Learning on ScreenThe Fall of the House of Usher
Another big strength is Floyd Crosby’s Eastmancolor CinemaScope cinematography. The opening sequence, in which Winthrop rides towards the house through an eerie landscape of smoking burnt-out trees – the story’s ‘singularly dreary tract of country’ – puts us immediately inside the narratives dreamlike world and Daniel Haller’s production design adds to the sense of uncanniness. A perceptive essay by Tim Lucas in the booklet accompanying the disc notes the importance of colour and width and also points out that Crosby’s use of a 24mm lens gives the film its sense of depth: especially evident in the film’s opening sequence, where the deep focus shot of Winthrop riding through the forest is framed by the closer, finger-like branches of the trees, which, as Lucas says, reach out as if pulling us into the film.
It might be argued that the use of deep focus is one of the keys to understanding the film: certainly it demonstrates Corman’s affinity with his source materials, given that that Poe uses language to evoke similar effects. A particularly startling example in the story is when the narrator sees the Lady Madeline passing slowly ‘through a remote portion of the apartment,’ where the effect of the word ‘remote’ is the literary equivalent of a deep focus shot, pulling the reader in, and making him/her look deeper and see further. Here Poe forces us to imagine an act of seeing that is rendered dreamlike but bizarrely precise at the same time. The language of the story works on the visual senses via the imagination and sharpens the reader’s awareness so that perception becomes, like Roderick Usher’s, a paradoxical mixture of acutely sensitivity and extreme unreliability: the site of uncertainty and potential madness.
In addition to Crosby’s cinematography and Corman’s direction, mention must be made of Vincent Price in the role of Roderick Usher. Playing the role with a restraint dictated by the character’s seethingly repressed hypersensitivity, Price powerfully conveys a man struggling to control his incipient madness: a slow-burning performance that only serves to highlight the inadequacies of the supporting actors.
Along with Rigby’s excellent interview and the booklet, extras include an audio commentary track by Corman, a video piece by Joe Dante on Corman’s Poe Cycle and an interview with Price from 1986 made for French television. A ten-minute video essay by David Cairns is somewhat mannered in its presentation and not long enough to really develop the ideas thrown out by Cairns but contains enough material to kick-start a discussion of the film.
Andrew Ormsby
