Shepard Express: A GOTHIC FALL
Bruce Calvert
A GOTHIC FALL
Unearthing a Halloween clasic
By David Luhrssen
The ghostly groan of Gothic fiction received a new lease on the
imagination with "The Fall of the House of Usher." Although Edgar
Allan Poe borrowed heavily from that German master of all things
eerie, E.T.A. Hoffmann, he brought his own emotional autobiography
into "Usher" (1839). The story of decayed aristocracy in a crumbling
manor, where love had degenerated into obsession and obsession into
morbid terror, "Usher" was the key to a dank cellar of the
subconscious, mossy with incestuous desire and emotional paralysis.
One of the most striking recreations of Poe's Gothic imagination, Jean
Epstein's silent film The Fall of the House of Usher (1928), will be
shown on Halloween weekend at the Oriental Theatre. The screening will
be accompanied by an original musical score written and performed live
by Milwaukee's Present Music ensemble.
Born in Poland, Epstein came to France as a teenager, where he likely
encountered the adulation of Poe that permeated French arts and
letters in the latter 19th and early 20th centuries. Weird fiction
was, of course, being written closer to home, but Poe's tragic
life--as a vagabond gentleman consumed by alcohol and literature--lent
extra measure to his stature in Europe. (In Puritanical America, he
was long shunned.) It may also be that Poe articulated the illicit
fears and desires of early modernity with keener insight than many of
his contemporaries. He named the imp of the perverse in human nature,
wondered about the fissures splitting our psyches into distinct
compartments (many of them locked), sought for opiated altered states
of consciousness, probed the lower depths of experience and feared
society's disintegration into individuals alone with their terror of
the dark.
Epstein embraced the cinema culture that flourished in France during
the 1920s, where the nascent medium was treated with greater respect
than was usually the case in the U.S. He wrote on film theory, and
like such latter-day critics-cum-directors as Jean-Luc Godard, wasn't
content to analyze the work of others. Epstein was determined to make
movies that would imbue reality with new mystery and beauty through
the devices of cinema: framing, editing, close-ups. By the time he
turned (with scenario assistance from Luis Bunuel) to Poe's classic
Gothic story, he had reached the peak of his artistic power.
Verging on Surreal
Epstein's House of Usher rises from a lustrous, gray-toned landscape
of bare trees and lifeless shrubbery under an overcast sky. A zigzag
crack runs through the time-weathered, fog-wreathed house, mirroring
the split in the soul of its master, Roderick Usher. As played by Jean
Debucourt, Roderick is a gaunt but haughty-eyed aristocratic aesthete,
high-strung yet strangely muted. We meet him, framed within arresting
camera angles and close-ups, palette in hand, painting a portrait of
his wan, sickly sister Madeleine (Marguerite Gance). The unstated
emotional-physical links between them are visualized: every stroke of
Roderick's brush on canvas seems to glance painfully from Madeleine's
cheek.
Madeleine is wasting away; her sickness baffles physicians and deepens
the depressing aura that hangs over gloomy corridors lit by the foggy
glow of candlesticks. It's as if Madeleine bequeaths her final drops
of vitality to her brother's portrait. As it takes shape, she recedes
toward the shadowland.
Epstein's Usher verges on Surrealism. A wind races through the
galleries of the house, filling the curtained walls with oceanic
billows and sending books tumbling from their shelves. As Roderick's
mind begins to splinter, the camera watches a pendulum's maddeningly
slow journey, the barely perceptible inching forward of a clock's
hands and even the gears turning within the timepiece. The lens blurs
and shakes, like Roderick's glassy eyes and trembling hands. He seems
to sleepwalk through the remnants of his life, his somnambulance edged
in nightmare as he descends to the desolate regions of fear.
Composing the Music
For the second year, Present Music will perform alongside a silent
classic in a special presentation during the Milwaukee International
Film Festival. Present Music's Eric Segnitz received the assignment to
compose an original score for The Fall of the House of Usher. "Weaned
on Vincent Price like everyone else," he was not aware of Epstein's
film before sitting down to write the music.
To get in the proper frame of mind, Segnitz "did as much background
reading as I could, which in the case of Edgar Allan Poe was pretty
extensive. This helped clarify what his issues were, what is relevant
to this particular film, the structure of the story and its symbolism,
conscious or unconscious."
Segnitz, who had previously collaborated on Present Music scores for
such silent movies as Freaks, Nosferatu and Witchcraft Through the
Ages, was determined to capture the "nervous intensity" of both Poe
and the film. Scoring music for a nine-piece ensemble plus the voice
of a guest vocalist, countertenor John Carden, he describes the
composition's range as including everything from Gothic polyphony to
folk balladry to avant-minimalism to progressive rock. "There are
moments of humor in the film," Segnitz says, "but they only reinforce
the tension Poe felt existed between sanity and madness, waking and
dreaming, life and death."
The Fall of the House of Usher will be screened with a performance by
Present Music at 7:30 p.m. Oct. 30 and 4 p.m. Oct. 31 at the Oriental
Theatre as part of the Milwaukee International Film Festival.