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Basil Copper's USHER

January 6, 2025

Alternative

#cinematic#film music#neo-classical#sheffield#soundtracks#Sheffield

The idea of making a film of Edgar Allan Poe's classic 1839 short story 'The Fall of the House of Usher' had long been a pet project of Basil Copper's when, in 1952, he began collaborating with a group of fellow Kent film enthusiasts on an amateur production filmed in black and white on the now obscure 9.5mm format. Produced, scripted and directed by Basil, it was shot without sound entirely in the Sevenoaks area, and filming locations included Knole Park, the private studio of a local artist in the town and, perhaps most atmospherically, on location in Chipsteaf Caves, an expansive and elaborate underground cave system that had been used to store film. Filming continued on and off until 1955 when, for reasons not entirely clear, the project was abandoned and the footage languished for decades in cans in the director's garage. It wasn't until 1997 that Basil and his friend Gerald McKee decided to finally finish off their ambitious production. They decided to shoot all the missing sequences on video and cut them into the footage already filmed on celluloid. Although this apparently happened, and a print running approximately forty-two minutes was assembled, the whereabouts of that version or any of the video insert material is unknown and now presumed lost. The edited version of The Fall of the House of Usher runs for around twenty-six minutes and was discovered in a film can in Basil's study following his death in 2013. It has been professionally transferred to a digital format and a new music score (by In The Nursery) added, just as its maker always intended. Stephen Jones

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