L’Atlantide (1921)

L’Atlantide is a French adventure film first released in 1921, directed by Jacques Feyder.  The film is based on a novel by Pierre Benoît and stars Jean Angelo, Stacia Napierkowska, Georges Melchior, Marie-Louise Iribe and Abd-el-Kader Ben Ali.  It has also been released under the title: Lost Atlantis.  Our overall rating for this film is: very good.


In the Sahara Desert, the unconscious body of Lieutenant Saint-Avit is discovered by fellow officers in his Spahi regiment.   When he recovers, Saint-Avit is questioned about the disappearance of his comrade, Captain Morhange, who accompanied him on his last expedition in the desert to look for the lost city of Atlantis.  At first, Saint-Avit is reluctant to talk, but finally he tells his story to a fellow officer, Ferrières.  He reveals how he and Morhange discovered the ancient city and how they met Antinéa, the all-powerful Queen of Atlantis.  No man can resist the allure of Antinéa, and all men who look upon her face are doomed to die from love.  As soon as he saw Antinéa, Saint-Avit made himself her slave by his all-consuming love for her.  How fiercely and hotly did the blood run in his veins when the queen passed him over and instead took Morhange as her next lover!   But the virtuous Morhange proved to be impervious to Antinéa’s charms.  Taking courage from his Christian beliefs, Morhange remained faithful to his one true love, the woman whose death he still mourned.  Incensed by Morhange’s misplaced fidelity, Antinéa decided that she must destroy him.  How fitting that his loyal companion Saint-Avit should strike the fatal blow...

Having completed his apprenticeship at Gaumont during WWI, Jacques Feyder rapidly established himself as one of France’s leading filmmakers with this epic adaptation of Pierre Benoît’s celebrated novel L’Atlantide, winner of the Grand Prix du roman of the Académie française in 1920. The novel had barely been in print a few months before Feyder bought the rights for 10,000 francs, a very canny investment as things turned out.  Although the film cost two million francs to make (a virtually unprecedented amount for the time), it was a phenomenal commercial success, at home and abroad, and soon recovered its massive production cost.  L’Atlantide may not have won over the critics (who were quick to point out its perceived failings), but Feyder’s reputation as a filmmaker of immense ability was confirmed by his subsequent successes, notably Crainquebille (1922), Visages d’enfants (1925) and Thérèse Raquin (1928).  It was the latter film (now sadly lost) which earned Feyder his ticket to Hollywood to direct Greta Garbo in her last silent film, The Kiss (1929).

L’Atlantide was an extraordinarily ambitious production for its time, primarily because Feyder insisted on filming it on location in North Africa rather than in a sand quarry in France.  The film took just under a year to complete, including a gruelling eight month location shoot in Algeria (of which fifty days were spent filming in the Sahara Desert).  This daring cinematographic venture was widely reported in the French press, which characterised it as the riskiest filmmaking exploit ever attempted.   As the production costs escalated, the film’s backers lost their nerve and sold the rights to the distributor Louis Aubert, who went on to make a fortune when the film triumphed at the box office, both on its original 1921 release and later on its successful re-release in 1928.  The main reason for the film’s popularity was that it offered audiences three hours and fifteen minutes of pure escapism from the troubles of the day - painful memories of a long and costly world war, and the bitter austerity of its aftermath.

Most of the negative critical reaction which the film garnered was directed at the lead actress Stacia Napierkowska, a renowned dancer and actress who, at the time she made the film, was considered too old and overweight for the part.  Although Feyder himself regretted casting Napierkowska, she does have an astonishing screen presence and she brings a sultry voluptuousness to the part which, by the standards of the early 1920s, was quite daring.  Napierkowska’s exaggerated style of acting jars with the cold realism that Feyder strives to achieve with his mise-en-scène and photography, and this somehow makes her appear more powerful and exotic, an untameable force of nature.  In some sequences, her eyes shining with lubricious intent, Antinéa resembles a nightmarish grotesque, an habitué of the same expressionistic stable as Murnau’s Nosferatu and Paul Wegener’s Golem.  It may not have been quite the effect that Feyder was after but Napierkowska’s Atlantean queen is among the most memorable of cinema’s legion of lustful temptresses.

After he had seen L’Atlantide, the influential filmmaker and critic Louis Delluc commented: "There is one great actor in this film, that is the sand."  Delluc may have had good reason not to be impressed with the acting performances but what he probably had in mind was the importance the location plays in the film.  Far from being a passive backdrop, the desert becomes an essential character in the drama and visually dominates much of L’Atlantide.  The vast expanse of sand which fills the screen for much of the first half of the film itself acquires the character of a deadly seductress, as powerful, as alluring and as lethal as the queen Antinéa.  It soon becomes evident that the implacable desert and the man-hungry Atlantean queen are two manifestations of the same fundamental truth.  Both represent death, that sweet oblivion for which man has an irresistible fascination and towards which he is helplessly drawn.

L’Atlantide was the first of the great desert epics.  It created an instant market for similar adventure films in exotic locales and established many of the genre’s conventions, including the film’s most striking visual motif:  a procession of silhouetted figures slowly making their way across the distant horizon.  The film’s trenchant realism, enhanced by some truly inspired photography, sets it apart from similar epics of this era, giving it a visual and narrative impact of rare quality.  It is only the mannered performances and the more fantastic elements of the plot that break the illusion and persuade us that we are not watching a newsreel documentary.  The elaborate, ornately decorated interiors of the Atlantean palace are every bit as convincing as the real exteriors, as they should be since these were contributed by the renowned Italian painter Manuel Orazi.

In common with Pierre Benoît’s original novel, the film can be seen as a thinly veiled reaction against the first wave of feminism which followed the First World War (the inevitable consequence of women having to fulfil roles vacated by the men who were away at the Front).  The powerful queen Antinéa represents the male sex’s most neurotic characterisation of the modern woman - a sexually liberated vamp who enslaves men through her feminine allure and makes them subservient to her will.  Antinéa is a threat to the social and moral order of the time, as any man who looks on her is compelled to renounce his commitment to honour, family and country.  Feyder goes even further than Benoît and makes Antinéa not just a temptress but an evil temptress, a fiend who has no qualms over coercing a decent man into savagely murdering his rival.  Clearly our sympathies lie not with Antinéa but with her selfless handmaiden Tanit-Zerga (sympathetically portrayed by Louise Iribe), a more wholesome depiction of womanhood.   Just as Antinéa cannot help luring men to their death, so Tanit-Zerga is impelled to risk everything in the service of a good man.  Feyder’s morbid preoccupation with the liberated woman would resurface in several of his subsequent films, most notably Carmen (1926) and Thérèse Raquin (1928), before attaining its most enlightened expression in his late masterpiece, La Kermesse héroïque (1935).

In 2004, L’Atlantide was restored to near-pristine condition by Lobster Films and released on DVD by MK2.  In this version, its runtime is 163 minutes, about thirty minutes shorter than the original release.  The film has been remade several times, most successfully by Georg Wilhelm Pabst in 1932, with Jean Angelo reprising the role of the doomed Captain Morhange.  Whilst L’Atlantide falls short of being one of Feyder’s greatest films - its languorous pace is painfully exacerbated by the 200 plus wordy inter-titles which the director felt was necessary to tell the story - it represents an important landmark in French cinema.  Not only did it create a massive public appetite for similar exotic dramas (many set in French colonial Africa), it also set a very high benchmark against which other epics were to be measured.

© James Travers 2004-2011

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