The Battle of the Somme and Jean Epstein’s and The Fall of the House of Usher

A Historical Comparison of The British Documentary Film The Battle of the Somme and Jean Epstein’s The Fall of the House of Usher
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A Historical Comparison of The British Documentary Film The Battle of the Somme and Jean Epstein’s The Fall of the House of Usher
Introduction
The Battle of the Somme is a 1916 British documentary that was shot by two camera operators, Geoffrey Malins along with John McDowell, who was sent to the front to collect miscellaneous footage of the preliminaries and initial skirmishes of the Battle of the Somme. It mainly features the British Expeditionary Force preparing and taking part in the early periods of the battle between July 1 and November 18, 1916. The documentary was edited by Charles Urban together with Geoffrey Malins and distributed by the British Tropical Committee for War Films. On the other hand, The Fall of the House of Usher is a 1928 French film adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s Gothic short story The Fall of the House of Usher.
The film follows the same narrative plot as Poe's story except for a few major alterations. For instance, in the film, Roderick Usher summons his friend to his derelict mansion, where he lives with his dying wife Madeline, who in the short story is his sister. The Fall of the House of Usher is more of an impressionist film that focuses on the sensational, as is demonstrated by Jean Epstein’s artistic obsession with evocating the transcendental force of nature. Unlike The Battle of the Somme, which is more hands-on in its intention to spread propaganda and bring closure to the families left back at home, The Fall of the House of Usher is more theatrical in its endeavor to capture the motifs contained in Poe’s short story. This essay will conduct a comparison of the two works with a specific focus on their history and roles.
The Battle of the Somme
The Production of The Film
The Battle of the Somme was a great success and quickly became the most widely watched non-fiction film in the 1920s. A large number of pundits have hailed the film as the first documentary and media incident in history, even though the contents of the film only cover the first two weeks of the five-month-long battle. Still, The Battle of the Somme can be correctly described as a clear and authoritative guide to the most bitter and largely unsuccessful battles in the history of the British army. On the first day of the battle, the British army lost as many as 19,000 men and suffered 57,000 casualties. By the conclusion of the battle, more than 3 million soldiers on both sides had perished. One of the biggest reasons for the heavy losses on the first day of the war was the gross assumption on the British army commanders' part that a week-long artillery barrage would all but obliterate the German defenses. This miscalculation proved to be costly as nearly half of the waves of British troops came under heavy artillery, leaving many dead and a large number of soldiers wounded.
A large number of casualties in the Battle of the Somme is widely believed to be the reason why the film was released in the first place: many critiques have referred to the do...