Jean Epstein's 1928 The Fall of the House of Usher (available in various reasonably clear versions on You-Tube) cleaves closely to Poe's tale; it is, perhaps, the most faithful adaptation of the story ever produced. The surrealist, Luis Bunuel, wrote the screenplay and some of the movie's effects are reprised in his later films -- in particular, a scene in which a filmy white shroud, like the train of a wedding dress, protrudes from a casket is echoed in the The Phantom of Liberty made fifty years after Epstein's film; in The Phantom of Liberty, I think its an exuberant plume of hair that extends away from the lid of a closed coffin. The silent film isn't frightening; rather, it's a poetic reverie on "motifs" from Edgar A. Poe (as a title informs us). Usher is a tone poem on morbid themes; it's atmosphere of dread and scarcely suppressed hysteria is expressed through strange dollying shots, cavernous sets so big that they seem to contain their own weather, and wet, murky images of bare trees in autumnal forests, Many of the shots are both beautiful and intensely suggestive, icons of the disturbed inner physiognomy of Roderick Usher -- the movie establishes a mold that forms many other later films not only in the avant-garde cinema but also in conventional studio-produced horror movies. Margaret Gance plays the vaporous, dying Madeline Usher, already a specter when the film begins. (Abel Gance, the great French silent era director, has a cameo part as one of a trio of vagabonds at an inn who warn the movie's protagonist, Usher's "only friend," to stay away from the decaying manor, the titular "house of Usher.") Roderick Usher is played by Jean Debucour in a flamboyant performance that mimics Poe's prose effects -- like all Poe heroes, Usher has a lofty forehead and piercing eyes and, as his hysteria and madness progress, in the film, his pale face becomes a Kabuki mask of despair mingled with a sort of nameless ecstasy; in some shots, he resembles a demonic Brendon Frasier -- it's one of those performances that will cause you to wonder where you have seen this sort of acting before: it's both extremely strange and oddly familiar, like something glimpsed in a dream. (After all, movies are a form of waking dream.)
A weird-looking little man carrying two heavy valises appears in the dense mist. He trudges right through muddy puddles that seem close around his ankles. The little man is Usher's only friend; he carries a magnifying glass which he uses to read and has an ear trumpet because he seems to be very deaf. (The defects in his senses -- he's hard of hearing and can't see to read without the magnifying glass --are the inverse of Usher's fantastically developed hearing and sight.) This figure has a hooked nose and walks with a halting limp and he's very small, always hunched over something -- he seems to be about sixty years old. Some men drinking at the Inn urge him to stay away from the doomed House of Usher, These figures are filmed from disorienting angles and one of them has his leg bent away from his body as if it's somehow disarticulated. The little man pays a coach-man to take him to the House of Usher. A woman's pale and frantic-looking face appears watching him from a window in the lower corner of an ivy-clad wall. The coachman drives through fog and barren forests to a big puddle, having already traversed what seem to be streams flowing in the byway. Unwilling to go any farther, the coachman halts and the little man, Usher's interlocutor, gets out. Tableaux-like shots without any motion show us the house -- it's a castle-keep but very primitively drawn, sometimes shown under garlands of stars like Christmas tree lights; the image is completely unnatural and cartoon-like and wholly distinct from the rest of the film's brooding forests and vast, empty rooms. On the front steps of the House of Usher, the interlocutor limps up to the top of the stairs where Roderick Usher reaches out for him -- for some reason, it looks as if the men are so far apart that they can barely shake hands.
