The Fall of the House of Usher (1928)

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Movie
German title The fall of the House of Usher
Original title La Chute de la maison Usher
Country of production France
original language French
Publishing year 1928
length 1288 meters, at 18 fps approx. 63 minutes
Rod
Director Jean Epstein
script Jean Epstein and Luis Buñuel
production Films Jean Epstein
camera Georges Lucas, Jean Lucas
occupation

The fall of the house of Usher (in the original French La chute de la maison Usher ) is a French horror film by Jean Epstein from the year 1927. It is based on the short story of the same name by the American author Edgar Allan Poe . Epstein and his assistant director Luis Buñuel wrote the script based on this template . The main role of Madeleine Usher was played by Marguerite Gance, the wife of the film pioneer Abel Gance .

action

In a letter, Roderick Usher, the man at the Usher estate, asks his old friend Allan to visit him because his wife Madeleine is ill. Allan sets off through a barren swampy landscape. When he asks for a ride in an inn, the guests get restless when the name Usher is mentioned; nobody wants to drive it. The coachman, who after asking many questions, agrees to take him with him, refuses to drive on when the property comes into view.

Allan is met by Usher and the doctor. Madeleine suffers from a mysterious illness, the doctor has no advice. Following an old tradition, Roderick paints a portrait of his wife with great devotion. But the further he gets on with it, the worse it seems for his wife, as if her life force is escaping from her to the extent that it flows into the picture.

Madeleine gets weaker and weaker and finally collapses. The doctor issues the death certificate. A coffin is already ready, which, contrary to Roderick's wishes, is nailed up. On a long way through dreary landscapes he is brought to the family crypt on an island.

After the funeral, Roderick's nervous tension increases noticeably. He becomes overly sensitive and perceives mysterious noises. These come from the crypt where the coffin falls from its pedestal and Madeleine frees herself from it: she was buried alive. Roderick falls into a trance, he feels Madeleine coming. When she appears in the hall in her bloody dress, the flames in the fireplace spread to the house. Madeline's portrait also catches fire. Allan can barely escape outside when the house collapses.

background

The photography was in the hands of Georges Lucas and Jean Lucas; The set designer was Pierre Kefer; the cloakroom was designed by the costume designer Fernand Oclise. Luis Buñuel assisted with the direction and wrote the script. He fell out with the director Epstein when he declared that he wanted to deviate significantly from Poe's original, and left the production. Other voices say that Gance's wife was offended by the cast of the female lead.

The first performance in France took place on October 5, 1928. The film was shown across Europe in Italy, Portugal, Hungary, Poland and Finland, and overseas in America, Brazil and Argentina; it premiered in Japan on July 4, 1929.

In Germany, the film was shown for the first time on November 25, 1967 on NDR Hamburg television with musical accompaniment by organist Gerhard Gregor on the Welte radio organ. The program was inspired by the then head of the film and theater editorial team, Hans Brecht ; it was also taken over by the 3rd program of the WDR . On October 8, 1972, it ran on Bavarian educational television, today's BR 3.

In 2000, La Chute de la Maison Usher was included in the National Film Registry as one of 25 films a year .

reception

According to Epstein's version, which is considered to be the earliest in the course of film history, Poe's short story was used several times as the basis for film adaptations.

In the same year as Epstein (1928), the two Harvard graduates James Sibley Watson and Melville Webber shot an experimental avant-garde short film The Fall of the House of Usher in the USA ; Herbert Stern played Roderick Usher, Hildegarde Watson played Madeline Usher, and Melville Webber played the traveler. The film does not have any subtitles and tells the story in a symbolic visual language.

The biggest difference between the book and the film adaptation is that Epstein makes a married couple out of the protagonists, who are set out as twins in the original. In doing so, he takes out the relevant topic of incest in the short story, which not only shapes the relationship between the siblings for Poe, but also serves as an explanation for the degeneration of the Usher house.

Epstein's film is preceded by a kind of prologue that does not exist in the original. He describes Allan's arduous journey to Usher's house.

The motif of the connection between the portrait and the life force of the person portrayed is reminiscent of Oscar Wilde's portrait of Dorian Gray (novel, 1899), which has also been the subject of several films.

Voices of criticism

“With Jean Epstein and Luis Buñuel, two of the greatest avant-garde artists worked on the first film adaptation of Edgar Allen Poe's classic story. Poe's linguistic style aimed at effect is congenially transferred into the means of the film: slow-motion, cross-fading, surreal image compositions contribute to the irrational aesthetic of the work - without completely foregoing narrative coherence. " (Filmmuseum Potsdam).

