Bruce Loeb on Piano Luis Buñuel began his filmmaking career as the assistant director of La Chute de la maison Usher. Its director, Jean Epstein, was one of the leading filmmakers of the French avant-garde of the twenties, a movement which the Surrealists would criticize strongly, defining their ethic and aesthetic in opposition to its search for a "pure," or cinema-specific, cinema. Buñuel would later relate that his Un chien andalou, completed the following year, was "a violent reaction against what was at that time called 'avant-garde cinema'..." On the other hand, the poet, sometime actor and sometime Surrealist Antonin Artaud was interested in the film's potential and expressed a desire to play the lead role! La Chute de la maison Usher combines several Poe stories-that of the title, "Ligeia," "Berenice" and "The Oval Portrait"-to tell of a painter whose portrait of his wife drains her life. We contrast it with the Surrealist Les Mystères du Château du dé by Man Ray. The title and film structure pay homage to Mallarmé's line "A Throw of Dice will never abolish Chance." The film takes place at the modernist villa (designed by Robert Mallet-Stevens) of Vicomte de Noailles, patron of Man Ray, Luis Buñuel, Jean Cocteau and others. --Kathy Geritz