"Now you understand: we share the same soul."
Curtis Harrington's final film, made when he was 74, is a version of Poe's 'The Fall of the House of Usher,' mirroring his first film, made at 14 and while in high school. All these years later it seems perfectly suited to where he was in life, facing his own mortality, sensing faded glory, and yet still having a playful sense of the macabre. It's a rather lugubrious story but that was in keeping with the source, and there are some wonderful shots in the film's climactic moments.
We also get some lovely little musings on artists and poets, such as "You must never forget that the life of the artist is less important than his art." That's something you could see Harrington believed with how he made 'The Wormwood Star' 44 years earlier, putting all of the focus on Marjorie Cameron's art and poems and none on her personal life or beliefs. And yet, "...the line between the two, that's where the mystery lies; it's a maze of ambiguity," something that called to mind 'Fragment of Seeking' or 'Picnic' for how the art reflected the artist's sexuality. Later, while talking about great poets, he has Usher say that poetry must be read in the original, citing an example of Nabokov's struggle to translate Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, because while the poem's meaning could be translated, "the meaning is not the poem." Attempts to dissect art or take it in a literal sense are bound to butcher its aesthetic beauty or miss its deeper, more profound truths. These are small little things in the film and aren't grand summations of Harrington's beliefs or anything, but I liked thinking about them in light of his body of work.
