Epstein's assistant director on the film was young Luis Bunuel, who had just finished his notorious collaboration with Salvador Dali on "Un Chein Andalou," a boldly surrealist film. Did he contribute to this film's weirdness? No doubt, although Epstein was a surrealist himself and the underlying story itself is less interested in psychological plausibility than in the creepiness and oddness of its immediate impression. (Bunuel eventually quit after a quarrel with Epstein.)
Roderick is played by Jean Debucourt, more convincing than many silent stars, who goes less for the demented madman effect and more for the aura of a man consumed by his fears. Madeline is played by Marguerite Gance, wife of the French director Abel Gance ("Napoleon"). Her task is to be an object. All attention and animation is concentrated in the two men, while Madeline poses for her painting and slowly sinks toward the grave. The visitor and narrator is Charles Lamy.
There is an amusing ambiguity about the painting, which we see at regular intervals throughout the film. In some shots it is a real canvas, which Roderick daubs at. In others it is the real Marguerite Gance standing within the frame and pretending to the camera she is the painting. "In a motif lifted from Wilde's 'Picture of Dorian Gray,' " writes the critic Mark Zimmer, "her life and vitality pours into the painting, such that it begins to blink and move, as she dies." Perhaps, but not according to the critic Glenn Erickson, who writes, "Roderick's portraits are represented by having Madeline sit very still behind the frame and pretend to be a painted image. Unfortunately, she blinks in almost every take, ruining the illusion."
Both critics are seeing exactly the same thing. Which critic is correct? The surrealists would have been delighted by the confusion.
Jean Epstein (1897-1953), born in Poland, studied medicine before falling into the Parisian orbit of the surrealists in the 1920s. He directed films throughout the 1920s, finding as others did that silent films gave themselves naturally to fantasy and impressionism; the talkies would discover that dialogue tended to tilt stories toward realism. "The Fall of the House of Usher," made in 1928, the last great year of silent films, was based on a Poe story that is more atmosphere than plot, anyway. There have been many versions of "Usher," from another 1928 silent film through to Roger Corman's excellent 1960 version with Vincent Price. Epstein seems to focus less on the mechanics of the situation than on its very oddness: The man and woman both trapped by his mad obsession with death, the woman almost helpfully fading away.
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