SOURCE: "Jean Epstein's 'La Chute de la Maison Usher': Reversal and Liberation," in Wide Angle, Vol. 3, No. 1, 1979, pp. 38-44.

[In the following essay, Abel examines narrative progression in several segments of The Fall of the House of Usher.]

Jean Epstein's La Chute de la Maison Usher (1928) interests me for several reasons. First of all, Epstein was one of the most important filmmakers (perhaps the most important) of what I would call the "narrative avantgarde" in the French cinema of the 1920s, and La Chute de la Maison Usher is the only example of his work currently available in the United States.¹ Second, although the film is mentioned often enough in studies of the Twenties, it probably has more detractors than advocates; and its advocates, even in France, tend to emphasize its exquisite atmosphere of gothic fantasy or its technical experimentation as "pure cinema" (the use of slow motion and extensive camera movement).² What I would like to suggest is that its value lies at least equally elsewhere.

In a remark since repeated by other cineastes of the period, Epstein once said that, in filmmaking, theory generally follows practice rather than precedes it.³ The statement aptly fits Epstein's own theoretical writing and filmmaking practice in the final years of the French silent cinema. Specifically, although references to narrative are virtually absent in those writings, one of the most fascinating features of the films, especially those he made independently from 1926 to 1928, is precisely the way the discourse operates rhetorically, syntactically, structurally—as narrative.⁴ I would argue that Epstein's filmmaking "recherche" clearly extends to film narrativity, and La Chute de la Maison Usher is a major work in sustaining that "recherche. " Indeed, the Usher text may have added significance since it appears to mark a shift in Epstein's aesthetic from the films he had directed previously to the "documentary fiction" of Finis terrae (1929) andL'Or des mers (1932).

The following pages offer a preliminary study of narrativity in Usher by examining some (not all) of the ways the text organizes its discourse to produce narrative. For the sake of specificity, I have confined myself, not arbitrarily, I will admit, to two segments of the text: the initial appearance of Roderick and Madeleine in Usher and the burial of Madeleine's coffin in the grotto.⁵ What I have tried to examine is the way these particular segments organize themselves in terms of similarity and difference, or more specifically, in terms of alternation, displacement or substitution, metonymy and metaphor.⁶ Such an analysis will produce a provisional reading of the overall narrative structure of the film.

Our introduction to the interior of Usher and its two inhabitants is preceded by an intertitle: "Dans ce manoir menaçant ruine, Sir Roderick tenait dans une étrange réclusion sa femme Madeleine, la dominant par sa nervosité tyrannique."⁷ Hero and heroine are joined in marriage, the one controlling, dominating the other through his nervous condition. Roderick, the dominant figure, first appears in a series of close-ups (CUs):

1) CU of two hands slightly outstretched, moving from right to left in conjunction with a revolving body.

2) CU of a painter's palette on a dimly lit table.

3) CU of the same two hands, now still, poised.

4) CU of Roderick's face, calm but slightly pained, with his eyes gazing off towards the left foreground.

5) FS (full shot) of a dark area or niche in which a painting stands obscurely (this shot exists in the Cinémathèque française print but is excised from the Museum of Modern Art print).

6) CU of Roderick's face which suddenly turns to the right—his eyes look off intently to the right (frame).

