Atlantis (Denmark, 1913)

Atlantis proves that the whole "too soon" concept was as pertinent one hundred years ago as it is today, greeted by a wave of consternation upon its release for its depiction of a Titanic-like disaster only a year after the actual tragedy occurred. Norway even went so far as to ban the picture entirely.

Yet to say that Atlantis was "inspired" by the sinking of the Titanic is a somewhat dicey proposition, as the film was in truth based upon a novel by Nobel Prize winning author Gerhart Hauptman, which famously and uncannily depicted events very similar to the sinking a month before they happened. Whether real life occurrences had a hand in inspiring the selection of Hauptman's book as source material, however, is another matter entirely.

As Atlantis opens, distinguished bacteriologist Freidrich von Kammacher (Verdens Undergang's Olaf Fønss) is having a crap day. Not only has his new treatise been rejected by the University of Berlin, but his wife (Lily Frederiksen) has gone completely off her noggin, endeavoring, with wild eyed abandon,  to cut up everything in sight with a pair of sewing scissors, including, it seems, Friedrich himself. You see, this was back in those day when women would become unaccountably broken and have to be sent off to the brain doctor -- preferably one in as remote a European locale as possible -- for repair, which is what pretty unceremoniously happens to Mrs. Kammacher within the film's opening minutes.

Seeing that Kammacher has become broody and disconsolate in the wake of these events, his doting mother suggests that he leave his three children in her care and take a rejuvenating trip abroad. And so he does, heading off to Berlin, where he soon becomes smitten with famed "artistic" dancer Ingigerd Hahlstroem -- and this despite the fact that she looks like a dowager and dances with all the grace of an anesthetized polar bear.

Ingigerd is played by Ida Orloff, whose casting was insured by a clause in author Hauptman's contract that required that certain parts in the film be played by the actual people who inspired them. Orloff, a former lover of Hauptman's, may indeed have been an accomplished dancer at one time. But the fact that she was past her prime is clearly demonstrated by her one performance in the film, a number called "The Spider's Victim" in which she clumsily tromps around in a butterfly costume before being scared by a giant prop spider, then dies after badly pantomiming being trapped in a web. Another figure who won his role in this manner was Charles Unthan, an armless violinist who portrays "Armless Wonder" Arthur Stoss, a character whose contributions to the story in terms of either depth or agency are somewhat mysterious.

Since it's not cheating if your wife mistakes you for a textile, Kammacher sets himself to ardently pursuing Ingigerd, going so far as to book passage on the same ocean liner when she sets off for an engagement in New York. Providing an obstacle to his stalking is the dancer's entourage, which consists of her father, a handsome suitor, her agent, and an angry pet monkey that on several occasions appears to be actually biting Orloff (who does an admirable job of maintaining a cheerful demeanor regardless). Undeterred, Kammacher instead enjoys an aborted flirtation with a young Russian immigrant on board. However, his cruise on the Love Boat is to be an abbreviated one, as it is not long before the ship has collided with an unknown object while passing through a dense fog and begins to rapidly take on water.

Atlantis' depiction of the ocean liner's sinking is both spectacular and impressive, in itself enough to earn the film its place as a landmark in Danish cinema -- and in cinema as a whole, for that matter. It's easy to understand audiences of the time being both startled and disturbed by its realism, which was apparently accomplished by the use of a near full-sized mock-up of the ship, along with the employment of hundreds of extras to splash about frantically in Denmark's bay of Køge. Yet, as central to the film as that scene is, and as much as its reputation has eclipsed everything else about the film that surrounds it, it was not Atlantis' sole reason for being.

You see, Atlantis was made during a more primitive cinematic age, back before people knew how to build an entire movie around a sinking boat (oh, how much we have learned since then). Director August Blom would come within closer striking distance of the classic disaster movie template with his subsequent Verdens Undergang -- aka The End of the World -- but was here trying to tell a larger story of which disaster was just one small component. Not that it's always easy to keep a firm grasp on what that story is, mind you. Atlantis takes the job of being Denmark's first feature-length film seriously, clocking in at over two hours, almost all of which consists of scenes filmed in long, static, medium shots with a minimum of intertitles. Amid this, it's easy to get a sense of something in Hauptman's original book being lost, and perhaps also the sense that silent film was not quite as ideal a medium for the novelistic approach to story telling as would be the sound variety.

