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Directors: James Sibley Watson
and Melville Webber
Cast: Herbert Stern (as Roderick
Usher); Hildegarde Watson (as Madeline Usher); Melville Webber (as a Traveller)
Synopsis: An avant-garde adaptation of Edgar Allen Poe's story in which brother and sister Usher (Stern and Watson) are cursed by a malady that will lead to their doom in
their ancestral home.
The Fall of the House of Usher has been adapted a few times. The
same year as this one in 1928 Jean
Epstein adapted the story for a feature length version that was as
unconventional in presentation and style. Roger
Corman started his series of Poe
adaptations (barring one adapting H.P.
Lovecraft) with the House of Usher
story. Ken Russell somewhat based a
film around the story, if anything of it does exist in said film alongside the
other Poe references, and shot said
story in his garage. This version is one of only three films made between James Sibley Watson and Melville Webber, the others including
the equally well regarded Lost In Sodom
(1932), and a personal favourite
Tomatoes Another Day (1930), shot by Watson
only, a parody of bad cinema that predates the use of "bad"
filmmaking but uses them, rather than for irony, for turning the scenario it
depicts into a hilarious and absurd reality where being shot dead doesn't mean
you're staying on the ground a second later. While this does retain the basic
outline of the Poe story, the
directors only went from memory of what took place in the narrative, allowing
the result to drift off into something different entirely. Having e.e. cummings write the shooting script -
a poet known for fragmented poetry which played with how their stanzas are
structured and how a reader even intonates the sounds reading the words - was
as well an encouragement to fragment the tale down to its primal form.
A film of the silent era, it
clearly absorbed countless influences from films before it but it itself now
exists outside of time, new and alien to current cinema regardless of its age. Set
in an environment fully indebted to The
Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919) populated by giant, geometrical shapes, the
film is entirely a mood piece, whittling the original story down to basic
images, the most important of placing someone alive in a locked coffin and the
madness that bubbles up to the surface. There was no sound, and barring
inspired use of letters marking out sound effects at one point, objects
alongside everything else onscreen, there's no intertitles either. Everything
is depicted through in-camera effects or artificial locations, the three actors
within the film as much puppets or automatons who gesticulate and change their
bodies at will for the shot being taken.
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Technical Details:
Entirely shot in black and white,
it's entirely opposite to Corman's
lush colour adaptation but the result is an alternative form of atmosphere, an
all-engulfing mass where even if you see a great deal in a shot its melded to
the shadows. The film becomes expressionist not just from its look by how the
in-camera effects are used, from reverse photography to superimposition, all of
which are intentionally unrealistic, the plasticity of the cinematic form
effecting the nightmare being depicted too, the later made sculptable by these
effects. It's not Vincent Price in
states of shock using his acting here but the camera tilting at one stage with
the environment following it in its slant, looking like both will fall off the
edge. The environment, the walls themselves, can be ripped open by an ordinary
people and the film, without needing to follow Poe's tale strictly, can add its own character in how each
imposition of images over others have their own character and effect the tone.
Abstract Spectrum: Experimental/Expressionist/Weird
Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): Medium
When set to the right music, this
perfectly conveys the emotions from the original short story, the few hand
built sets used appropriately claustrophobic and everything reduced to the most
pronounced, bold shapes and symbols. What's actually depicted in the film is
very minimalist at times, merely a wall of the set behind a distorting camera
effect, but from the multiplication of one of the actors' faces to a silhouette
on the wall, everything is evocative and once you learn to appreciate the film
in how it communicates this with the visuals only, it becomes a lot more bolder
as a result.
Personal Opinion:
Avant-garde shorts are a
particular favourite of mine. For the many that are difficult at first to
understand, and for the few that are just technical experiments in form and
light rather than emotionally relatable, at their best they push what you can
do with cinematic form. Neither on an intellectual level alone either, as they
can effects you with a gut impact like The
Fall of the House of Usher does. They subject you to something that strays
away from what you expect a film to usually look and act like. Poe's stories are as much about what is
not conveyed directly in the lines, even if he's very explicit in his
descriptions and ideas, something which links hand-in-hand with an experimental
short like this whose main good is to convey emotions like fear through less
conventional images that are yet more real and impactful.
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