This fragmented, elliptical introduction is quite typical of Epstein, evidencing his belief that the close-up was the "soul" of cinema, the intensifying agent par excellence, the maximum expression of the "photogénie" of movement.⁸ It occurs repeatedly in his earlier films: in Coeur fidèle (1923)—Gina Manès' hands collecting and moving wine bottles on a café bar top, in L'Affiche (1925)—Nathalie Lissenko's hands tying artificial flowers into a bouquet. In the earlier films the close-ups had been a means of defining character immediately in terms of occupation and milieu. Here in Usher, the close-ups imply something more, an associative chain—from hands to palette, from eyes to painted image. Two schema are being placed in paradigm. Succinctly, even abruptly, the text is defining Roderick as subject in terms of desire and potential action.⁹ His sickness (mentioned earlier in a letter to his friend, the guest who is yet to arrive), his tyrannical dominance enunciated in the intertitle preceding these shots, are both becoming manifest in the desire to paint, to transfer paint from palette to canvas. The next series of shots continues an alternation that has begun to appear in the text: in Roderick's looking towards the left foreground and his point-of-view shot of the painted image. Now he turns to the right, and his glance determines the appearance of a second object, displacing the first, his wife Madeleine. The look of the subject both creates a space and draws an opposition between painted image and wife. Two more schema are being placed in correlation: Roderick's look towards the painted image/Roderick's look towards his wife Madeleine. If desire (what kind of desire?) marks the relationship between Roderick and the painted image, what marks that between Madeleine and him? The alternation is disturbed in two ways that threaten Roderick's dominance as subject. Instead of cutting immediately from Roderick's gaze to a point-of-view shot of Madeleine, the text interjects a sudden extreme long shot of the vast interior space of Usher which has the effect of reducing or circumscribing that look as well as presenting its object with some degree of equality. Furthermore, the shots that follow emphasize the object Madeleine, at the expense of Roderick (two shots of her to one of him).

The next series of shots subdue this threat to Roderick's dominance through a double displacement, a double operation of metonymy. Roderick's look is displaced metonymically (through contiguity) by his hands in a shot which shows them clasped together and moving to the right. Then the palette, which initially had been correlated with the hands, is displaced metonymically by Madeleine. By replacing the look, the shot of the hands connotes a blindness in the subject (absence of sight). Through repeated alternation, the increasingly nervous clenching hands suggest a blind compulsion that seems to threaten the object Madeleine. When Roderick's hands pick up the palette at the conclusion of the series, the action latent in the opening shots of the sequence is on the verge of being realized. But the act of painting, of transferring paint from palette to canvas, is now charged metonymically—it involves a transfer, a threat to Madeleine.

In the next five shots, the alternation between subject and object, Roderick and Madeleine, is disturbed briefly once more, this time by opposing movements within the frame. Roderick moves left with the palette (towards the painting off-screen), while Madeleine turns to move away from him into the right background. He turns to follow her movement; she stops and turns back to face the left foreground again, her image caught within the frame of a harp (the metaphorical value of entrapment here will be transferred later to Roderick's guitar—its strings breaking when the climactic storm approaches Usher). In a near repetition of the first shot in this series, Roderick moves left again, his attention once more on the palette.

The next shots finally realize Roderick's desire in action; they complete the correlation of subject-object predications. A paintbrush metaphorically replaces both Roderick's hands and look, so that the schema of hands/palette is condensed into a single shot of paintbrush touching palette, while the schema of look/painted image is condensed into a shot of brush touching canvas. The two acts of touching and painting, through metonymy and metaphor, articulate a transfer from one object to another: adding to the painted image subtracts from Madeleine. As the paintbrush strokes the canvas, Madeleine reacts as if struck, as if her face were being taken away. Roderick's desire is being defined as a compulsion to transfer life to the painted image—to give life to artifice, at the expense of life itself. The discourse seems to be asserting that, as an aesthetic, such a compulsion is blind, sick, and cruelly, deadly possessive: to enclose Madeleine living within the frame of the painting is to imprison her, to place her in a kind of coffin.

The "spell" Roderick holds over Madeleine—and which dominates him as well—is broken only by a change in his look. And the change is motivated by the arrival of his summoned friend from outside Usher. In this the text foreshadows the eventual breaking of the "spell"; it will come from the natural world outside Usher.

What strikes me about this initial sequence involving Roderick and Madeleine is how concisely, how sophisticatedly and yet how easily the text narrates, according to a visual syntax of paradigmatic and syntagmatic relations. Except for the opening intertitle, there is no recourse to verbal language at all. The sequence, in fact, constructs a paradigm of the narrative action for the first half of the film. Roderick transfers Madeleine (as the object of value) from reality to artifice, from a condition of "freedom" to one of imprisonment, from a condition of living to a condition of "life-in-death."¹⁰ Though presented as subject, Roderick functions from the beginning as an unconscious villain.