In any case, the shipwreck at least performs the utility of killing off Ingigerd's father, suitor, and monkey, thus leaving her fair game for Kammacher once the two of them finally make it to New York. Unfortunately, this also affords Kammacher the opportunity to sample in full Ingigerd's capacity for shallow vanity. Thus he fucks off to hang out with a bunch of arty types instead, whereupon he handily meets Eva (Ebba Thomsen, also of Verdens Undergang), a sculptress with whom he ignites the initial sparks of romance.

Meanwhile, we get a lot of intriguing period footage shot on location in Manhattan, as well as of a public exhibition performed by the "Armless Wonder" Stoss. This consists of Stoss/Unthan playing a trumpet with his feet, playing cards with his feet, lighting a cigarette with his feet, and, finally, uncorking and pouring a bottle of wine, also with his feet; in short: his entire performance in more or less real time. It's the kind of scene, like others in Atlantis, that leaves you thankful for those modern editing techniques that make it impossible to tell which robot is punching whom, or whether we're looking at Mila Kunis' ass or Justin Timberlake's. Moan all you want about the limited attention span of today's audience, but it was an earlier audience's development of a capacity to be bored with cinema's novelty that was a necessary and revolutionary step in the advancement of the art -- something you will be frequently reminded of while watching Atlantis.

Atlantis' final act involves the distraught Kammacher retiring to a friend's isolated mountain cabin (which is presumably supposed to be near New York, but looks like it's in Siberia) in order to mend his shattered nerves. The loneliness proves too much for him, however, and he soon starts to succumb to madness, and then illness. Happy tragic news eventually arrives in the form of a telegram announcing the death of his wife, after which Eva fortuitously arrives to pledge her devotion and nurse him back to health. Thus, after a full recovery, is Kammacher able to make a triumphant return to the homeland with a new mother for his children in tow. Hooray!

The DVD of Atlantis includes an alternate ending that was shot exclusively for the film's Russian release. Russian audiences accounted for a significant portion of producer Nordisk Film's foreign revenues at the time, and such changes were typically made due to a perception that said audience had a marked taste for tragic endings. (It's not for nothing that Gershwin wrote that line about seeing "more skies of gray than any Russian play can guaranty".) Thus was shot a conclusion in which Kammacher summarily dies immediately upon Eva's arrival, after which a "THE END" title card is hastily rushed on screen. It's hilarious for seeming every bit as cursory and tacked-on as the typical happy ending, and as a result makes the actual happy ending seem paradoxically hard won. I imagine the Russians would have been happier if they'd just ended with the shipwreck.

Verdens Undergang, aka The End of the World (Denmark, 1916)

Back in the teen years of the last century, when others were taking more tentative steps into the world of feature film making, Denmark’s Nordisk Film Company repeatedly demonstrated a fearlessness in tackling grandiose subject matter. We’ve already seen this with 1918’s Himmelskibet, which depicted the first manned space flight to Mars, and here with director August Blom’s 1916 Verdens Undergang, which, true to its title, depicts fiery apocalypse at the instigation of an overly friendly comet. It had only been six years since Halley’s Comet had done its last drive-by, an event that occasioned not inconsiderable panic due to concerns that the gasses within its tail might suffocate every living thing on the planet. Verdens Undergang certainly reflects those anxieties, but, like Himmelskibet, seems to have at its heart more a despair over the ongoing world war and the apparent inability of mankind to just get along.

Despite the enormity of his subject, Blom wisely strives to keep his narrative small scale, telling his story from the perspective of one family in a small mining town, while still managing to span the wide class divide that fuels the movie’s conflicts. Said family is that of West (Carl Lauritzen), a manager at the mine who has two adult daughters, Dina (Ebba Thomsen) and Edith (Johanne Fritz-Petersen). During a swing through town to oversee operations, the mine’s wealthy owner, Stoll (Olaf Fonss), falls for Dina and does his best to sweep her off her feet. After some requisite hand wringing, Dina eventually decides to run off with Stoll to the big city, seeing in him the opportunity to escape from both her small town existence and the dominion of her stern father -- who, in an earlier scene, is seen accusing her of being a “harlot” for the crime of returning home from a local dance unattended. Meanwhile, the less restless Edith throws her romantic lot in with Reymers (Himmelskibet’s Alf Blutecher), a dependable young sailor with deep roots in the town.

