As a man of surrealist extraction working on it with another notable surrealist of the time, Luis Buñuel—who was to go on to complete his fantastic corpus starting with that one pristine surrealist sally, Un Chien Andalou—Jean Epstein directed and produced The Fall of the House of Usher with the result that, bringing alive the eerie gothic ambience of Poe’s short story, he committed to film a visual tour de force: a funhouse of style and atmosphere. The film is chilling, for its time visually ingenious, and a pleasure to look at, despite the want of other compelling cinematic elements and the graininess of the film (owing perhaps to the version that I watched on YouTube–but there’s a better one here).
Like the story from which it derives, this plotless funhouse of style and atmosphere is a veritable phantasmagoria that makes the case against visiting friends or neighbors: going to the house of his companion Sir Roderick Usher, who lives with his moribund wife whose vitality seems linked to that of the portraits he obsessively makes of her, the nameless narrator arrives to find in the making a kind of parasitic relationship in which the painter, Sir Roderick, has been siphoning off the vitality of his wife while she languishes, then dies, and the narrator remains in the house to deal with the fallout, the burial, and the supernatural upheaval that fills up the breach.
Sir Roderick is an obsessive and maniacal man unhinged by his years-long reclusion and wasting away in the house of Usher, unsettled by his own nature, and fixated on carrying out a deviant plan not to be delayed, much less prevented. The stunning surrealist-visuals of the film, really those of a very gothic expressionism, are there for the feasting: the billowing curtains of the empty hall exposed, like the arrhythmia of a distressed heart, to the blustery autumn weather and to its own destruction from within; the leaves blowing across the cold parquet floors of the hall toward one of the many gaping doorways, kept in motion by an unseen generative force; the close-ups and medium shots of the maniacal Jean Debucourt intent on doing the work of his own internal demons.
These moments and many others are as antiquated as they are luminous, and they please the eyes as they compensate for the bare-bones structure of the story. The Fall of the House of Usher is eerie, brief, and unsettling, one of the final starbursts of the silent period, and like a reflective puddle whose depth can be deceiving until a foot or leg takes its measure, it is shallow while holding out the possibility of depth, so that we have to take the plunge. But only to find out for ourselves.
