Film adaptations of Edgar Allan Poe's 'The Fall of the House of Usher'

Abstract

Having had the opportunity to attend many lectures on film and film adaptation, I grew more and more aware of the artistic potential of this medium. I realised that not only film is an art in its own right but it also offers some deeply perceptive adaptations of other works of art. Studying film adaptations turned out to be a highly inspiring way of approaching plays, novels, paintings, short stories and poems. The main reason why I chose to analyse three film adaptations of Edgar Allan Poe' s 'The Fall of the House of Usher' for my thesis is that Poe is one of my favourite writers. However, I also wanted to show that film is not a medium of hollow surfaces. Poe is a deeply complex writer and the main themes of his work can by no means be called superficial. Thus, if film can recreate Poe' s essential themes, the claim that film cannot deal with abstract concepts must be refuted. With the help of my tutor, Dr Saviour Catania, I selected Jean Epstein' s La Chute de la Maison Usher (1928), James Sibyl Watson and Melville Webber's The Fall of the House of Usher (1928) and Roger Corman' s The Fall of the House of Usher (1960) as the films to analyse. In the Introduction to my thesis, I offer an. overview of the theories of film adaptation and also endeavour to establish some evaluative principles according to which I examine the films chosen. In Chapter 1, I deal with the film adaptations' ability to recreate the Poesque theme of the dissolution of personality. In Chapter 2, the way the film adapters deal with the love theme of 'The Fall of the House of Usher' is explored. In the third chapter I analyse the films in terms of their success in retaining the fundamental undecidability of Poe' s tale. In the Conclusion, I provide a final appraisal of the films, concluding that Epstein' s La Chute de la Maison Usher is the most artistically significant of the three adaptations.