La Chute de la Maison Usher (1928)

With most of its factories destroyed and a great deal of its able-bodied population wiped out, the years following the end of World War I were marked by great economical instability in Europe. With exception of the Weimar Republic, where UFA-sponsored cinema was seen as a tool to restore its people's morale after having lost the war, little to no money was being invested in the European entertainment industry as a whole. Correspondingly, most domestic film companies opted to avoid altogether the risks inherent to movie production, by concentrating their activities in the more stable motion picture distribution business instead. As a consequence, film production came to an all time low in Europe in the early 1920s, whose home market was then flooded by Hollywood. Seeing themselves unable to compete with the powerful US film industry given their meager budgets, a group of French directors decided to take an orthogonal approach, striving to differentiate themselves by developing a new style of filmmaking. Thus, French Impressionism was born, strongly influenced by art movements in vogue in Paris at the time, particularly Dada, a reaction to every aspect of modern society that had led to the war, nihilistically rejecting all traditional art standards in favor of the absurd, and Surrealim, which attempted to replicate the inner workings of the subconscious mind. In order to create something uniquely cinematic, what they called cinéma pur, visual was prioritized over narrative, with focus given to the conjuring of abstract of ideas in the mind of the viewer via the use of image juxtaposition, rhythmic editing, subjective shots and several other techniques possible only on celluloid.

Sir Roderick Usher (Jean Debucourt), feeling helpless in face of his wife Madeline's (Marguerite Gance) illness, calls upon his friend (Charles Lamy) for help. Sir Usher had been occupying himself with painting Madeline's portrait, which strangely seems to feed on her life force, with her growing weaker as the painting nears completion. Unsurprisingly so, with the final stroke of the brush being made on the canvas, Madeline lies dead. Desolated, her husband refuses to bury her, choosing rather to entomb her in a crypt near their mansion. Days go by, Sir Usher getting restless by the minute; one stormy night, as he is rocking in his chair while gazing with anticipation at the main door, a strong wind gushes into his halls, blowing cinder from his fireplace to the curtains nearby, starting a fire. Meanwhile, Madeline, having risen from her grave as Sir Usher had been expecting all along, creeps slowly into the room, seeking his embrace. After the lovers are reunited, they all flee the burning manor and watch from a distance the ancient house of Usher crumble into nothing.

Sir Roderick Usher (Jean Debucourt) fixated on painting his
wife's (Marguerite Gance) portrait, unaware of her agony

Horror is at its scariest when it deals with themes that are relevant to its contemporary society. Before the birth of modern medicine, with a historical record that dates at least from the 14th century, being buried alive was an extremely valid and justifiable fear; however, it was only with the popularization of newspapers after the 19th century Industrial Revolution (and the consequent birth of the sensationalist press) that such fear turned into generalized hysteria. Edgar Allan Poe, fascinated by the theme of man's relationship with death, certainly capitalized on that panic, with The Fall of the House of Usher (1839) being his most famous work on the subject. Given its emphasis on atmosphere rather than plot, a film adaptation of that short story had the potential of becoming extremely close to the French Impressionist's ideal of cinéma pur, a fact avant-garde director Jean Epstein must also have remarked, being his the first of many adaptations of the tale (of which Roger Corman's - 1960 - is my favorite by far). In order to complement Poe's account of the Usher's demise, Epstein and Luis Buñuel, then his assistant director and co-screenwriter, chose to incorporate to their script the storyline of Poe's The Oval Portrait (1850), with Madeline herself fading away as her painting grows livelier, but more on that later.

Sir Usher upon realizing Madeline's death

The concept of photogénie, that is, the notion that all animate and inanimate beings possess a particular facet that can only be unveiled through their transformation into a film image, was pivotal in Jean Epstein's vision of cinema in particular and in the French Impressionist movement as a whole, being then regarded as the ultimate objective of any cineaste. A true Impressionist, Epstein advocated that drama should arise not from the plot, but from the audience's intuitive grasp of the photogenic images they are being presented, for true photogénie is in itself antagonistic to the idea of coherent narration, more suited, he believed, for novels and the theater. Consequently, he shared with his peers the highly subjective, almost dream-like narratives of his films, along with the love for the use of image juxtaposition to invoke ideas in the mind of the viewer. A further trait of his filmography is the frequent use of close-ups, with the intent of magnifying all feelings and emotions being enacted on the screen, a technique whose power he more than proved in his Cœur fidèle (1923), thanks in part to his beautifully expressive leading lady, Gina Manès. Nevertheless, even though most Impressionist movies were interesting case studies in the power of the then still-in-development grammar of cinema and would greatly influence later generations of directors, Epstein and the other exponents of French Impressionism  have since long fallen into obscurity: none of them, other than Epstein with La Chute de la Maison Usher, has a Great Movie selected by Ebert; Luis Buñuel, on the other hand, who abandoned the movement allegedly because of how pretentious he thought the French cinema avant-garde had become, has five. The reason for that is simple: the profound surrealism and "unnecessary mysticism" intrinsic to Impressionist movies make them quite inaccessible, much too modern, to put it differently, to be fully enjoyed, and Epstein's adaptation of Poe's tale is no different IMHO.

