Film Review
It may be hard to believe today but there was a time, exactly a century
ago in fact, when Denmark's film industry was the envy of the
world. Then, along with those of France and the United States, Denmark's
pioneering
filmmakers were developing the language of cinema, laying the
foundation stones on which today's movie making industry is
founded. A key figure in this golden age of Danish cinema was
August Blom, the head of production at the country's
leading film company, Nordisk Film. Between 1910 and 1925, Blom
directed over one hundred films and perfected techniques which have
become part of the universal lexicon of filmmaking.
Atlantis was
one of his most ambitious films, the first superproduction made in
Denmark and one that had a profound resonance with the most shocking
human disaster of the day: the sinking of the
RMS Titanic.
Atlantis was first released in
Denmark in December 1913, just over a
year and half after that fateful day in April 1912 when the
Titanic struck an iceberg and
sank in the North Atlantic, resulting in the loss of 1500 lives.
What is spooky is that the film was not based on this real-life
disaster but an a novel of the same title by the Nobel Prize
winning writer Gerhart Hauptmann. Written between 1909 and 1911,
the novel first appeared in print in serial form in March 1912,
precisely one month
before
the
RMS Titanic sank on her
maiden voyage - on the
same route taken by the fictitious liner
SS Roland in the novel.
As in the case of the
Titanic,
a woefully inadequate number of lifeboats on the
SS Roland results in a large
contingent of the passengers and crew
drowning or freezing to death in the cold Atlantic waters. The
similarity between the fictional disaster imagined by Hauptmann and the
real thing that came along a few years later is both striking and
chilling.
Such was the high profile given to the sinking of the
Titanic in the
popular press of the time that Blom's film could not escape attracting
international attention. Although
Atlantis failed to recoup its
astronomical production cost on its first release it became the most
widely seen Danish film in history, although it was widely condemned
for making capital out of a human tragedy (the film was banned
outright in Norway). In the midst of the First World War, Blom
courted further controversy with another film that latched onto the
Zeitgeist -
The End of the World (1916),
cinema's first full-on
apocalyptic movie.
Whilst the sinking of an ocean liner is only one incident of many in
Atlantis it is the most
dramatic and the most impressively realised, a gloriously ambitious
set-piece that consumed a large chunk of the film's budget.
Audiences of
the time must have been appalled and amazed by such a convincing
recreation of the real disaster that had filled the newspapers the
previous year. Even today, the sequence can hardly fail to
impress, despite some obvious imperfections (the
vessel sinking below the waves is clearly smaller than the real ship
seen earlier -
the budget presumably couldn't run to the expense of a full-size
replica). Blom uses the cross-cutting technique which he had
pioneered to give the sequence an incredible sense of drama, rapidly
cutting between panicking passengers and the sinking ship to capture
the horror of the moment. Camera movement, another of Blom's
favourite techniques, heightens the sense of urgency and pandemonium,
inducing a feeling of nausea in the spectator as he is
transported into the midst of a fantastic orgy of abject terror.
What is perhaps most striking about the central set-piece of
Atlantis
is how utterly realistic is seems. It might almost be documentary
footage
of the sinking of the
Titanic,
and because it shot objectively, with none of the over-the-top
dramatisation seen in later films featuring sinking ocean liners, it
feels scarily authentic. The rest of the film is imbued with the
same uncomforting naturalism, the one notable departure being the short
excursion to the lost underwater city in
an eerie dream sequence. The exterior location sequences of
Berlin and New York City might have been lifted from a newsreel and
offer a fascinating glimpse of both cities before WWI. Blom's
endlessly moving camera, with tracking shots from moving vehicles that
are truly breathtaking, endow the film with a vertiginous sense of the
vitality of the modern metropolis. All this adds to startling
modernity of the film.