The second half of the film involves a reversal of the narrative action in the first half, with an important difference. The transition from one to the other occurs in the sequence of Madeleine's burial, which Roderick at first resists. This sequence, like the introduction of Roderick and Madeleine, also organizes its discourse according to alternation, displacement, metonymy and metaphor.

The grotto in which Madeleine will be interred is at some distance from Usher. Thus the funeral procession of Roderick, his guest, the doctor and the butler, all bearing the coffin, becomes a kind of journey or voyage (across a river or tarn at one point); and certain connotations become attached to it. Madeleine's burial clothes are much like a bridal costume, and a long veil trails behind the coffin like the train of a wedding dress.¹¹ Superimposed over most shots of the journey are tall, thin flaming candles, creating a kind of path or aisle through which the funeral procession moves. Taken together, these images suggest that the journey is as much a wedding march as funeral—two actions are being conveyed metaphorically as one. When the procession reaches its destination, the grotto is depicted in a single establishing shot as a double chamber framed by obviously painted rocks and columns (in the manner of Méliès fantasy films).¹²

The grotto thus becomes analogous to the painting Roderick has done, and the placement of Madeleine's body there simply reenacts the earlier transfer of her from reality to artifice, from life to death, through painting. With the allusion to Méliès, the grotto also becomes the possible site of magic, of further mysterious doings or undoings.

The burial sequence itself is organized according to a simple alternation. The doctor and butler stay by the coffin on the left side of the grotto while the guest keeps Roderick away from it and tries to push him up the grotto stairs on the right. In the alternation between sets of characters/sides of the grotto, the spatial description repeats that of the opening sequence in Usher, but with an important reversal of positions. Madeleine's coffin takes the place of the painted canvas, while Roderick has replaced her and is now in a similarly powerless condition (no longer agent but object). The third shot of the sequence makes the metaphorical relationship between the sequences quite clear. Since the coffin has replaced the painted canvas, the close-up of the butler's hands holding the hammer becomes a replacement for Roderick's hands with the paintbrush. Thus when in close-up the butler begins driving nails into the coffin lid, the action stands in a metaphorical relation to Roderick's act of painting (so, too, are the later multiple-exposed shots of hammering paradigmatically connected to the earlier multiple-exposed shots of Madeleine in agony just before she collapses and dies). This enclosing, sealing, entombing, is at once the logical outcome of Roderick's compulsion and its reenactment. Only now it is Roderick who reacts to the hammer strokes much the way Madeleine reacted to the strokes of his paintbrush.

Midway through the sequence, just as Roderick is pushed out of the grotto altogether, an important change occurs in the alternating series. The shot outside the grotto already signals some kind of shift, but what happens is quite unexpected. Instead of cutting back to a close-up of the hammering inside the grotto, the discourse suddenly interjects a shot of a toad on wet stony ground (completely free of any character's point of view). A shot of the hammering reappears followed by another shot of the toad, only this time a second toad is on the first's back in mating position. Again two terms/images are being placed in association. Hammering nails into a coffin is being made visually equivalent to the mating of toads. But the visual metonymy produces a schema of metaphorical opposition: hammering nails into a coffin connotes entombing, death/mating toads connote impregnating, life.¹³ Through displacement and metonymy, the discourse introduces an antidote to Roderick's compulsion. But how will it function?

