L'Atlantide (1921 film)
| L'Atlantide | |
|---|---|
Poster by Manuel Orazi
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| Directed by | Jacques Feyder |
| Screenplay by | Jacques Feyder |
| Based on |
L'Atlantide by Pierre Benoit |
| Starring |
Jean Angelo Georges Melchior Stacia Napierkowska |
| Music by | M. Jemain (original score) |
| Cinematography | Georges Specht Victor Morin Amédée Morrin |
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Production
company |
Thalman & Cie
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| Distributed by | Louis Aubert |
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Release date
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Running time
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original reported as 196 minutes; DVD of restored copy from Nederlands Filmmuseum 163 minutes |
| Country | France |
| Language |
Silent film French intertitles |
L'Atlantide is a 1921 French-Belgian silent film directed by Jacques Feyder, and the first of several adaptations of the best-selling novel L'Atlantide by Pierre Benoit.
In 1911, two French officers, Capitaine Morhange and Lieutenant Saint-Avit, become lost in the Sahara desert and discover the legendary kingdom of Atlantis, ruled by its ageless queen Antinéa. They become the latest in a line of captives whom she has taken as lovers, and who are killed and embalmed in gold after she has tired of them. Morhange however, already grieving for a lost love and planning to take holy orders, is indifferent to Antinéa's advances and rejects her. Angered and humiliated, she exploits the jealousy of his friend Saint-Avit and incites him to kill Morhange. Appalled by what he has done, Saint-Avit is helped to escape by Antinéa's secretary Tanit-Zerga, and after nearly dying in the desert from thirst and exhaustion, he is found by a patrol of soldiers. Saint-Avit returns to Paris and tries to resume his life, but he is unable to forget Antinéa. Three years later he returns to the desert and sets out to find her kingdom again, accompanied by another officer to whom he has told his story.
Much of the narrative is contained within a long flashback as Saint-Avit recounts his first visit to Antinéa; other shorter flashbacks are used within this framework, creating a fairly complex narrative structure.
When Jacques Feyder obtained the rights to film Benoit's novel, he took the radical step of insisting that the film should be made on location in the Sahara, a strategy which no film-maker had previously used for a project on this scale. His whole cast and crew were taken to Algeria, first to the Aurès Mountains and then Djidjelli on the coast, for 8 months of filming. Even the interiors were filmed in an improvised studio in a tent outside Algiers, with sets by the painter Manuel Orazi.
Feyder initially borrowed production money from his cousin who was a director of Banque Thalmann. By the time of the film's release in October 1921, the costs had escalated to an unprecedented figure of nearly 2 million francs, and its financial backers rapidly sold their rights to the distributor Louis Aubert. The film soon became a huge success however and earned a great deal of money for Aubert; it ran at a Paris cinema for over one year and was widely sold abroad. Aubert re-released the film in 1928 and it had a renewed success.
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