French author, critic, and filmmaker Jean Epstein is best known for his cinematic adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe's The Fall of the House of Usher. In 1947, the impressionist also made the short Le Tempestaire, in which he uses time-lapses and slow-motion to play with imagined time, characteristic of his theories on cinema.

In Le Tempestaire, a young girl worries about her fiancé on the high seas. She goes to a templar, a sorcerer who, according to an ancient belief, has the power to control the elements of nature.