A Film Canon

 

 

This short film is a much more abstracted adaptation of Poe's story than La Chute De La Maison Usher. Watson and Webber translate Caligari's expressionist universe directly into cinematography, sculpting the same distorted, dream-like spaces out of light and darkness. When discrete objects intervene, they are generally blurred and superimposed over the action, as if they simultaneously embodied all the perspectives from which they could be viewed, producing an elegant, subsidiary balance between cubism and realism; or, rather, an explication of cubism as a more sophisticated realism. Although this allows for spectacular treatment of the recurrent staircase, whose constant differentiations produce a diaphanous ripple across the screen, it culminates with the depiction of the Ushers themselves (the narrator being largely occluded, as occurs with Epstein's version).  For most of the film, there is an absolute porosity between them and their shadows, making them feel more like bundles of darkness and light, or mere emanations of the mirage-like mansion, than living, breathing human beings. This produces an unprecedented phenomenology of the undead, most evident in the sequences detailing Madeline Usher's death, in which a combination of superimposition and elegant shadow-play force her into a coffin whose parameters are never completely distinguished from those of the house itself.