An “ambrosial breath of faery” : Jean Epstein’s La Chute de la Maison Usher and the inverted orphism of Poe’s “poetic principle”

Abstract

Representative of the paradoxical position that Jean Epstein’s La Chute de la Maison Usher (1928) usually occupies in Poe film criticism is the Aurum ’s anonymous critic’s assertion that, “[t]hough often dazzling visually, [t]his version is, in fact, a travesty of Poe” (39). Strangely, what this reviewer seems to be suggesting is that Epstein’s Usher sacrifices Poe’s vision for its selfish cinematic achievement. Hence the conclusion that “the film is basically an empty exercise in style” (39). More explicitly exemplary, however, of this critical misconception is the belief that “by ‘slay[ing]’ Poe to assert his own self and aesthetic, [Epstein] makes a nonsense of him” (O’Donoghue). What such approaches apparently denigrate is the appropriative essence of Epstein’s creative engagement with Poe’s universe that vindicates Hutcheon’s Genettean definition of adaptation as “its own palimpsestic thing—a derivation that is not derivative—a work that is second without being secondary” (9). Torres rightly claims in fact that Epstein’s Usher “conveys a prospective exploration of aesthetic and cinematic values in Poe’s fiction, opening new paths and visions” (184). For Epstein’s Usher transcends D. W. Griffith’s The Avenging Conscience (1914), with its similar fusion of several Poe writings, by its untypical tendency to invert its literary inspiration.