James Sibley Watson, Jr. and Melville Webber | The Fall of the House of Usher / 1928

what was under that cover of the hotplate?

By Douglas Messerli

 

James Sibley Watson, Jr. and Melville Webber (screenplay and directors, based on the story of Edgar Allen Poe) The Fall of the House of Usher / 1928

 

As almost anyone, professional critic or amateur observer, commenting on James Sibley Watson, Jr. and Melville Webber’s The Fall of the House of Usher has noted, given the directors’ extensive—and wondrously original—use of experimental film effects, it is truly difficult to follow any narrative or to determine what Watson and Webber were attempting to say about Poe’s original story. As Donald Egan has nicely restated the issue:

 

“The final version had no explanatory intertitles, and made no attempt to provide a context for viewers, who were assumed to be familiar with the original story. As film historian Eileen Browser wrote, ‘Its sets and effects dominate over the actors and its atmosphere of doom is the whole meaning of the film.’ But even those who had read the story might not have understood what Watson and Webber meant by their shots and editing. ....The intent of the filmmakers here is often obscure. Is their representation of the narrative, founded as it is on artistic and intellectual principles, useless if viewers can’t comprehend it? This became the core dilemma in abstract filmmaking, and even Watson seemed to lean on a more accessible narrative approach in his subsequent work.”

    One might imagine that these amateur filmmakers were simply without the proper tools and lacked experience along with their necessarily hurried methods to explain the apparent lack of coherency in their version of Poe. But quite the opposite was true. The wealthy Watson, heir to the Western Union Telegraph fortune, devoted a great deal of time and money on this project, going so far as to build his own optical printer which allowed him to achieve the sophisticated wipes and dissolves employed in the 13-minute work of cinema. Webber, who was himself a painter, designed the costumes and sets, as well as performing as the Usher House visitor.

     Watson later recollected that the two of them shot the seventy scenes of the film each three or more times.

    Moreover, as the co-owner and major editor of the noted American literary magazine The Dial, publishing contemporary experimentalists such as E. E. Cummings, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Djuna Barnes, and numerous others, along with works of Poe, Watson and his cinema partner Webber clearly understood the psychological and sexual implications of Poe’s writing, and the two in 1933 would create an entire film devoted to the fall of Sodom and Gomorrah, Lot in Sodom, which dealt openly with homosexuality and featured male nudes.

     It’s interesting that Egan again brings up the issue of the audience and its ability and or inability to interpret their work as a core issue here. Although you might not describe it yet as “coding,” it is clear that Watson and Webber were focusing on viewers who might be able to interpret their photogénie.

     Since these directors shot their film over a period of two years, and Epstein’s Usher appeared later in 1928, it is doubtful that they would have seen La Chute de la maison Usher. But they certainly had seen Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) and perhaps the films of F. W. Murnau both of whose influence is obvious in their work. Like Cabinet, their Usher sets are dislocated at trajectories that are disorienting and dizzying. The visitor knocking at the front door has a large, jagged line running down his face, in German expressionist style representing the crack that he observes in Poe’s version that follows down the roof to the ground of the Usher mansion.

     But other than that brief moment, we hardly ever see Roderick’s childhood friend again.

     From the film’s earliest scenes of the visitor traveling to the house, the film, entering the mansion through a cinematically-created crack of the image, begins at dinner with Madeline (Hildegarde Watson) kissing hydrangeas which, as she moves to the dinner table, she eventually adds to a vase of canna lilies at its center. Roderick (Herbert Stern), looking like a slightly finicky aesthete (read homosexual), pulls out her chair as she sits to the table, he joining her at its head. He pours her and then himself a class of wine as the black covered hands of a servant produces a covered hotplate of some dish which, when he opens it, sends Madeline into a faint resulting, even when soon after she stands to return to her bedroom, in what appears to be a catatonic fit. She moves away as a sleepwalker from the table with rows of caskets floating overhead, superimposed upon the image. Obviously, during all of this Roderick is concerned, coming over to her to check her after she faints, and rather horrified by the sight of her rising and moving off.

      We now see the visitor knocking at the front door, unable even to find a suitable bell or knocker but pounding the door instead with his fist. Madeline slowly descends the staircase a bit like Lucia di Lammermoor, clearly sleepwalking and certainly “out of  her mind,” if not mad. Numerous doorbells are superimposed upon the frame suggesting the intense ringing and hammer of the friend’s search for entry. We see him, with his high hat, once again waiting at the door, the crack of the mansion, as I suggested earlier, reflected upon his face, he himself becoming a blurred double-like image hinting at what soon will be the film’s interchange between the friend and Roderick, where they almost become one another.

     And so begins a series of maddeningly doublings, parallel staircases moving like escalators in opposite directions, piles of books that also serve as stairs spiraling almost endlessly out of sight. Madeline seems trapped between these parallel images, the shadow of a hammering pounding in shadows upon the walls.

