James Sibley Watson’s The Fall of The House of Usher: Surrealism—Improvisation—Complementary Serendipities

Abstract

JAMES SIBLEY WATSON’S THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER: SURREALISM—IMPROVISATION— COMPLEMENTARY SERENDIPITIES ROBERT SHOLL INTRODUCTION There is a way of going to the movies as others go to church and I think that, from a certain angle, completely independent of what is given, it is there that the only absolutely modern mystery is celebrated.1 AMES SIBLEY WATSON’S AND MELVILLE WEBBER’S The Fall of the House of Usher is an extraordinary flm. Edgar Allan Poe’s novella (frst published in 1839) is compressed into a little over twelve minutes of avant-garde cinema.2 According to the flm historian Jan-Christopher Horak, Sibley Watson’s flm was “the most widely seen American avantgarde flm of the era.” It was “hailed by the Chairman of the National Board of Review as the most outstanding contribution to the motion picture as an art form since The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920),” and “the flm was screened both theatrically and non-theatrically hundreds of times all over the United States.”3 The videos referenced in this article may be found on the Perspectives of New Music YouTube channel: www.youtube.com/c/PerspectivesofNewMusic. J 24 Perspectives of New Music The musicologist Charles E. Brewer has recently provided much insight into the lm. Sibley Watson gave an incomplete synopsis of his version of the story in 1929: In a doomed house live the last two children of a once powerful family. The sister falls victim of a strange malady which resembles death. Her brother, unbalanced by hereditary madness, nails her up alive in a cof n. A traveller comes to the house. He tries to sooth the troubled conscience of the brother by reading aloud to him. The words of the book become confused with the noises from the burial vault. The buried woman is struggling to burst her cof n. The door of the vault is forced open, feet are heard on the stair. Starved, broken from her struggle, the girl falls upon her brother and in her now nal death . . . [incomplete]4 Brewer notes that for the most part the musical images of the novella are elided, including Roderick Usher’s “wild improvisations of his speaking guitar” that provide temporary distraction for him from his fate.5 These gures are instead replaced in the lm by other prominent visual images of stairs (present in the novella), the hammer, and a glove (not present in the novella).6 In a commentary, Sibley Watson states: “the importance of the piece lies in its mood—in a development of emotional tone almost without action. We decided to make a picture with a mood rather than a story.”7 In his 1929 article, Sibley Watson recalled his desire to use new cinematic techniques to “invoke in its audiences the esthetic impressions and moods which the tale created in its readers.”8 There are therefore no intertitles, unlike the other much longer lm based on Poe’s novella of the same name, La Chute de la Maison d’Usher by Jean Epstein and Luis Buñuel, also released in 1928, a lm that is less re ned in both its narrative and in its cinematography. In Sibley Watson’s and Webber’s lm, the elision of intertitles is an important departure from standard technique, and the lm therefore moves as one piece from beginning to end. Some scholars have addressed interesting cultural and cinematic facets of the lm. Brewer documents the creation of a score by the composer Alec Wilder (1907–80) as an avant-garde musical companion to the lm. The lm historian Lisa Cartwright has focused on the cinematic context and modernism of the lm, especially with regard to German Expressionism. The lm historian Lucy Fischer has connected it with European lmmakers associated with Expressionism, Surrealism, Futurism, and Cubism.9 Fisher, for instance, notes that the sets “with their peculiar angles, their impossible spaces, their bizarrely decorated surfaces, and their discrepancies of scale,” are “transpositions of Expres- James Sibley Watson’s The Fall of the House of Usher 25 sionist plastics to the cinema.”10 Cartwright links Watson’s thinking with a correspondence between Sibley Watson and the poet E...