There’s always more Poe. A couple of years ago I wrote about the short American film adaptation of The Fall of the House of Usher co-directed by James Sibley Watson and Melville Webber. Watson and Webber’s experimental take on Poe was made in 1928, and happens to be one of two films based on the story that were made that year.
This week I watched the longer French adaptation (La Chute de la Maison Usher) directed by Jean Epstein, a very impressive silent film which changes a few details—Roderick and Madeline Usher are now husband and wife rather than brother and sister—but otherwise remains close to Poe’s tale. Epstein’s film is notable for having Luis Buñuel’s name on its screenplay credits but disputes between Buñuel and Epstein means few of Buñuel’s contributions survived. The film is also noted for its dream-like atmosphere, a quality the director favours over storytelling to such a degree that it helps if you’re already familiar with the story.
Epstein’s house of Usher is toy-like castle in exterior shots whose interior reveals cavernous spaces as vast as Charles Foster Kane’s Xanadu living room, with billowing curtains that make the place a precursor of the magical castle in Cocteau’s La Belle et la Bête. Jean Debucourt is a Roderick Usher who spends his time obsessively painting the doomed Madeline (Marguerite Gance), paying no attention to her increasing fraility. Poe’s visiting guest in this version is an aged man (Charles Lamy) with sight and hearing difficulties which contribute to the general ignorance of Madeline’s plight. In one of the opening scenes, director Abel Gance (the husband of Marguerite) may be seen inside an inn. Gance is best known today for the bravura cinematic invention of his 1927 Napoleon (which I recommend), but Epstein shows himself a match for Gance in the range of effects he brings to the Ushers’ plight: rapid edits, slow motion, double-exposures, low-angle shots, and a remarkable point-of-view sequence where Roderick seems to be floating through the hall. Later in the film the camera drifts along the mansion corridors following wind-blown leaves, a forerunner of all the Steadicam shots of the 1980s.
I was watching this copy of the film, an excellent print (no doubt swiped from disc) with French intertitles. The downloadable files include a subtitle file but with Portuguese subtitles only. English subs may be found here.
Previously on { feuilleton }
• Robert Lawson’s House of Usher
• The Fall of the House of Usher, 1928
• Burt Shonberg’s Poe paintings
Wow. Thanks for putting this out there. What an astonishing film. Ground zero for art horror. Lately I’ve been having trouble getting archive.org to work on my PC (seemingly their problem rather than mine), so I saw it on YouTube, which has various versions of it – different running times and soundtracks, including a 15-minute cut with a purported Throbbing Gristle soundtrack. I went for https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fp-rnQVQb0E.
This movie’s a headfuck now – God knows what cinema audiences almost a century ago would have made of it. Perhaps it would’ve looked unfashionably fin de siecle for some, but for my money, and with this much hindsight, it shares at least some of the stark 1920s modernism of its almost exact contemporary Metropolis. I reckon both Jean Cocteau and Maya Deren must have taken something from it. Possibly Edgar G. Ulmer too, going by The Black Cat. And towards the end of the film [spoiler alert!] Roderick Usher’s blissful indifference to the fire building up around him reminded me a bit of the climactic scene in Midsommar (although that’s probably just my association, rather than a direct influence).
The cutaways to the shagging frogs were brilliant. Nothing to do with the story, of course, but so what.
Another bonus: The music (on this edit at least, likely dubbed on later) is fantastic, in both senses of the word.
Thanks again.
I forgot to mention the soundtrack on the IA copy which is a contemporary score that I found distracting after the first minute or so. One convenience of silent cinema is being able to change the music if you don’t like the one the print has been burdened with; I listened to a disc of Ligeti recordings while watching the film, a random choice but it worked very well.
As for viewing, I’ve often found the Internet Archive video player to be troublesome so I always download the file (there are usually multiple formats to choose from) then watch it with VLC, a free application that works with most computer systems, and which will play most video formats. VLC even works with Android televisions if you have one. If you place a subtitle file with the same name as the film in a folder containing both file and subs file then VLC will automatically show the subtitles.
I was wondering if the frogs were one of Buñuel’s contributions. I’ve never seen any mention of this film in relation to Jean Cocteau but I’m sure he must have seen it even if he didn’t take anything from Epstein’s direction.