Spectacle, apocalypse and the telepathic fruitarian pacifists from Mars

For half a decade, beginning in 1910, Denmark was the most influential filmmaking nation in Europe after France. Of more than two dozen production companies, many of which lasted only long enough to make a handful of films, Nordisk Films Kompagni was the most successful.¹ Established in 1906 by cinema-owner Ole Olsen, it quickly became the second largest European production company, after France's Pathé,² making, for example, over 140 films in 1915 alone. Indeed, Nordisk's fame and influence was such that the Hungarian theatrical actor and film director Miháley Kertész — better known as Michael Curtiz — visited Denmark to study their filmmaking systems and techniques.³ Nordisk ceased to make films in 1917, and when production recommenced after World War One, its global position was lost. Its German market was undermined by the establishment of Ufa, Germany's state-owned studio, and Nordisk's increasing focus on literary adaptations proved a less-successful export strategy than Germany's development of expressionism into a cinematic mode.

In 1910, actor August Blom joined Nordisk's 1700 staff as a director.⁴ He soon became the studio's leading director, shooting more than a hundred films by 1924. While Olsen preferred single reel films (up to sixteen minutes long), which had to sell about twenty prints before turning a profit, Blom wished to make longer films. After his racy three-reel melodrama Val Foengslets Port (The Temptations of a Great City; Denmark 1911) became an international hit, selling nearly 250 copies, he increasingly got his way. Although largely forgotten nowadays, Blom was a major figure in the development of what we now think of as feature-length films, both in Denmark and internationally. He was best known for literary adaptations, including versions of Robinson Crusoe, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and a Hamlet shot at Elsinore, and for social melodramas, which depicted temporary mobility between social classes before conservatively reasserting the natural order of social hierarchies (Mottram 135-6). In 1913, he adapted German Nobel Prize-winner Gerhart Hauptmann's novel Atlantis, following its narrative very closely. It was a prestige production over which Hauptman retained considerable control; but despite the novel's rather modern perspective, its story of the self-exiled, proto-existentialist Dr Friedrich von Kammacher (Olaf Fønss) resonated strongly with the melodramatic form Blom favoured. At eight reels (nearly two hours), it was the longest Danish film — and one of the longest films anywhere — to that date. It was another international hit, with prints prepared specifically for Danish, German, English, French, Italian, Portuguese and Russian language markets (there were two Russian versions, one with a much more tragic conclusion which is included as an extra on this DVD). For its US release, it was cut down to six-reels. According to Mottram, the excised scenes almost certainly included von Kammacher's side trip to Paris and his brief shipboard affair with a Russian Jewess from steerage, and probably the two-shot sequence which gives the film its title and its few moments of more-or-less direct interest to readers of this journal: von Kammacher's dream/vision of Atlantis.

Nearly halfway through the film, the overwrought von Kammacher retreats to his cabin on a liner crossing the Atlantic to the US. In his sleep, he meets a dead friend with whom he walks through the streets of Atlantis. While Blom succeeds in giving this sequence an oneiric quality, the lost continent is rather obviously just a Danish town. This tension makes it appear oddly prescient of Ingmar Bergman's symbolic use of Scandinavian settings in a film such as Smultronstället (Wild Strawberries; Sweden 1957), but it is profoundly at odds with the rest of the film's realist aesthetics. In Blom's defence, the equivalent brief passage...