The insertion of mating toads modifies the alternating series through displacement, but since a shot of Roderick and his guest at the grotto's entrance recurs, a triplet or triadic pattern begins to form: 1) hammering, 2) toads mating, 3) Roderick and guest. However, its repetition is disrupted immediately by a second unexpected displacement. Instead of Roderick and his guest, the discourse suddenly interjects a negative (or high contrast) image of an owl sitting motionless in a web of branches (that includes part of Madeleine's veil) against a black background. This new triplet pattern is then repeated a half dozen times (the shots of toads and owl lasting but two seconds each), and only in the final two repetitions does a further change occur. The close-up of hammering gives way to a shot of the sealed coffin lid and then to a shot of the doctor and butler ascending the grotto stairs. The whole sequence ends with a long shot of the two joining Roderick and his guest in the trees before the grotto entrance. The repetition and continued contiguity of toads and owl/veil suggest that these conjoined images are being placed in opposition to the nailing of the coffin. Fertility is being projected metonymically onto the owl, but what does the owl bring to the schema? Is it the wisdom of the "white goddess," confirming the grotto as the site of life-in-death and as the possible site of resurrection?¹⁴ With" the veil, is it a sign of "natural" wedding, union? Whatever the precise correlation of schema, Madeleine's burial functions simultaneously as an entombing, a withdrawal of life, and as an insemination, a seeding, a renewal of life.

The schema of metaphorical associations constructed in this sequence is crucial to the final sequences of the film. As the storm wind rises one night, blowing leaves and billowing curtains in Usher's interior, lightning begins to flash in exterior shots of the tower (and slowly tolling bell). As Roderick drags his guest to the window to see, the discourse inserts that same shot of the owl/veil in wind-whipped tree branches followed by a long shot of the exterior landscape as fire and smoke begin to appear around Usher. Through a simple instance of metonymy, the owl and storm are placed in conjunction. The schema of fertilizing, renewal, is equated with the storm, and its fire and smoke begin reversing the process of the first half of the film. Shots of the logs burning and smoking in Usher's huge fireplace alternate with Madeleine's coffin moving as if suspended in the dark and then falling off its support in the grotto. A shot of candle flames igniting a blowing curtain is intercut with Madeleine's veil beginning to unfurl from the grotto entrance. All these alternations are intercut with Roderick's guest reading the medieval tale of Ethelred who escapes his prison and slays the firebreathing dragon (a further metaphorical schema to Madeleine's future action). Madeleine's return in the storm thus coincides with/causes the destruction of Usher by wind and fire.

The reverse transfer of Madeleine from the grotto to Usher, mediated by the mating toads, the owl/veil and the storm, transforms her into the narrative agent of a final operation. When Roderick returned to Usher after the burial, he lived as one imprisoned, in silence and monotony, his senses intensified to the point of decadence. His existence became a kind of death-in-life, the inverse to that of Madeleine in the coffin or in the painting. Metaphorically, the artifice of Usher as a whole came to equal the artifice of his painting, the walls around him analogous to the sealing frame of the coffin.¹⁵ He, too, had become the victimized object of his own blind desire. Thus, while the storm destroys Usher (and the painting), Madeleine rescues Roderick from a living death. Whereas he had taken her from life by transferring her into a painted image, she reverses the process. Inverting the Orpheus-Eurydice myth, she restores him to life by plucking him from Usher and returning him to the natural world outside, to "reality." There, perhaps he will be free truly to see.

In conclusion, La Chute de la Maison Usher seems to establish a certain aesthetic as a destructive compulsion of decadent perception. Roderick's aesthetic (inherited, social) transfers value from the living or from "reality" to "fiction" or artifice. It is sick, blind and ultimately selfimprisoning. That compulsion is destroyed by "natural" forces which return the artist to the "real" world. Whatever aesthetic will be accepted now will be posited on the "natural." The change within the film announces the break that occurred in Epstein's own life¹⁶ and a corresponding change in his aesthetic, articulated in the essays written after Usher's production.¹⁷ That aesthetic was to be embodied in the practice of his next three years of film-making. Rejecting the studios and the "ultra-modern" decor of his previous films, and impelled by a deep love for the sea, he ventured out to remote islands off the coast of Brittany and, in Finis terrae (1929), placed both his eyes and his "machine de la cinématographe" in the service of a people who enacted their own stories in the "real" world.

