{"id":22048,"date":"2022-10-05T16:29:09","date_gmt":"2022-10-05T15:29:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/?p=22048"},"modified":"2022-10-05T16:30:35","modified_gmt":"2022-10-05T15:30:35","slug":"the-fall-of-the-house-of-usher-1928","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/2022\/10\/05\/the-fall-of-the-house-of-usher-1928\/","title":{"rendered":"The Fall of the House of Usher, 1928"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"usher1.jpg\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Halloween approaches, in case you hadn’t noticed. This silent short<\/a> had eluded my attention until this week even though I knew the directors, James Sibley Watson and Melville Webber, via a later film, the homoerotic Biblical fantasia Lot in Sodom<\/em><\/a> (1933). Watson and Webber’s Poe adaptation was made in the US the same year as a longer French version of the same story directed by Jean Epstein with partial assistance from Luis Bu\u00f1uel.<\/p>\n

\"usher2.jpg\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The American Usher<\/em> was described by its directors as an amateur work but it fills its running time with a remarkable range of visual effects: slow motion, tilted angles, multiple exposure, kaleidoscope views, even a touch of animation in the caption lettering when Madeline breaks out of her tomb. The visuals overwhelm the storytelling but that’s the advantage of using a familiar tale, the narrative can be subordinate to the style which in this case extends to the Caligari<\/em>-derived sets. Watson and Webber’s Usher<\/em> is less an imitation of Robert Wiene’s thriller than a condensation of everything that German Expressionist cinema had been doing throughout the 1920s, a fitful dream or hallucination.<\/p>\n

Previously on { feuilleton }
\n\u2022 Mask of the Red Death, 1969<\/a>
\n\u2022 The Pendulum, the Pit and Hope<\/a>
\n\u2022 The Tell-Tale Heart from UPA<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Halloween approaches, in case you hadn’t noticed. This silent short had eluded my attention until this week even though I knew the directors, James Sibley Watson and Melville Webber, via a later film, the homoerotic Biblical fantasia Lot in Sodom (1933). Watson and Webber’s Poe adaptation was made in the US the same year as … Continue reading “The Fall of the House of Usher, 1928”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"New blog post: The Fall of the House of Usher, 1928","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[7,22],"tags":[93,12466,12468,3639,12467,6275],"class_list":["post-22048","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-film","category-horror","tag-edgar-allan-poe","tag-james-sibley-watson","tag-jean-epstein","tag-luis-bunuel","tag-melville-webber","tag-robert-wiene"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pq7rV-5JC","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22048","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22048"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22048\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22048"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22048"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22048"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}