None other than Luis Buñuel provided the screenplay for the most famous film adaptation of the never sufficiently praised Edgar Allan Poe; the film was directed by Jean Epstein. The result inspired Henri Langlois, the founder of the Cinémathèque Française, to write the following hymn: ‘Everything in this masterpiece contributes to its unity. The absolute mastery of the editing, the rhythm in which the slow motion, the dissolves, the tracking shots and the moving camera play their part and are never in vain: There is no image, no technical process that is not there to embellish the film; they are there to impress us in the noblest sense, like the images and the cadence of a verse. The quality of photography worthy of the greatest masterpieces of German cinema, where, thanks to orthochromatics, the greys are grey, the whites are white and the blacks are uniquely velvety...’