NOTES

¹ The Museum of Modern Art is in the process of acquiring several more of Epstein's silent films. Just recently, a print of La Glace à trois faces (1927) became available for study purposes at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

² Henri Langlois, "Jean Epstein," Cahiers du cinéma, 24 (juin 1953), pp. 22-24; Pierre Leprohon and Marie Epstein, Jean Epstein (Paris: Seghers, 1964), pp. 83-85; Jean Mitry, Histoire du cinéma muet, III (Paris: Editions universitaires, 1973), pp. 381-382.

³ For instance, René Clair, in an interview with Armand Panigel for the latter's "Histoire du cinéma français" (Antenne II, 1975). I would like to thank M. Panigel for permission to consult the transcripts of this interview made in 1973.

⁴ See Epstein's own comments on Usher in Jean Epstein, Ecrits sur le cinéma I (Paris: Seghers, 1974), pp. 187-191. I have argued similarly on the subject of Louis Delluc's theory and practice in "Louis Delluc: the Critic as Cinéaste," Quarterly Review of Film Studies, I, No. 2 (May, 1976), pp. 205-244.

⁵ This analysis is based on a study of the 35mm print at the Cinémathèque Française (courtesy of Mlle Marie Epstein) and the 16mm print (with French titles) at the Museum of Modern Art (courtesy of Charles Silver).

⁶ The use of these concepts in film theory and criticism, in part, can be traced from Roman Jakobson's "Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances," Fundamentals of Language (The Hague: Mouton, 1956), pp. 76-82; through Raymond Bellour's "Les Oiseaux, " Cahiers du cinéma, 216 (octobre 1969), pp. 24-38, and "Le Blocage symbolique," Communication, 23 (1975), pp. 235-350; Christian Metz' Le Signifiant imaginaire, (Paris: Editions 1080, 1977); and Linda Williams' "The Prologue to Un Chien andalou: a Surrealist Metaphor," Screen, XVII, 4 (Winter, 1976-1977), pp. 24-33.

⁷ As is well known, Epstein's film synthesizes two Edgar Allan Poe stories, "The Fall of the House of Usher" and "The Oval Portrait." The incestuous brother-sister relationship of the first story is transformed into a husband-wife relationship in the film.

⁸ Epstein, Ecrits sur le cinéma, pp. 93-99. Translated by Stuart Liebman as "Magnification," October, 3 (Spring, 1977), pp. 9-15. In one sense, Epstein's practice here can be seen as a deliberate inversion of the American convention of first establishing the space and then the character.

⁹ The concept of narrative functions is drawn primarily from A. J. Greimas, "Elements of a Narrative Grammar," diacritics, 1 (March, 1977), especially pp. 30-33.

¹⁰ Greimas, pp. 34-36.

¹¹ Phil Brown, Jr. first drew my attention to this association as well as that between the hammer driving nails into the coffin and Roderick's hands painting the canvas.

¹² The effect is created either by means of a "glass shot" (though I am not certain when that technique was first used by the French) or superimposition.

¹³ Toads or frogs have been associated with sexuality in many myths and fairy tales. See Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment (New York: Random House, 1975), pp. 289-291.

¹⁴ Robert Graves, The White Goddess, (2nd ed.; New York: Viking, 1958), pp. 92, 343.

¹⁵ So the use of an obviously miniature set for the exterior of Usher, imposed presumably by budget limitations, is not inconsistent with the film's conceptual design.

¹⁶ Marie Epstein was emphatic about this in an interview given to me in Paris, August 14, 1976.

¹⁷ Epstein Ecrits sur le cinéma, pp. 191-200. This aesthetic has roots in Delluc's "neo-realist" pronouncements in 1919 and in the French documentary tradition that includes Jean Grémillon, André Sauvage, Alberto Cavalcanti, Dmitri Kirsanoff, Léon Poirier, Georges Lacombe, Jean Lods, Jean Vigo and even Epstein himself.