      As more caskets fly through the air, Roderick checks on Madeline. She reaches out her hand toward him, but he does not fully respond and certainly does not attempt to embrace her in return or even visually offer her his sympathy.

     Now garbed in a black burial dress, Madeline lies in what appears to be a coffin, black gloved hands stroking her face as if attempting to readjust her features rather than warm hands proffered in love. The gloved hand trails slowly down her chest and mid-riff to her legs, slightly readjusting her dress by pulling it further down, a representation of proper closure and burial.

     The hammer, metallic we now discover, begins once more to ring out. Obviously, this time its sound disturbs only the remaining family member Roderick. We see multiple images of Madeline’s face, visions that Roderick surely cannot erase from his mind.

     In the disorienting landscape of his mansion, Roderick seems for a moment to wake up, the sun blinding his eyes as he moves forward. One might almost imagine a moment of rejuvenation, but images of Madeline keep reaching out toward him, the mallet again reappearing, and finally Roderick himself as he descends the stairs, begins making the movement of the pounding hammer with his arm and hand.

     Suddenly, in shadow and floating in mid-air, is his friend’s top hat, eventually doubling as everything else does in this film. He looks around the corner as if seeking out the visitor, and, for a moment he pauses, leaning against the wall, looking up, his face seemingly taking on a faint smile—almost as if his friend might offer some possible salvation.

     But in the very next moment his arm again takes up the gesture of the hammering man, as, around the next corner, he again encounters a layering of images of Madeline. He cannot escape her or what he may have done to her in burying her body while possibly alive.

     Even at his most quiet moments, her image stalks him, his own books piling up like the staircases between which previously Madeline was trapped.

      Again he spots the friend’s top hat, but our attention quickly shifts to a nearby book whose pages flip past as their former words break up into letters mid-air: beat, crack, ripped, scream, all suggesting the intertwined actions of Madeline and the house itself, the beat of her heart, the crack of fissure running down the side of the house...and, coinciding with a quick glimpse of Madeline opening her own coffin, the rip of the nails from where they have been pounded into place. 

      As Madeline moves toward the house from her grave, the directors provide a wonderous cacophony of abstract images from the pairs of rolling escalator-like rolling staircases—interspersed with her bare feet moving ever forward—to intersecting lines that interact like abstract swords clashing against one another. It is truly a stunning mix of brilliant experimental abstractions, cut by fragments of the human world about to be destroyed by the inevitable narrative Poe has set up.

      Only at this moment, with Roderick looking out the window (very much like he did during the storm scene in Epstein’s film) does his friend finally join him, the two coming together for the instant before they spot Madeline in the distance. It is somewhat suggestive of the delayed coitus of the separated Wagnerian figures of heroes such as Tristan and Isolde or Siegfried and Brünnhilde. But here they have only a moment to share the vision of the risen Madeline, who just as quickly appears, dominating the full screen in a mad Medea-like dance, charging at Roderick and landing them both on the floor, dead. Seeing the disaster, the friend quick races off, the house falling around him into the water.     

     In a great many respects, Watson and Webbers’s adaptation of the Poe story is not so very different from Jean Epstein’s. Even as a twin sister, Madeline is still a bore who Roderick is near desperate to get rid of so that he might have some quality time with the friend who he has summoned to his house. But things have simply gone too far before the visitor has arrived, and there is no way that he might ever be able to separate her from his own self and family involvement. Her death, in some respects, is mere pretense, a grand operatic gesture to ensure that her brother/husband might never be able to escape her for the arms of the old “friend” for whom he’s obviously been lusting for decades. Unlike Epstein’s work, which allowed that one moment to Roderick, Watson and Webber’s Roderick has no direct contact of flesh with his beloved visitor.

      There is no question that what I just wrote in the above paragraph a rather glib “gay oriented” assessment of the situation, for nothing of that sort is truly established in the film; but I do believe these directors strongly encourage such an interpretation, turning, as they have, what might appear to be a metaphysical tragedy into a story of incestual revenge. The house of cards in which they live only falls because they have been holding it up in self-delusion. Neither of the two survivors in this mansion seems to be very much enjoying life. Roderick and Madeline are clearly not a loving couple.

       Yet with regard to the Watson-Webber masterwork (which a few years back was added to the National Film Registry of US movies), I still have one question, even if it’s most definitely an unanswerable one: what was under the cover of that hotplate that sent poor Madeline into such a catatonic state?

        I’d like to imagine that these clever filmmakers secretly whipped up a cryptic subplot that involved something akin to Oscar Wilde’s Salome, that what she saw upon that hotplate that made her so recoil was the image of her own or her brother’s head. But here we have simply entered the world of pure imagination when I had hoped only to show that their film, despite the profusion of radical imagery, was not truly impossible to read if you looked at it slowly and carefully enough and were willing to enter the photogénie of the film.

 

Los Angeles, September 5, 2021

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (September 2021).