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Starring: Jean Debucourt, Marguerite Gance, Charles Lamy, Fournez-Goffard |
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Summary
With his wife succumbing to an unknown illness, Sir Roderick Usher invites his friend
Allen to his castle to comfort him. When Allen arrives, after a long journey, Sir
Roderick is painting his wife’s portrait. It seems that the portrait is draining
the life from its model, and once the painting is complete, Madeleine Usher is dead.
After the funeral, a ghostly presence invades the house of Usher...
Critique
For many film enthusiasts, Jean Epstein’s La chute de la maison Usher represents
the pinnacle of artistic achievement in European cinema of the 1920s. Epstein was
already an accomplished film-maker by the time he came to make this film, having distinguished
himself for his bold experimental techniques in such films as La
Glace à trois faces (1927). When La chute de la maison Usher
was released in 1928 its was immediately hailed as a masterpiece.
The avant-garde director's competent use of what was then primitive technology, coupled with a fertile imagination and an unbridled creative flair, enabled him to create some of the most astonishing works of cinema. Epstein managed to combine the apparently irreconcilable principles of expressionism, romanticism and surrealism in a way that very few of his contemporaries could emulate. Nowhere is this more apparent than in his haunting La chute de la maison Usher. With skilful use of superimposed images, slow-motion photography and clever interplay of light and shade, Epstein creates a nightmare fantasy world which is so believable that the spectator is drawn into it and really does experience the terror within. It is not difficult to see why some regard this as the finest horror film ever made. As Epstein himself admitted, this film is less an adaptation of Edgar Allen Poe’s famous short story "The Fall of the House of Usher" but more an amalgam of several of Poe's stories, including, most obviously, "The Oval Portrait". In Poe's original Usher story, the male-female lead characters where brother and sister; Epstein presumably changed this to a husband and wife couple to avoid any suggestion of incest. He also changed the ending to be more in line with public tastes of the time. The part of Madeleine in the film was played by Marguerite Gance, wife of the celebrated film director Abel Gance, whom Epstein greatly admired. Luis Buñuel, Epstein’s assistant director, worked with Epstein in setting up the film but the two separated during production after a major row and never worked together again. © James Travers 2002 Write a review for this film... User Comments
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