Atlantis wasn't just ahead of
its time on the cinematographic front, it
was also highly sophisticated as a piece of drama. The film's
authors took the opportunity afforded them by its two hour runtime to
develop realistic characters, rather than, as was more usual, fall back
on the familiar stereotypes. The main character - sympathetically
played by Olaf Fønss, a major star of Danish and German cinema -
is not your conventional romantic hero. He's a driven
scientist (in the field of bacteriology no less) and a devoted husband
(married to a lunatic wife who threatens to disembowel him with her
scissors). He's also reckless and easily led
astray by an over-active libido. He's a fully-fledged character
and yet - and this is the interesting part - he is completely passive,
totally at the mercy of events. He resembles a ball in a pinball
machine, being knocked from pillar to post by forces beyond his
control. The secondary characters
are also convincingly drawn representatives of their time, the most
interesting being the entourage of
artists that the hero encounters during his stay in New York.
The one character who doesn't quite ring true is the supposedly
irresistible dancer Ingigerd. One of the things that Gerhart
Hauptmann stipulated in his contract with Nordisk was that two of the
characters in his book would be played by the people who had inspired
them. This explains the slightly eccentric casting of Ida Orloff
for the part of Ingigerd, even though she is clearly too old and too
stout for the part. The other cast member that Hauptmann foisted
on the film was Charles Unthan, a man who had been born without arms - he
plays the cabaret performer Arthur Stoss, a.k.a. the 'Armless Wonder'.
Unthan's presence in the film is unnecessary and today would doubtless
be condemned as exploitative but it introduces a few welcome shots of
humour, and the scene in which he plays cards and opens a wine bottle
with his feet has to be seen to be believed. Another noteworthy
name in the cast is Mihály Kertész, who would later find
fame and fortune in Hollywood as Michael Curtiz, the director of such
classic movies as
The Adventures of Robin Hood
(1938) and
Casablanca
(1942). Kertész/Curtiz appears briefly in a small
supporting role, as a
colleague of the main character in the Berlin sequence. He was
also engaged by Blom as an assistant director, sharing the workload
with another future director of some renown, Robert Dinesen. As
the first in a long line of ocean liner disaster movies,
Atlantis is definitely worth
checking out.
© James Travers 2014
The above content is owned by filmsdefrance.com and must not be copied.
Film Synopsis
Dr Friedrich von Kammacher is an eminent bacteriologist who is married
to a woman who suffers from a severe mental disorder. When his
wife starts behaving in a dangerous manner von Kammacher has no
option but to have her placed in an institution. A second upset
comes when the doctor's proposal for an innovative research programme
is rejected by Berlin University. Taking the advice of his
parents, von Kammacher takes an extended holiday. His first port
of call is Berlin, where he falls under the spell of an exotic dancer,
Ingigerd Hahlstrom. The object of his infatuation is too busy
being cosseted by her other male admirers to notice him, so he leaves
for Paris. In a newspaper, von Kammacher reads that Ingigerd is
to travel to New York via the
SS
Roland, so he immediately books
himself a berth on the same liner. During the crossing, von
Kammacher attempts to renew his acquaintance with Ingigerd, only to
discover that she already has a boyfriend. In his sleep, the
doctor imagines he is visiting the lost city of Atlantis. He
awakes to discover that the
SS Roland
is sinking after the hull has been damaged in a collision. In the
ensuing panic most of the passengers and
crew are drowned. Von Kammacher and Ingigerd are among the
few survivors who are able to get away in a lifeboat. In New
York, Ingigerd cannot agree to commit herself to one man, and so von
Kammacher gives her up. He meets with a friend, Willy Snyders,
who brings him into contact with a community of artists. This is
how he comes to make the acquaintance of an amiable young sculptress
named Eva Burns. Whilst enjoying a few days' rest in a remote mountain
cabin, the doctor receives a telegram notifying him that his wife has
died. The news is more than he can bear and immediately he
succumbs to a delirium of sickness...
© James Travers
The above content is owned by filmsdefrance.com and must not be copied.