Madeline seeking Sir Usher's embrace,
after having risen from her grave

Before dwelling on the things I didn't like about the movie, I want to talk about what Epstein did best in it, and that was to build a deeply melancholic atmosphere that lasts from the first time we set eyes on the Usher abode right up to its downfall. All sets created by Pierre Kefer (the movie's art director and, I presume, set decorator) mingle beautifully to express some certain intangible, nightmarish oddity that permeates the Usher mansion. Its haunting main hall, as remarked by Ebert, is truly a sight to behold, with its sparse furniture dominated by a gigantic fireplace and through whose windows a never-stopping wind seems to flow, all while the gloomy 1960’s soundtrack by Rolande de Candé completes the mood of strangeness and melancholy that impregnates it. Inhabiting that near-hallucination are Marguerite Gance's Madeline, a somnambulic figure in whose face an expression of agony seems to perpetually linger, and Jean Debucourt's Sir Usher, to whom all of the movies close-ups are reserved, so that we, the audience, are able to share his mental state slowly progress from obsession into grief and, ultimately, into delirium. Much like Gina Manès, Debucourt's highly communicative face, coupled to his restrained pantomime, turns his sequence of close-ups into a character study in itself. Just observe how his stance, particularly his eyes, evolve with the plot: at first, fixated in immortalizing his ailing Madeline through her portrait; then, grief-stricken upon discovering her dead and subsequently burying her; and finally, bordering on becoming unhinged from reality, waiting for Madeline to return from the dead. I wonder how remarkable could have been a movie in which he shared the screen with Renée Maria Falconetti...

Sir Usher carrying Madeline's coffin to the family crypt,
gazing defiantly at nature itself 

And now for the not so good stuff... In his adaptation, Epstein makes extensive use of slow motion to highlight sir Usher's fall into depression, a correlation substantiated by the medical literature of the time. While such approach poses no problem for shorter films (see e.g. his Le Tempestaire (1947), in which he manipulated the speed of most of his shots to show a tempest from the point of view of the storm-tamer), its indiscriminate use in a full-length picture greatly hinders its overall pacing, here "risking self parody", making the 66 minutes of his La Chute de la Maison Usher feel longer than the three hours of D. W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation (1915). Furthermore, it seems like the character of Sir Usher's friend could have easily been written off the final script, such is his lack of contribution to the overall movie, thus turning it into a nice medium-length feature film with certainly fewer pacing problems, but still flawed in its core. That is because, foremost, of his misuse of intertitles, with much more expository text than the average silent movie, and, ultimately, of its script per se, due to the misguided alterations made to the original short story. At first, even though I believe the addition of Poe's The Oval Portrait (1850) to be quite clever in complementing the writer's narrative of the demise of the Usher bloodline, Epstein makes the mistake of giving too much importance to Madeline's portrait in the first part of the movie while ignoring it altogether in the latter half, thus creating a palpable rift in his film in its entirety. Also, by making Sir Usher and Madeline to be a married couple instead of brother and sister, as in the original tale, Epstein manages to make his scenario become borderline incomprehensible apparently just for the sake of it. It is strongly implied by Poe that the Ushers have had a very incestuous family tree, not having put forth "any enduring branch", and that such tradition was being kept by Sir Usher and Madeline; accordingly, because Sir Usher is doing something unnatural, he fears nature itself, which, in turn has been constantly assailing his homestead. Had such detail been kept, that would be the reason why he didn't leave his threshold to greet his old friend upon his arrival, as well as why he was looking menacingly and with disgust to the trees as he carried Madeline to her crypt, and why he never went to check on her even though he believed her alive the whole time inside her coffin. Above all, however, by giving his movie an anticlimactic happy ending, in which both Sir Usher and Madeline escape the crumbling mansion and watch it collapse from afar, entangled in a loving embrace, he basically stripped the story of its basic meaning, making it all about the literal fall of the house of Usher.

Summarizing it:

Liked	Didn't like
Its prevailing atmosphere of melancholy	A movie to admire rather than enjoy
Jean Debucourt's beautifully expressive face	It feels like it would have been better suited as a short/mid-length feature The alterations made to Poe's narrative didn't pay off

The great hall in Jean Epstein's La Chute de la Maison Usher is indeed one of the most haunting spaces in the movies:

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Great Movie review by Roger Ebert here.

If you liked this movie, then maybe try watching Abel Gance's J'Accuse (1919).

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