Usher is painting a portrait of his wife, Madeline. She stands surrounded by dense arrays of candles, half-swooning in the gloom. Usher tells the interlocutor that the painting "shows the very life of Madeline" and it's apparent that the more detailed and realistic, that is, the more living the picture, the less life available to his wife as she is called in this film -- with each brushstroke, she visibly declines. As we see close-ups of the brush swabbing paint on the canvas, Madeline flinches as if the brush-strokes are burning on her cheeks and brow. The interior of the house of Usher is a vast, gloomy basilica without ceilings, walls rising up to vanish in the upper darkness. Suits of armor on pedestals gaze down on the huge room with its armorial decorations on the walls, its candelabras and sconces, and its half-open closets full of dusty-looking books. Sometimes, the old volumes cascade to the floor in leather and parchment avalanches filmed in slow-motion. There's a great broad corridor with alcoves covered by heavy dark drapes. Somehow, the tempest has entered the house and the drapes blow wildly from their dark niches. A cadaverous doctor is attending to Madeline who is dying of some nameless malady. The doctor wears steel-rimmed glasses that sometimes catch the movie-lighting and glint in a sinister way. Ultimately, Madeline swoons and seems to die. A lackey carries her empty casket on his hip. Later, she is crammed into the coffin wearing what seems to be an enormous white chiffon wedding dress. The dress protrudes from the casket as the doctor, the lackey, Usher's house-guest, and Usher drag the box through the wintry landscape. The crypt is miles away, beyond a vast lake that the casket crosses on a sort of stygian barge. (The crypt is simultaneously about a hundred feet from the house; the movie is full of surrealist distortions of both space and time. The entrance to the crypt is shabby masonry hut with steps inside that lead into a huge dome-shaped vault about a hundred yards across.) When the sinister doctor pounds nails into the casket to seal Madeline (who is still alive) into her tomb, the screen becomes dense with superimpositions, Soviet-style montage of the nails being pounded layering the screen also congested with images of bare, dripping trees and guttering candles. Back at the house, maybe a week later, the air is charged with electricity. The wind whirls through the corridors causing the drapes in their alcoves to blow like pennants. Now, the floor is covered with fallen leaves and the camera skitters over the leaves as the wind picks them up and hurls them down the passageway. Lightning flashes in the window. First, the dwarfish interlocutor is using his magnifying glass to read a huge book, a vast tome that is about the size of a sofa; then, the dwarf reads a very tiny book. Usher's face is glowing with some kind of supernatural glory -- it's like he's haloed by St. Elmo's fire. The interlocutor reads the story of Ethelred slaughtering a dragon and Usher knows that Madeline, interred alive in the crypt, is now stirring. In an inserted image, we see the casket in the crypt sliding off its shelf. In the flaring glare of the lightning strikes, Usher's head bobs back and forth as he sees Madeline staggering forward over the wet heath, bedraggled, in her enormous wedding dress. Fires start in the house; the candles have lit the blowing drapes. Madeline's portrait now is alive and moving itself in its frame made from the white plumes of giant feathers; the portrait has become a mirror and fire is burning everywhere, including in reflections on the picture. In slow motion, the suit of armor falls over and books slide off the shelves like sullen flows of magma and, at last, Usher, carrying Madeline, and his interlocutor flee the house. It collapses. But there seems to be a kind of tentative happy ending. Madeline, Usher, and the little crooked man watch the house of Usher as it collapses, beholding the falling walls from a copse of barren trees.
Some of the film's imagery is clearly derived from Murnau's 1922 Nosferatu. The scenes involving the interlocutor's approach to the house of Usher and the rather comically dire warnings that he receives recapitulate imagery from the vampire film, A sequence in which the lackey totes around Madeline's casket alludes pretty directly to the scenes in Bremen in the Murnau film in which the monstrous Count Nosferatu carries his coffin on his shoulder through the deserted night-time streets. But Epstein is also a great inventor of imagery. The shot following wind-blown leaves through the corridor, tracking along at about 15 inches above the floor is one of cinema's great images -- it's been reiterated in films as diverse as Bertolucci's The Conformist and Paul Brickman's 1983 Risky Business. The colossal gloomy sets without ceilings became a staple in 'thirties monster movies made by Universal. Thematically, the movie addresses a rather abstract problem: what is the relationship between the work of art and the thing that it portrays? Madeline's wasting disease is a pathology of art; her husband's portrait saps her vitality. When the crooked little interlocutor distracts Roderick Usher by reading him the saga of Ethelred, a medieval fantasy in which the sounds described in the crabbed archaic prose illustrate Madeline's escape from her premature burial, the distinction between fantasy and reality is blurred to the point that the narrative's implosion equals the fall of the house of Usher.
Epstein's The Fall of the House of Usher is about 65 minutes long, only slightly sorter than Edgar Ulmer's equally atmospheric The Black Cat (66 minutes) made in 1934. Epstein made a couple dozen movies. None of his other pictures are known to me.
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