ATLANTIS (1913)

Strikingly advanced technically, this two-hour feature from 1913 Denmark shows the strength of European (and especially Scandinavian) film in the years before WWI knocked out production on the continent and opened the door to Hollywood hegemony.  A rebalance in output & power that continues to this day.  (Though what exactly a ‘Hollywood’ film now means is open to debate.)  ATLANTIS also earns extra caché from Hungarian hire Michael Curtiz as supporting actor & assistant director (to August Blom), learning on the job in the first of many spectaculars to come.  No wonder the highlight here is something of a recreation of the Titanic disaster, barely a year in the past, it plays like a typically muscular Curtiz action set-piece.  If only the rest of the film were as compelling.  Instead, for all the physical polish, its main story never builds much dramatic pull.  Danish stage star Olaf Fønss plays a rejected research scientist forced to place his mentally unstable wife in an asylum.  Sent abroad by his worried mother for R&R (as well as a possible cure for the wife), he meets exciting dancer Ida Orloff (madly over-acting) on the ship to New York and bonds with her when the ship goes down one foggy night.  Eventually, a calmer lady friend will step up (after insanity claims the first wife) for marriage, motherly duties to his children & a hopeful ending.  So, plenty of incident, plenty of interesting locales & characters, but no story construction to match the film’s other qualities.  At one odd point, everything more or less stops to allow a Music Hall act for a man with no arms to take tea with his stage stooge.  A welcome diversion, but at half a reel, maybe too much of one.  Watch for the scale, for the shipwreck, and for its remarkably good state of preservation.  Easy to find on-line, but most sites show the same over-processed copy.  Instead, LINK to the Internet Archive Digital Library which retains an attractive level of grain, especially if you slightly reduce the brightness level.   https://archive.org/details/atlantis-1913-august-blom

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: Italy’s CABIRIA/'14, which came out a year before D. W. Griffith’s THE BIRTH OF A NATION/’15,  often gets credit as the first full-length feature to influence world markets.  (Other Italian epics preceded it back to 1911, but traveled less.)  ATLANTIS, out the year before CABIRIA, seems the more likely influencer.