Jean Epstein's The Fall of the House of Usher

Translated by Baudelaire and Mallarme, celebrated by Gaston Bachelard, and interpreted by filmmaker and critic Jean Epstein, Edgar Allan Poe has always been more esteemed, more beloved, in France than in his native land. The SF Film Society's last-minute decision to screen Epstein's La Chute de la Maison Usher alongside Watson and Webber's short American version gave us an inspired lesson in contrasts. Both films are avant-garde interpretations made in 1928, but Watson and Webber's film, with its sharp angles and effects, clashing slices of blacks and whites, multiple exposures, heavily made-up actors and art-deco sets couldn't have been further from the essence of Poe's haunted and dreamlike meditations. Epstein's beautiful film, on the other hand, seemed to offer itself as the medium through which Poe's spirit might speak - and what could be more apropos of its subject than that?

Poe was never very interested in the nuts and bolts of life. His territory was always Death, not the fact of it, but the ongoing experience of it, which influence kept him magnetized to movements of his unconscious, to the ambiguous figures of his imagination, to the symbolic, the dialectic, and, ultimately, to the static, melancholic vision of unity in which his love was forever dissolved. For Poe, such a vision was Beauty itself, Beauty as the sign of Death in the soul of the dreamer, or the artist. Like the anima, she was always feminine, and like the mother who died when he was still a boy, she was forever young, unchanging (despite the various characters in which he reincarnates her soul) and unattainable. Epstein's film conforms to this oneiric sensibility with its haunted, windswept, cavernous interiors, its vast curtains of billowing silk, calligraphic winter trees, pale, dripping wax, wide spirals of dusty stairs, mist, smoke, and water. The filmmaker combines as many as seven of Poe's stories, and his Roderick Usher is compelled to finish an Oval Portrait of his wife Madeline despite her succumbing to a wasting illness that advances with each brushstroke. This Orphic hymn to art's fascination with death is Poe's love letter to his lost mother, developed by Epstein with tailored sensitivity, as he weaves about the dead-undead Madeline a gorgeous visual spell, a gown of diaphanous white tulle which streams from her head and floats behind her coffin on the lake. And just as the film's conjuring effect is uncannily synchronous with Poe's themes, so the silence of this silent film is curiously well suited to its subject, achieving a positive formal status entirely unlike the technological limitation with which we normally associate it. Limitation - like loss - achieves in this film its opposite pole under the influence of artistic compression. Death reaches its far shore and becomes, magically, positively charged, a reversal typical again of Poe himself, that water-gazer.

Roderick's sensitivity to sound extends the application of the silent motif; his ears are tuned to the heartbeat in the coffin in the crypt across the lake; grosser sounds begin to snap his nerves like the strings of the abandoned guitar which break one by one as Madeline stirs. When the suit of armor comes crashing to the floor and the smoke from the enormous hearth replaces the mist of the lake we know we are in a possible-impossible realm of inversion, where fire and water, living and dead are approaching some sort of supernatural betrothal, and the husk of human limitation is cast aside. It sounds so out of all proportion now that I write it, but this exquisite elegy defies reality, giving us not images of Poe's ideas, but perfect correspondences.