage in his lyrical masterpiece, Coeur fidèle (1923), and a kind of Marienbad-like modernism in La Glace à trois faces (The Three Sided Mirror). These, and the starkly realistic postwar study of Breton fishermen Mor'Vran, have been rediscovered by PFA audiences in recent years. L'Auberge rouge was made just before Coeur fidèle in 1923. Based on a novella by Balzac, it is an extraordinary "double narrative" in which two stories unfold in parallel, only to be entwined in the end. Two quite different milieux are skillfully juxtaposed: an elegant dinner in 1825 Paris, where a story is recounted of murder and deceit in an isolated Alsace inn one rainy night in 1799; and the cramped and bustling inn itself, with all its "types" in wonderful contrast to the bourgeois characters delineated in the present-time sequence. Epstein develops a mood of mystery and tragedy while elucidating a complicated narrative entirely through unconventional means-through psychological use of the subjective camera, and a cinematic rhetoric in which, as Henri Langlois has written, "objects, playing cards, jewels, take over the screen and become characters." In the end, as Richard Abel writes, "The film...seems to out-Balzac Balzac, by unmasking the violence and deceit on which the French bourgeois society is predicated."