A still from Usher.

A traveller arrives at the Usher mansion to find that the sibling inhabitants, Roderick and Madeline Usher, are living under a mysterious family curse: Roderick's senses have become painfully acute, while Madeline has become nearly catatonic. As the visitor's stay at the mansion continues, the effects of the curse reach their climax.

In this film the story is reduced to its abstract essentials, the impact being largely transmitted through the careful use of silhouette, multiple exposure and rhythm, which successfully evoke the disembodied atmosphere of the piece. Lady Usher's "resurrection," for example, is shown as a montage of feet climbing two superimposed flights of white stairs. Sets are suggested by light and by patterns made by folded paper rather than by painted or three-dimensional props.

Not to be confused with the Jean Epstein and Luis Buñuel version, also filmed in 1928. The Watson & Webber version was selected by the Library of Congress in 2000 for the National Film Registry, an honor reserved for "culturally, historically or aesthetically significant motion pictures." A musical score by Alec Wilder was added in the 1950s, however tonight we are presenting the film with electronic music from the album Heroes.

James Sibley Watson, Jr.

James Sibley Watson, Jr. was the son of the founder of Western Union. From 1919 to 1929, he was the co-publisher along with Scofield Thayer of The Dial, the most prestigious avant-garde literary review in New York during the 1920s. T. S. Eliot's "The Waste Land" first appeared in the November 1922 issue, and Ezra Pound published his "Letter(s) from Paris" in the magazine. After Thayer left in 1925, Watson became the sole owner and his wife Harriette editor-in-chief.

e.e. cummings – who contributed to the script for Fall of the House of Usher – first published in The Dial in 1922, although Watson may have known him from Harvard even before then. When cummings returned from Paris in 1923, Watson became his landlord, setting cummings up in his famous Greenwich Village apartment at 4 Patchin Place, where cummings remained for 40 years. The building, which Watson had inherited, was entirely populated with writers. Watson and his wife became cummings' primary patrons.

After the demise of the magazine in 1929 Watson left book publishing and involved himself wholly in his other interests. Watson was also an expert photographer who helped to develop the technology of flourocinematography when he served as a professor at the University of Rochester.

Fall of the House of Usher and Lot in Sodom (1933) are the only two films known to have been made by him.

From Experimental Cinema: A Fifty-Year Evolution by David Curtis (NY: Delta, 1971):

Because of their continued dedication to experimental film, college professors Dr. James Sibley Watson and Melville Webber, working in Rochester, New York, were the first truly avant-garde American film-makers. Their film The Fall of the House of Usher (1928) is consistently more inventive and imaginative than Epstein's French version of the same year.

Collaborating again, Watson and Webber were to make one of the

Lot in Sodom (1933).

first American sound experimental films Lot in Sodom (1933). Significantly, they avoided a direct representation of the sexual conflict implicit in the Biblical story and showed instead a series of symbolic quasi-erotic tableux that emphasize the elemental qualities of the story. Compared with the more overt treatment of similar themese by Kenneth Anger, Curtis Harrington and Gregory Markopoulos in the forties, its handling of sexuality now seems painfully obscure; at the time, however, its subject matter was considered too much in advance of popular taste to permit commercial distribution. Shot on 35mm, it was not available to amateur (16mm) markets either. [Today, 16mm prints are indeed available.]

However, Movie Makers, the magazine of the Amateur Ciname League, nominated Lot in Sodom as one of their ten best films of 1933 saying:

Lot represent a complete innovation, not only in the treatment of the theme as a whole, but in the cinematic interpretation of the sequences. The familiar tools of the avant-garde cinema: multiple exposure, trick printing, complicated lighting, symbolism, models and models in combination with life-size sets are used to secure an entirely new and cinematic representation of the Biblical story. In Lot these two amateurs have mastered the world of illusion of the motion picture, but in doing so, they have produced more than mere novelty; they have founded a new cinematic art.