Along with his sister Marie, Jean Epstein was a leading light of French avant-garde filmmaking in the 1920s. This adaptation of the famous story by Edgar Allan Poe (which also incorporates parts of another, "The Oval Portrait") was co-written with Luis Buñuel (unhappy with the project, his second with Epstein, Buñuel left early, and would go on to unleash the greatest of surrealist films upon the world the following year with UN CHIEN ANDALOU). Ensconced in their crumbling manor house, wealthy madman Roderick Usher (Jean Debucourt) paints the portrait of his sickly wife Madeline (Marguerite Gance, then wife of Abel Gance, who makes a cameo appearance in the film). But as the portrait takes on an ever more lifelike appearance, Madeline's own life keeps slipping away. Poe's perverse and twisty plot is realized onscreen as a pervasive atmosphere of gothic dread and obsession, with Epstein indulging all manner of camera trickery: dream-like slow motion and double exposures, extremely skewed angles and slowly creeping pans and tracking shots. - Text courtesy of AFI

About The Alvin Cobb, Jr. Trio: 

Composed by its leader, an original film score will be performed live by the Alvin Cobb, Jr. Trio, a Chicago-based music group led by drummer/composer Alvin Cobb, Jr. featuring bassist/vocalist Katie Ernst and pianist Julius Tucker. Heavily inspired by straight-ahead jazz trio playing, their music also incorporates folk melodies, free improvisation, and modern Black music elements.