The Fall Of The House Of Usher (+ Ghosts Before Breakfast)

One very short film (9mins), by the German Dada and Surrealist artist Hans Richter, made in 1928, 'Ghosts Before Breakfast'. Genuinely surrealist in its reapprasial of the everyday, the inanimate become animate, this is a fun film and one with a none-too subtle message (fetish quality of the object, comes to control us and rear up a life of its own), but interesting scenery and set design. The actual filming, using stop motion and different speeds, is experimental rather than assured, but shows a good sense of using cinema. Good fun.
The main feature is the hour long adaption of the great Poe story (with a little of 'The Oval Portrait'), made in 1928 by Jean Epstein. This was a sensational cinematic experience, beautiful, moving, powerful, eerie, elegiac.
Cited as a piece of surrealism or expressionism, this film refuses to fit into its category. Unlike the oft-compared 'Der Kabinet Des Doktor Caligari' this film uses pretty realist, straightforward sets. The atmosphere is eerie in a way much more similar to Dreyer's 'Vampyre', in its use of the veryday to confuse. The long rooms look underused, too little furniture, this kind of 'offsetting' rather than in your face expressionism. Indeed, the montage itself is not so much surreal as symbloic, an expressive holding of the narrative and metaphor. The eerie nature is generated by other mean.
Perhaps this is partly the exposure, the whites all incredibly burnt out. This film was presumably filmed in the dark, we have wonderful tiny texture differences of blackness and the most terrifying shafts of white brightness, that stun and kill and surround the house. Applied well to the set, this is exacerbated by its use on the characters. This film has the most expressive and brilliant use of front-lighting, especially on Roderick, who gets a lot of close ups and in whose blank features the sympathetic mystery and power of this film detonate, while leaving no difference on the shiny surface.
Around this kind of power we have a lot of tradtional camera shots, even if the order of what is shown and the subject are, though not surreal certainly expressive montage, there is a discipline in the use of /lond/mid/close up. This has exceptions, the coffin carrying and the start where we nip around the characters, the movement camera to follow speeding horse on occassion, not overused.
There are some incredibly beautiful shots here, the long shots of the castle room, helped by the above mentioned minimal sets and exposures, are simply incredible. Elegiac, the tiny figures move like rock marionettes across the horribly flat dancefloor. The thing, if we could pick on, we loved most about this film is perhaps the slow-downed frame speed. In 'Nosferatu' speed is terrifying, here sloth means a dreaminess, a sadness, a great beauty and understanding (Wong ar Wai in 'Chungking Express'? In 'In The Mood For Love' he's certainly knicked the wind on the curtains...). Impossible in sound cinema, here is the silent art at its best; the Poe atmosphere couldn't be better conveyed by this slight slow speed, the forethought, the fog of narrative, the fire that burns slowly and we wish to touch it, it tempts. Difficult to explain how the frame speed really does take this film to a higher level.
The narrative montage is key to the atmosphere, it is faithful to Poe in tone and adds more creep and melancholy than perhaps any of the filming techniques do. At the beginning we have a nice hide of the narrator, then the sudden reveal of Roderick, to disorientate. Roderick is main here, as mentioned above, his mystery and smiling whiteness leaving the viewer sympathetic but unclear. It appears always underplayed, mannered, despite moments of potential melodrama (and some melodramtic acting gestures, but done in a way as though the characters are at a distance, wathcning there own performances through frezen glass). The ambiguity of the ending, her death or not, seeps in slowly, around a narrative that does rather hammer its point home.
This is a sensational viewing experience, the genuine art of silent cinema is the form that can express such beauty, majesty, pathos. True art, the great cinema.