THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER (Webber & Watson, 1928)

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It was the midwinter of 1926, in Rochester, New York, when James Sibley Watson, Jr. and his friend Melville Webber first started filming their adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s 1839 short story, “The Fall of the House of Usher”. They had set up in an old stable; the cast was made up of Herbert Stern (a local architect), Sibley Watson’s wife Hildegard, and Webber himself. They only had twelve kilowatts of direct current for lighting, and very little heat, let alone room for sets...

... it was clear they could not make anything like The Phantom of the Opera (1925), the Gaston Leroux adaptation that had reconstructed the Grand Opera in Paris for its shocked audience the previous year. So instead, over the next two years, they created a thirteen-minute feature that has been called one of the first avant-garde films produced in the United States: a work that seeks to evoke not the plot or even characters of its source material but Poe’s claustrophobic, itchy energy

LONDON AFTER MIDNIGHT ai

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Been playing around with Perplexity.ai and, on a whim, asked it about LONDON AFTER MIDNIGHT. Delivered the standard answers - lost, never found, frames etc etc - but it did include something I didn’t know: that there’s a full script out there (which I should've known, given the photo recreation of the film from 2002 but hey). Anyhow, got me to thinking: given that there’s a script and plenty of stills and fragments (and the 2002 reconstruction) extant, could AI be used to recreate the complete film as it was when it premiered? A search for the 2002 recreation yielded this bit of brilliance, from someone who made an amazing (though obviously not perfect) go at recreating a few minutes of the film with AI. Excited by the potential here and what it could mean for lost films as a whole.

DAS PHANTOM DER OPER images(!)

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A reddit user found images (via the Internet Archive’s collection of German film journal Lichtbild-Bühne) from this 1916 grail of lost films – one from which no images (even promotional) were known to exist. As if I didn't want to see this film found enough…

phantom carrying christine down stairs?

My previous resurfacing of my initial write-up featuring early promotional texts and a description of the plot (note: add tag).