A Reoccurring Curse [The Fall of the House of Usher (1928)]

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Dir. Jean Epstein

France-USA

Film #21, of Sunday 21^st October, for Halloween 31 For 31

The numerous adaptations of a single work can leave a fascinating and tangled web, the odd examples permanently disrupting the history of the original work, and the changes and similarities between them all taking the source version into different dimensions that exist in the same plane of existence, where characters can commit the same actions, suffer the same fates, but their appearance and their outcomes likely to alter depending on the decisions of the new ‘God’ who takes over the characters and reinterprets the material. Edgar Allen Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher is a good example of this. I have already reviewed the 1960 Roger Corman version, but there is also an abstract short by James Sibley Watson and Melville Webber also from 1928, Jan Svankmajer’s 1982 short version, and as mentioned in the review of the Corman version, the late Ken Russell’s version shot at his own home, not to mention a handful more. Having also read the original story for the first time this month, the fluxuations between the versions I have seen is surprising.

Co-written by Luis Buñuel, Jean Epstein’s version strips away the American Gothic nature of the original story in favour of a more impressionist light, the closest comparison for me from my limited knowledge being the films of Jean Cocteau, but balancing between a more fairytale tone and a style that heavily evokes Soviet montage techniques. The use of sets is a key to show the vast contrast to the Corman film. With deep, delirious colours, the Corman film replicates the madness of the story in an upfront depiction as vivid as the paintings Vincent Price’s version of Roderick Usher paints. For Epstein’s earlier film, the sets are sparse, intentionally so, contrasted with specific touches of the fantastical – the depictions of the Usher family home and the burial tomb – which brought to mind the Cocteau similarities. It is less an outright horror depiction, but a fantastical work which slowly drifts into horror tangentially.

Epstein’s version also mixes material faithful from the story and completely original aspects. Corman’s version had some differences, but Epstein’s has some significant changes; with an older protagonist travelling to the house of Usher, Roderick Usher’s sister is replaced with a wife Madeleine Usher who, in a more fantasy based concept, is slowly becoming weaker and weaker as her husband paints a portrait of her that may be drawing away her life essence. With a more faithful conclusion bar the very end, the film is a very unconventional interpretation which does not necessarily make ‘sense’ at first. It does however have its own logic, Roderick Usher far from the morally slipping interpretation Vincent Price played but someone under the circumstances undermined by fate outside his hands. This film also emphasises the sense of the unknown only in a different way, the fissure within the Usher’s home wall replaced by electrical storms and trees that spark and burst in smoke outside.

The film also includes a growing sense of anxiety and fear as it goes on that, as my first Jean Epstein film, shows him with an excellent eye for using the techniques he had available to him. Superimpositions, doubling of images over each other, extreme close-ups and distance shots, and choice use of editing are all used with considerable effect; my knowledge of this area of silent cinema is still minimal, the only thing close to this outside of Soviet cinema in terms of montage and image is clips I’ve seen of the films of Abel Gance, included in critic Mark Cousins’ TV series The Story of Film: An Odyssey (2011) but with none of his films available in the UK, but the clear influence and/or continuation of the cinematic effects is obvious. 

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Does the film fit Halloween though? Yes, closer to fantasy it still fits the mood of the season with its supernatural tone and the fact that the main thread of Poe’s original story, the growing madness and dread, is still that and expertly done by Epstein and his directorial style when the move to the conclusion is set up. The drastic changes still emphasise this but shifts it to a more lyrical depiction of the supernatural, poetical before pushing itself into a maddening rise in tension if you see a version with a great score like I did. Which is the better version, Corman’s or Epstein’s? I would throw in a third choice personally, James Sibley Watson and Melville Webber’s short version also from 1928, a completely avant garde version that doesn’t follow a narrative thread at all, merely conveying the moods of the story, with a use of sets and cinematic effects from the period that are still jaw dropping. With the two films I have reviewed though, the differences allow them both (and the others I’ve seen) to co-exist without the sense of redundant repetition. While the web of a source’s multiple adaptations involves repetition inherently, the duplications of narratives can become merely of interest from a curiosity’s sake rather than vested. With both versions of Poe’s story I have seen two very different interpretations which work on their own merits. To choose between them is difficult on first viewings of them each, but they connect together as different sides to the same spectrum regardless.

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