The Fall of the House of Usher (American)
If you're looking to understand the narrative of a film, it would be near impossible to watch this film without reading the short story first, or at least knowing what it's about. Unless you just care about gut impact, in which case you'll be fine.
Since this was the film of these two that I watched first, I was extraordinarily pleased to see that in the very first moment of the film, as the novel's narrator (the film has no such reference point) draws up to the cloud-enveloped dark blot that's the Usher mansion, that Webber and Watson got the story's atmosphere exactly right. To quote from the book: "I know not how it was -- but, with the first glimpse of the building, a sense of insufferable gloom pervaded my spirit. I say insufferable; for the feeling was unrelieved by any of that half-pleasurable, because poetic, sentiment with which the mind usually receives even the sternest natural images of the desolate or terrible." Although I can't really follow the grammar in the last quarter of that passage, the general gist is that this place is pretty much the suxx0r. Hang on to that thought, because it's pretty much the last cohesive thought that you'll get out of the film.
To continue talking about this, some degree of summary of the short story will probably be necessary: a nameless narrator is called to the Usher mansion because Roderick Usher is dying and lonely, with mental problems to boot! Upon arrival at that dreary mansion, the narrator finds Usher's sister to be in some sort of odd trance-like state and when she enters a catatonic state, Usher buries her alive. In the final moments of the film, as the narrator tells to Usher a medieval story about the defeat of a dragon by some brave doosh, the doors fly open and the sister staggers in and dies upon Usher, who dies of fear or something. Plus, as the narrator flees the place, it splits in two. Wikipedia sez that a major theme of the novel is of Usher's "self-fulfilling prophecy," including that he's such because he expects to be sick and that he buries his sister alive because he expects to. I just take wikipedia's word for stuff like this.
The film manifests Usher's "self-fulfilling prophecy" when the screen literally splits apart to reveal the inside of the mansion. It's an intriguing bit of foreshadowing, coupled with the fact that it seems that the house has become the film (within the realm of foreshadowing). Epstein's film perhaps does similar (aka "tangentially related at best") material a bit better, but I'll leave that for when I talk about the other film.
As I said, the screen splits to reveal Usher and his sister having dinner, whereupon the sister is served something that sends her into some surreal mindtrip mental state, at which point the film becomes heavy surrealism, complete with sets straight out of Caligari or Aelita. The sister walks down a corridor with staircases twisting off in every other direction. She walks down a ramp as escalator-type stairs move down towards the bottom center of the frame, with obvious symbolic meaning. The orientation of those escalators themselves resemble the rip in the frame at the beginning of the film. I'm not sure what this could mean, but I'm sure there's something there. A shadow on the wall shows the hammer nailing the lid of the coffin down (presumably), which is repeated multiple times to accentuate its importance to the mental state of the characters (here, Usher). The camera's doing a continually rotating Dutch angle thingy to illustrate the haze of the characters. A series of jump cuts moves impressionistically through the rooms as the woman reaches out at the screen, trying to claw her way out of her fate. Then it gets more dense with hypnotically surreal stuff. And it remains effective.
The Fall of the House of Usher (French)
I might be a bit biased towards this one given my previous admiration for Epstein and my tendency towards films that reveal the artificiality of film, or art in general. Epstein was no stranger to this thematic territory, given that he had made The Three-Sided Mirror a year earlier -- and probably earlier films too, although those aren't available for my viewing pleasure. Epstein changed the brother-sister Ushers to be man-wife (perhaps to remove the somewhat unnecessary possibility of an incestuous relationship between the two), and also changed it so that Usher (and indeed, every Usher) is obsessed with painting his wife as she dies. The obvious interpretation is that he's trying to preserve her through art, and that's certainly an element of it, and this is what Roger Ebert noted in his review of the film. But more than that, it displays the self-deception and artificiality in the painting, for obvious reasons. Furthermore, in the paintings of the wife, sometimes it is actually a painting, and sometimes it is the camera filming the wife in real time posing within the frame; this bit of fakery only exists in the film world for us as viewers, and not for anybody within the film. The fakery in the painting has been generalized to film itself. On a side note, considering both this and Le Tempestaire some twenty years later, it would seem that Epstein was one of the earliest directors - along with Evgenii Bauer - who was interested in those themes [if you know of any others, let me know!]. In almost a trivial addendum, two or three intertitles show Roderich saying of the painting: "Here, she really lives!" That bit of heavy-handedness is my only complaint about the film. The film itself is revealed to be artificial when it resorts to surrealist techniques, such as brief time-lapse and blurred images.
This film better than the American film - and even better than the Poe story - captures Usher's psychological anguish as his wife is presumed dead, using a slew of techniques from slow motion to slowly tilting camera frames. This makes it somewhat similar to the American film, although that was more global in terms of producing unsettling images -- rather than this film's focus on Usher himself. This is also a very beautiful film, especially when it builds to the climax. There's also a swift tracking shot along the ground that can only be described as kewl.
And it's narrated by that guy with the voice, which is awesome.
