Quote:
“While obeying the biblical account concerning Lot and his family and the function of the two angels who investigate Sodom at the Lord’s behest, the Watson-Webber work uses all its creative accents to depict the sensual responses of the male homosexuals of Sodom to the physical beauty of the foremost angel. Naturally the angel repulses their advances and proceeds (not finding fifty chaste persons present) to condemn Sodom to the flames, but not before we have witnessed, at some length, the orgiastic pleasures of the all-male population.”- Parker Tyler

Quote:
We are shown the orgies of the sodomites, semi-nude young men, fair and countenance and strong of limb, as they carry on their bacchanales. Pleasure and pain, ecstasy and despair, are mingled in these faun-like evil faces that guide like apparitions in the mist before us… I have never seen light manipulated so eloquently as in these expressive lights and shadows which sometimes form men or fragments of a body, sometimes coagulate into flowers or break up their particles into water – and at all times make Lot in Sodom into a moving and arresting film. — Herman G. Weinberg, Close-up, 1933

Lot in Sodom (1933, James Sibley Watson & Melville Webber) [BR 576p].mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	25 min 54 s
Size: 	580 MiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	688x576 
Aspect ratio:  	1.194
Frame rate: 	23.976 fps
Bit rate: 	2 872 kb/s
BPP: 	0.302
Audio
#1:  	2.0ch AC-3 @ 256 kb/s

https://nitro.download/view/2EA7F822C2E879F/Lot_in_Sodom_(1933,_James_Sibley_Watson_&_Melville_Webber)__BR_576p_.mkv

Language(s):None
Subtitles:None

The post James Sibley Watson & Melville Webber – Lot in Sodom (1933) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Released the same year as Jean Epstein’s “La Chute de la Maison Usher”, this is the American avant-garde version of Poe’s classic short story.

Quote:
“The Fall of the House of Usher” combines European influences with something home crafted. James Sibley Watson Jr. had seen the German expressionist film “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari” more than once during its 1921 New York City run. Not only do USHER’s impossibly angled sets draw from that film, but the top-hatted, cloaked “traveler” (played in expressionist makeup by Melville Webber) seems to echo the figure of Dr. Caligari himself. Less obvious now is the French influence. Whereas CALIGARI expressed a madman’s consciousness through set design and stylized acting alone, French experimental filmmaking of the twenties typically represented disturbed mental states through elaborate camera tricks and optical distortions. Indeed, such a style animates the more celebrated 1928 version of Poe’s story, Jean Epstein’s feature-length “La Chute de la Maison Usher”.

In an article of the same year titled “An Amateur Studio Picture”, Watson argued that such European modernist styles could carry a filmmaker only so far. He proposed returning to the “old tricks” of the camera, even to Hollywood studio techniques, but using them selectively to craft a personal vision that was proudly “amateur”. With its sophisticated camera effects and superimpositions accomplished on Watson’s handcrafted optical printer, “The Fall of the House of Usher” challenges Hollywood on its own terms. (Scott Simmon)

Quote:
Webber and Watson’s adaptation of Poe’s story is silent, but the rhythm of its editing and its stylistic filigrees make for a musical experience nonetheless. The story itself is stripped down to the barest essentials of plot—a stranger comes to visit a mysterious man who may or may not have buried his own sister alive—but the visuals tell an epic of shadowplay, ghostly apparitions, hallucinations, and murderous deeds. When sound would normally be called for—a scream, a heartbeat, a creaking coffin lid—Webber and Watson simply place the onomatopoetic word on the screen in a ghostly, undulating typeface. Sound is sublimated to the visual and even on-screen text becomes part of the horrific goings-on at the Usher place. The whole film is over in a mere thirteen minutes, but you can’t imagine anything essential from the story that might be missing or any image that might seem out of place in Poe’s strange world. (Matt Bailey)

http://nitroflare.com/view/9F4DC6C83B160FE/The.Fall.of.the.House.of.Usher.1928.DVDRIP.XViD-CG.avi

Language(s):Silent, English intertitles
Subtitles:none

The post James Sibley Watson – The Fall of the House of Usher (1928) first appeared on Cinema of the World.