La Chute de la maison Usher (1928)

La Chute de la maison Usher is a French horror film first released in 1928, directed by Jean Epstein.  The film is based on a story by Edgar Allan Poe and stars Jean Debucourt, Marguerite Gance, Charles Lamy and Fournez-Goffard.  It has also been released under the title: The Fall of the House of Usher.  Our overall rating for this film is: excellent.


As his beloved wife Madeleine succumbs to a mysterious illness, Sir Roderick Usher invites his old friend Allan to his castle to comfort him.  Allan has difficulty finding someone to drive him to the Usher homestead; the locals appear to be terrified of the name Usher, as though it bore the imprint of an ancient curse.  Allan eventually finds a coachman to take him to his destination, which turns out to be a dilapidated old castle set in the midst of misty marshland.  Sir Roderick is pleased to see his old friend but sends him away for a while so that he can work on his wife’s portrait.  As the painting nears completion, Madeleine’s illness worsens, as though her life were ebbing from her and into the portrait.  Once the picture is finished, Madeleine collapses, and her physician confirms she is dead.  After a solemn funeral, a ghostly presence invades the house of Usher...

It is widely acknowledged that the horror genre in cinema had its origins in German expressionism of the 1920s.  Such films as Robert Wiene’s Das Cabinet des Dr Caligari (1920) and F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922) showed how expressionistic motifs (blocks of shadow, oblique camera angles and atmospheric sets) could be used to arouse feelings of terror and dread in an audience, paving the way for Universal’s Gothic horror movies of the 1930s.  However, German filmmakers were not the only ones to experiment with horror and fantasy themes in the silent era.  Another film which would prove to be highly influential came out of France, via the unlikely collaboration between the modernist Jean Epstein and surrealist Luis Buñuel.   Their film, La Chute de la maison Usher, was arguably cinema’s first true Gothic horror offering, one that provided the template for the innumerable period horror films that would be made subsequently.  

The film is a loose adaptation of the Edgar Allen Poe story The Fall of the House of Usher.   First published in 1839, Poe’s story about a decaying family in a decaying mansion has been adapted on numerous occasions for cinema, the best known version being Roger Corman’s stylishly creepy House of Usher (1960).  Epstein’s film is not a straight adaptation of Poe’s story but rather an amalgam of several of the writer’s works, including The Oval Portrait.  In Poe’s original Usher story, the central characters where brother and sister; Epstein changed this to a husband and wife couple, presumably to avoid any suggestion of incest.  He also altered the ending to be more in line with public tastes of the time.

Although Buñuel parted with Epstein (on fairly acrimonious terms) before the film was completed, it is apparent, from its bold surrealistic flourishes, that he had a significant impact on its design.  The slow-motion funeral sequence, which manages to appear both haunting and comical, has a similar subversive tone to that of Buñuel’s surrealist masterpiece Un Chien andalou (1929).  However, the expressionistic touches which give the film its haunting dream-like feel are more likely to be the work of Epstein, who had been greatly influenced by early German cinema.  Another influence was Abel Gance, whose pioneering use of the close-up and superimposition in such films as La Roue (1923) and Napoléon (1925) is emulated by Epstein in this film, to great effect.  Epstein acknowledged his debt to Gance by casting his wife Marguerite in the role of Madeleine.

As a purely visual experience and journey into the realm of unbridled fantasy, La Chute de la maison is pretty well unsurpassed by any other film of the silent era.   The endless tracking shots, the inspired use of superimposition and the subjective camera, the misty and desolate exteriors and the fact that not everything we see makes sense logically all have the same effect - to persuade the spectator that he is experiencing a dream rather than watching a film.  One of the defining qualities of a dream is the breakdown of time and causality, and this is skilfully replicated in Epstein’s film.   The house of Usher seems to dwell in a phantasmagoric limbo where time is a purely subjective phenomenon, to be compressed, stretched and deformed at will.  In such a place, anything is possible.

As in Poe’s novel, there is a dual relationship between the setting and the main protagonist, the crumbling old house reflecting the inner world of the melancholic Sir Roderick, dank, gloomy and decaying.  Just as the living portrait absorbs the life of Madeleine, so the house appears to soak up the poison in Sir Roderick’s soul, growing more evil and more frightening by the minute.  It is hard not to fall under the hypnotic spell of La Chute de la maison Usher and succumb as it draws us, with delectable ease, into the darkest precincts of our imagination.  Cinema’s first serious flirtation with Gothic fantasy is also one if its darkest and most viscerally compelling, a profoundly unsettling meditation on the relationship between life, death and art.

© James Travers 2010

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