First and foremost: I love the tale of "House of Usher", regardless of which film version, and I try to encourage as many people as humanly possible to check out this haunting story of agony and Gothic damnation … So, I swear, if one more person replies me with: "Usher? … Oh, you mean the R&B singer? Yeah, he's cool", then I swear I will go Edgar Allan Poe on his/her ass! Thank you. Admittedly I'm not much of an art connoisseur, but I reckon this silent classic is pure and genuine art! It's a stunningly beautiful, haunting, surreal and absorbing impressionistic interpretation of Poe's short story. The plot is undeniably subsequent to the atmosphere and choreography, and I actually don't recognize the storyline from the other versions I've seen. In the other versions, for example the awesome Roger Corman production starring the almighty Vincent Price, the Usher kinship is cursed and continuously being punished for the crimes committed by their evil ancestors. Here, it's actually just Sir Roderick Usher who's obsessed with painting a portrait of his lovely wife Madeleine, only … The nearer the painting comes to completion, the more his wife weakens due to a strange illness. After her death and burial service, Sir Roderick becomes increasingly mad with the restless ghost of his Madeleine still prowling through the house. The story is often confusion and open for various interpretations, but the wholesome is just downright visually stunning! Director Jean Epstein, with the more than noticeable influence of his young and upcoming assistant director Louis Buñuel, generates an atmosphere that is morbid, depressing and hypnotic from start to finish and multiple sequences are hauntingly surreal; like the funeral march and the storm. I watched the 1997 restored version, during a special film festival where there was a professional pianist providing live musical guidance, and it was one of the most culturally engaged moments of my life. Art like this will surely survive for yet another hundred years.

From the eerie opening where a stranger comes in from the mist and mud to ask for safe passage to the house of Usher, to the fiery ending where said house comes crashing down, this film is a strange piece of surrealism - using animals, pictures, and extreme close-ups to drive the story along.'The Fall of the House of Usher' has just three characters taking the main roles in the film - the stranger, who has been asked to visit his friend and the friend's dying wife - the friend, Sir Roderick Usher, a wild-eyed loner struck with the passion to paint, and his wife, Madeleine, who has a slow death with every brush stroke inflicted by her husband, while the painting of her lives and breathes.When Madeleine finally dies she's buried in her veil and dress in a coffin, but after a lot of tension (shown by bells and clocks counting time) we find she's not really dead but just walking wounded in spirit. By the time we reach the blazing close of this short film (only an hour) it has done Poe's story proud - a silent classic of Surrealism.

The Fall of the House of Usher is about... well, I suppose it's about someone, Allan, visiting the house of Usher, run by Roderick, who lives with his sick wife Madeline and spends most of his time painting and trying to find a cure for whatever her supernatural-esquire disease is. The rest of what happens I cannot really say. Maybe because I'm still not totally sure myself. While I've yet to read the original Poe story, or see the later, more well known Roger Corman production with Vincent Price, I would probably advise on what little I know in comparing both films for the 1960 version if you're most concerned about sticking straight to the story.Apparently, by the way, Luis Bunuel, who was director Jean Epstein's chief collaborator, quit after creative clashes over this issue. For whatever reason it was, I'd be hard-pressed to figure on how much influence he did or didn't leave on the picture. As it stands, and probably sticking to a certain aesthetic that was familiar for those in love with Poe, the silent version of Fall of the House of Usher is chock full of atmosphere in every kind of delicious, creepy, wonderful kind of connotation. The production design is sometimes full of a smoke, or a smoke-filled tint from the camera, and the outside of the mansion is covered in dirty fields and dead trees. The inside of the house, the interiors of the walls, the mirrors, the paints of Roderick's, and the placement of the camera in some strange angles (i.e. guitar) all build up to something unexpected.Would I call it surrealism just because of Bunuel's involvement? Yes and no. Yes in that, of course, there are some striking moments that could only come out of a dream &/or a desire to just completely tool around with the audience's head just for the hell of it. And no because it's really Epstein's movie through it all, and he crafts this mostly as a somber, quietly intense picture where he experiments not in as a surrealist but as a director of contemplative Gothic horror. I can't even totally understand what absorbed me, but everything in the 'plastic', technical sense of the word did, not to mention the performances by Debucourt, Lamy, and especially Gance who all seem to be drifting in and out of the fantastical consciousness that seems to be living in this place, where life and death merge or go un-hinged, and (as another reviewer noted) is like a slow-poisoning prison.Just, as I said, don't watch it to be wrapped up in 'what happens next in the "plot"', as it's more about what may happen in the next twist with a setting or a mood, or if a character should suddenly have a look that changes everything. It's not the greatest of the near-end silent period, but it's close.

This is all mood and none the worse for it. Trivia buffs will seek it out because Abel Gance had a supporting role (to say nothing of Marguerite Gance as Madeleine Usher), Luis Bunuel adapted Poe and quit as co-director when he failed to see eye to eye with Epstein. Several posters have praised the music which I found totally inapposite but then what do I know. Jean Debucourt (Roderick) has a long and distinguished career and appeared in some of my favorite French movies - Douce, La Ciel est a vous, Marguerite de la nuite, Madame de, etc - and is suitable restrained for a silent film when 'emoting' was de riguer. Anyone who has read anything of Poe let alone the original story will feel at home with this adaptation despite Epstein's cavalier treatment of the story. Photography, atmos, etc, are right on the money and it's well worth seeking out.