Cut to a few years later, and Stoll -- who, in his towering top hat, couldn’t be a more efficient symbol of capital if he was the Monopoly guy -- has struck it rich on the stock market, enabling him to shower Dina, now a bored trophy wife held prisoner in their lavish mansion, with glitzy baubles. Unfortunately, it is right around this time that Stoll’s cousin, Wiseman, a renowned astronomer, discovers a new comet that is destined to travel very close to the Earth, the news of which triggers a market panic and corresponding dip in stock prices. Stoll then decides to use his inside line to the astronomy world to manipulate the market, but when the news from his cousin isn’t good –- it turns out that the comet probably really is going to destroy the world -- he lies to his newspaper publisher friend and has him publish a much more sunny projection of the outcome. As a result, the value of his portfolio is restored.

Soon after, Stoll returns with Dina to her hometown, where he reveals a scheme that sounds like one of Ayn Rand’s most fervid masturbatory fantasies. According to this plan, they will wait out the disaster within the presumed safety of the mine, after which Stoll envisions a scenario in which only the rich and powerful have survived, emerging from the rubble to create and master a new world, free of the impediments presented by all of those pesky worker types. (Gee, I guess those dishes really will wash themselves.) To celebrate this grand vision, Stoll throws a lavish party for all of his rich cronies on the very day of the projected disaster. Unfortunately, those pesky workers, lead by Dina’s spurned former fiancé Flint (Thorlief Lund), see this as an ideal time to get back some of their own, and attempt to storm the mansion at which the fete is being thrown. A gun battle ensues, during which Dina is mortally wounded, and, with her in arms, Stoll steals off to the mine, where both he and Flint, who follows him, will die horribly.

If you come to Verdens Undergang with the expectation of seeing some kind of steam punk FX extravaganza -- as I admittedly kind of did -- you may end up being mildly disappointed. So what, you may ask, are the effects of a comet’s passing too closely to our Earth, according to Verdens Undergang? Lots and lots of sparks, apparently. At the same time, Blom’s depiction of submerged houses, along with the scene in which Johanne Fritz-Petersen kneels atop a table, frantically crying to the heavens as her own home rapidly floods with sea water, are as realistic as could be. Three years earlier, Blom had directed Atlantis, a film inspired by the Titanic disaster whose effects were so realistic that audiences suspected he had sunk an actual ocean liner in order to get them. He didn't, but judging from what I saw here, I wouldn’t be too surprised if he had.

Being a child of the 70s, I’m well accustomed to the thuggish moralism of disaster movies, wherein, given that the destruction of the many is assured, the only suspense lies in seeing on whose side that particular movie’s version of a vengeful God -- or Irwin Allen, if you prefer -- falls down upon. As an early example of that tradition, Verdens Undergang helpfully has a preacher on hand to officially label the comet “God’s punishment” -- leaving open only the question of who will be spared its wrath. Will it be the poor workers, who doff their caps in humble prayer as the comet approaches, or the rich, who party like it’s 1999? (And, truly, every time Stoll opens his title-card-assisted-yap, you can practically see the Old Guy rubbing his hands together in anticipation of smiting him.)

Well, it turns out, somewhat refreshingly, that, at the end of Verdens Undergang, pretty much everyone has been equally on the receiving end of the big cosmic dump, which I imagine reflects the cynicism about human nature that the horrors of the First World War might understandably have inspired in Blom and his ilk. Aside from the preacher -- which is something of a gimme -- the only apparent survivors are Edith and Reymers, who are together Inarguably Verdens Undergang’s least interesting characters. Both sought neither to enrich nor to liberate themselves, but simply, one assumes, to quietly procreate and die within the stifling confines of the tiny town to which they were born. In return for this prize, the two end the film by falling to their knees in reverent thanks, as well they should.

Himmelskibet, aka A Trip To Mars (Denmark, 1918)

If Reptilicus had been Denmark’s only contribution to the science fiction genre, that might well have been enough. Few countries, after all, can boast of producing a film in which a prehistoric dragon is represented almost exclusively by a vomiting puppet head. But, of course, I kid. Not only did Denmark make another contribution to the sci-fi genre, but that contribution was also among the earliest cinematic depictions of space travel. The Danish film industry was, in fact, pretty robust during the teen years of the last century, with receptive audiences throughout Europe and a reputation for a high level of craftsmanship, of which Holger-Madsen’s 1918 film Himmelskibet (or Sky Ship) offers a fine example.