"It's about the film ... to create creepy room moods with his compositions, to reveal strange relationships between people and to convey the feeling that an uncanny, invisible but always present force hovers over the whole scene." (Peter Ellenbruch, interzone perceptible (June 2, 2004))

“The unreal atmosphere that envelops the Usher estate is captured by cameraman Georges Lucas in harmonious horror images: High, leafless trees, a cool lake, gray clouds and wafts of mist, swamp. This gloomy mood continues in the impressive high, great hall where the main part of the action takes place. In the long shots, the protagonists seem very small and somehow 'unprotected', and the books falling from the shelves and the leaves blowing in are signs of decay. " (André Stratmann, January 31, 2006).

“Jean Debucourt plays Roderick as a nervous but deeply calm sociopath whose world is shaken when Madeleine dies. Then he waits, impatient and suffering. When Madeleine finally “rises” from her crypt, his eyes light up, and while the homeowner, confirmed in his madness, staggers towards the beautiful woman wrapped in a wedding dress, the horrified guest Allan flees. Whether the viewer of the film also flees depends very much on his willingness to deal with the difficult work. ”(Cjamango, July 26, 2010)

Re-performances

“The Downfall of the House of Usher” was performed on Saturday, January 27, 2007 at the 11th StummFilmMusikTage in Erlangen ; the musical illustration came from the avant-garde electronics group Interzone perceptible from Essen .

On February 9, 2008 the film was shown at the International Film Festival Berlin , where it was presented in a restored version and accompanied by the Dutch musicians Maud Nelissen, Merima Kljuco and Frido ter Beek.

In November 2009, on the occasion of EA Poe's 200th birthday, the opera The Fall of the House of Usher by the minimalist composer Philip Glass was presented as part of the “Potsdam Winter Opera” in the Neues Palais palace theater . A unique silent film screening in the Film Museum, which Helmut Schulte accompanied on the historic Welte cinema organ, set the mood for the opera event.

At the 9th Karlsruhe Silent Film Festival, Epstein's Der Untergang des Haus Usher , "whose nature and water photos are legendary and still cause anxiety" (program announcement), was shown on March 11, 2011 with music by the Karlsruhe improvisation ensemble.

The culture broadcaster Arte broadcast The Downfall of the House of Usher / La Chute de la Maison Usher on Monday, April 28, 2014 at 11:40 p.m. on German television in a version restored in 1997 by the Cinémathèque Royale de Belgique in collaboration with the Cineteca di Bologna . Gabriel Thibaudeau composed a new piece of music specially for this in 2013. It was interpreted by Jean-Louis Sajot and the musicians of "L'Octuor de France".

literature

  • Guido Bee: The fall of the Usher house. In: Ursula Vossen (Hrsg.): Film genres: Horror film. Reclam, Stuttgart 2004, pp. 56-60.
  • Guy Crucianelli: Painting the life out of her - Aesthetic integration and disintegration in Jean Epstein's La Chute de la maison Usher. In: J. Hand, Jay McRoy (Ed.): Monstrous adaptations: Generic and thematic mutations in horror film. Manchester University Press, Manchester / New York 2007.
  • Roger Ebert: The Fall of the House of Usher. on: rogerebert.com
  • Dagmar von Hoff: Family Secrets. Incest in contemporary literature and film. (Literature, culture, gender: large series. Volume 28). Böhlau-Verlag, Cologne / Weimar 2003, ISBN 3-412-09803-5 .
  • Lothar Prox: Silent film settings of German TV reactions. A list. In: Stiftung deutsche Kinemathek Berlin (ed.): Silent film music yesterday and today. Verlag Volker Spieß, Berlin 1979, ISBN 3-88435-008-0 , pp. 9-26.
  • Bert Rebhandl: Bonjour Cinéma - Jean Epstein and the French cinema of the twenties. In: The Standard. November 4, 2005.
  • Friedrich von Zglinicki: The way of the film. History of cinematography and its predecessors. Rembrandt Verlag, Berlin 1956, pp. 478-479.
  • Mark Zimmer: The Fall of the House of Usher (La Chute de la Maison Usher). 1928, on: digitallyobsessed.com (Review)

