The film’s flaws, such as they are, ensured that the film was given a mixed reception on release but since then its reputation has grown in stature (the benefit of hindsight comes into play here of course, since we can now see the film as part one of a series and forgive its more obvious missteps) and this edition, extremely well presented and accompanied by an interesting and informative selection of extras can only further enhance Corman’s reputation even if, in the final analysis, the film as a whole falls short of being an out and out masterpiece.
Nonetheless Usher, presented here in its original aspect ratio in Arrow’s beautifully restored Blu-Ray version, shows that Corman knew what he was doing from the beginning. Roger Corman’s 1960 film The Fall of the House of Usher (or ‘House of Usher’, as it was released in the USA) was the first in the director’s series of Poe adaptations for American International Pictures, and critical opinion tends to rank the later films, such as Masque of the Red Death, more highly. ‘It is not everyone who can put ‘a good thing’ properly together,’ wrote Edgar Allan Poe in an essay ‘On Unity of Effect’ in the Southern Literary Messenger in June 1836. £13.99Ībout the reviewer: Andrew Ormsby is the BUFVC Information Officer and is also Content Co-ordinator on the EUscreenXL project. In keeping with this aesthetic credo, Poe designed "Usher" with a view to depicting the ineluctable onset of what the book of Job called "the king of terrors" (18:14), creating a supreme unity of effect of apocalyptic sublimity.įirst published in September 1839 in Burton's Gentleman's Magazine, "The Fall of the House of Usher" has since assumed its place as perhaps Poe's best-known story and.Review type: Video | Posted on: 23 December 2013 The Fall of the House of Usher. In "The Philosophy of Composition" (1846), Poe would argue that a writer should begin a narrative with the denouement already in mind, creating a plot in which both action and tone are ineluctably related to a final dramatic effect (13-16). Poe seems to have carefully designed "Usher" around its final moments of sublime apocalyptic terror. The main character of the story, Roderick Usher, attempts to transcend mortality in an idealized realm given over to the creation and enjoyment of art yet death reappears in the form of Usher's prematurely buried "twin" sister, whose advent catalyzes the collapse of the Usher mansion and line. "Usher" is notable for its iconographic depiction of the terrors of death. "The Fall of the House of Usher" provides a representative example of the author's use of the apocalyptic sublime. (2) Yet one aspect of Poe's aesthetic practice that has gone largely unnoticed is the synthesis, in a small body of his fiction and poetry, of contemporary notions of the sublime combined with a number of well-known motifs of biblical apocalyptic. It has long been recognized that Poe was steeped in contemporary aesthetic theory indeed, Poe's poetry, tales, and critical writings demonstrate a familiarity with Burkean and other eighteenth-century theories of the sublime and beautiful as well as more recent writings on the picturesque. (1)ĭespite Paley's pioneering work, the notion of an "apocalyptic sublime" that we find in English Romantic art has not been extended to the work of contemporaneous English and American Romantic writers, for some of whom it would seem particularly apt-for example, Edgar Allan Poe.
Created during the violence and unrest of the French Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars, and the Age of Reform, some of the most distinctive paintings, drawings, and engravings by these artists depicted a variety of apocalyptic events largely taken from the books of Daniel and Revelation (along with a few other popular catastrophic biblical scenes) while simultaneously drawing on the pervasive contemporary influence of Edmund Burke's A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757). Turner, John Martin, Samuel Colman, and Francis Danby. The term was pioneered by Morton Paley, whose study The Apocalyptic Sublime (1986) examined this concept in British art from the late eighteenth to the mid nineteenth century in works by Benjamin West, Philip James de Loutherbourg, William Blake, J.M.W.
Among the many interpretations of the idea of the "sublime" during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the concept of an "apocalyptic sublime" was not formally recognized indeed, it had to wait until the late twentieth century to emerge as a distinct aesthetic category.
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