Himmelskibet begins with Navy Captain Avanti (Gunnar Tolnæs) returning from the Great War in search of new ventures. His father, the great astronomer Professor Planetarios (yes, it’s that kind of movie), introduces him to the concept of space travel, lighting a fire within the lad that can only be expressed by lots of overwrought gesticulating toward the heavens. (Hopefully, once the talkies came along, actor Tolnæs was able to find a job pointing at things, because he’s really good at it.) Avanti recruits his sister’s suitor, Dr. Krafft (Alf Blutecher), to assist him in building a spaceship capable of reaching Mars, and the call soon goes out for volunteers to make up the ship’s crew. Throughout this process, the only obstacle to our heroes’ progress is that posed by Planetarios’ arch rival, Professor Dubius (again, that kind of movie), who makes a project out of heckling them at every step of the way.

Two years later, Avanti and his team have succeeded in building the Excelsior, a spaceship that, with its vestigial wings and protruding wagon wheels, is at once ungainly and perilously rickety looking. Yet fly it does, and soon Avanti, Krafft and a crew that includes a hulking alcoholic by the name of Dane are winging their way to Mars. Unfortunately, even at this historical remove from actual space travel, the makers of Himmelskibet were aware that getting to Mars would take an awful lot of time, and that, in addition, spending that amount of time in quarters as cramped as those within the Excelsior would take a grave psychological toll upon its astronauts. Thus, six months in, Avanti and Krafft find themselves with a mutiny on their hands under the leadership of the boozy Dane. Fortuitously, it is at this moment that the Martians choose to send out their tractor beams and gently waft them down to the surface of their planet.

The Martians turn out to be a highly enlightened race who spend their days sitting around in white robes while being unnervingly serene. Obviously, we humans have a lot to learn from an encounter with such a race, but even a film as idealistic as Himmelskibet has the common sense to realize that we would fuck it up. After sampling the Martians’ vegetarian diet, Avanti send one of his crew back to the ship for some canned meat and wine. Asked by the Martian elder how the Earthlings are able to obtain “dead meat” for their consumption, Avanti enthusiastically demonstrates by whipping out a revolver and blowing a passing bird out of the sky. In response, the outraged Martians fall upon the group and, in the ensuing melee, one of the crew members throws a grenade that seriously wounds one of the Martians. It’s pretty bad.

Because the Martians’ is one of those vaguely atavistic utopian societies in which there is a “the something” of everything, Avanti and his men are sent to “The House of Judgment”, where, after a presentation on how the Martians overcame their own warlike past, they are encouraged to “judge themselves”. They gain some assistance in this from Marya, the Elder’s beautiful young daughter, who takes pity on the Earthmen and decides to act as their counsel. With her guidance, the humbled Earthmen collectively lay down their arms, swearing off violence forever, and are in turn rewarded with the honor of wearing “The Robes of Innocence”. Marya and her fellow Martian maidens then subject these long isolated males to a performance of something called ”The Dance of Chastity”, which is just as airy fairy as it sounds, contrasted with scenes of bad behavior back on Earth that involve unruly beer halls, rowdy mobs mocking the infirm, gambling, and lovers necking in darkened dance halls.

Perhaps as a result of all this in-your-face chastity, Avanti finds himself taken with Marya. A formal courtship ensues that involves Marya leading Avanti to “The Forest of Love” and then “The Tree of Longing” (and ultimately, one hopes, to the “The Well Hidden Grove of Surreptitious Boning”, though, to be honest, that is neither depicted nor implied). Eventually, Avanti takes Marya and, with his newly reformed crew, heads back to Earth, only to face a violent storm upon reentry into our atmosphere. The odious Professor Dubius, watching from the ground, is felled by a serendipitous lightning bolt, happily leading our way into a hopeful conclusion. Once they are safely on the ground, Professor Planetarios tells Marya and Avanti that he hopes theirs will be a new generation who will, by embodying the Martian example, set the human race on the right path. Then a title reading “SLUT” appears on the screen. Which is apparently Danish for “The End”.

Though I myself would hitch a ride on the next piece of flaming space debris to get away from those Martian hippies, I have to admit to being moved by the sweetness at the core of Himmelskibet. That in the immediate aftermath of humanity’s horrific introduction to modern warfare on a near-genocidal scale, its makers could even conceive of a society as enlightened and peaceful as that pictured here is something of a human achievement in itself. And the naïve special effects and rickety spaceship only serve to make it that much more endearing. Set aside, of course, that the bloodless, endlessly lounging lifestyle of the Martians seems like a specific hell of its own, and that, with all of those white robes and bleached Roman edifices dotting the Martian surface, it all seems a bit queasily Arian. The main point is that Himmelskibet, in showing us its epic depiction of man conquering the heavens, had the humble goal of making us all just a little less shooty with each other. It’s hard to find fault with that, really.