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Roger Ebert: The Fall of the House of Usher. auf: rogerebert.com : “'In a motif lifted from Wilde's› Picture of Dorian Gray ‹', writes the critic Mark Zimmer, 'her life and vitality pours into the painting, such that it begins to blink and move, as she dies '. ”
  2. ↑ “The motif of being alive and buried, which the reader also encounters in The Premature Burial (Buried alive) 1844, The Cask Of Amontillado (Das Faß Amontillado) 1846, and The Black Cat (The Black Cat) 1843, as well as the Appearances of the 'undead' body are at the core of Poe's inventory of motifs ”, says Kindler's literary lexicon on Edgar Allan Poe: The narrative work
  3. ^ IMDb / trivia
  4. ↑ cf. programm.ard.de
  5. ↑ IMDb / release
  6. ↑ Gregor himself played in the cinema during the silent film era, cf. Prox p. 29.
  7. ↑ Hans-Ulrich Wagner: The film club on NDR television, January 3, 2014, Prox pp. 28–30.
  8. ↑ Film tips . In: Die Zeit , No. 40/1972
  9. ↑ Through this appointment and the associated special treatment of the film material, 425 films classified as culturally and artistically valuable have been saved from decay. Apart from Epstein's film adaptation, this honor was only given to Roger Corman ( House of Usher , 1960), in which Vincent Price played Roderick.
  10. ↑ Listed by IMDb and diogenes.ch . The narrative was also productive in other disciplines: Claude Debussy left a short opera fragment on La Chute de la Maison Usher , which, edited by the British musicologist Robert Orledge, premiered in Göttingen in December 2013, goettinger-tageblatt.de , the American Philip Glass composed an entire opera around the subject in 1987. Volker Boser: Minimalism is ambivalent. For the premiere of Phil Glass' “The Downfall of the Usher House” at the Gärtnerplatztheater . In: Kulturvollzug , March 28, 2011 - and in 2006, The Downfall of the Usher House was published by Titania Medien as a radio play (60 min. / 1 ​​CD, ISBN 3-7857-3250-3 )
  11. ↑ With “wonderfully crooked backdrops and loving Art Deco elements”, it is unmistakably linked to German Expressionism in the early 1920s and to films such as Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari or Nosferatu . echolog.de
  12. ↑ von Hoff, p. 387.
  13. ↑ Allan takes a rest in a tavern and asks about Usher's house. Locals feel quite uncomfortable when this name is mentioned and begin to whisper softly. At first no one wants to take him with them, only after many requests does someone take pity on driving him to the Usher house, but refuses to drive on when the house comes into view - this is reminiscent of Murnau's Nosferatu and Hutter's stop at the Carpathian inn. There, too, the guests drive together when he pronounces the vampire's name. There, too, the carters refuse to take him over the magical border to the “land of phantoms”. Roger Ebert: The Fall of the House of Usher. on: rogerebert.com : "There are echoes of the Dracula films and of the silent classic Nosferatu (1922) in the way the locals refuse to convey the visitor to the house ..."
  14. ↑ Marc Zimmer: “a motif lifted from Wilde's 'Picture of Dorian Gray'”; a very modern technical variation is conceived in Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1927), where Brigitte Helm's head tilts to the right under the glass cover, as if she were dying after her “life forces” had been transferred to the machine Maria with high-voltage lightning.
  15. ↑ kulturport.de, November 1, 2009.
  16. ↑ stummfilm-fan.beepworld.de ( Memento of the original from May 31, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / stummfilm-fan.beepworld.de
  17. ↑ cjamango.blogger.de
  18. ↑ stummfilmmusiktage.de ( Memento of the original from May 31, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.stummfilmmusiktage.de
  19. ↑ stummfilmmusiktage.de ( Memento of the original from May 31, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. and interzone-perceptible.de @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.stummfilmmusiktage.de
  20. ↑ infomedia-sh.de (PDF): “On February 9, 2008 Un chien andalou will be shown together with another masterpiece of surrealist film, Jean Epstein's La chute de la maison Usher (The Fall of the House of Usher, France 1928) at the Buñuel worked as an assistant director. Both films are presented in restored versions and accompanied by the Dutch musicians Maud Nelissen, Merima Kljuco and Frido ter Beek. With their improvisation they give the poetic and the intensity of the cinematic worlds of Buñuel and Epstein an adequate sonic space. The composer and pianist Maud Nelissen is one of the most renowned European silent film musicians. This performance in cooperation with the Volksbühne is supported by the French embassy. "
  21. ↑ culture-port.de
  22. ↑ inka-magazin.de ( Memento of the original from May 31, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. March 2, 2011 @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.inka-magazin.de
  23. ↑ The basis was a black and white original negative with French subtitles from the Cinémathèque française and a viraged nitro positive copy from the EYE Film Institute (formerly the Nederlands Filmmuseum )
  24. ↑ to November 21, 2005 in the Austrian Film Museum, New Intensity Behind the Mirror. on: derstandard.at