A man at a podium reads from notes: people have been looking for Atlantis in the wrong place. The lost civilization isn't drowned beneath the sea but buried under the sands of the Sahara. This declaration is broadcast over the radio. Two men in the French Foreign Legion are listening to the radio on the parapets of a desert fort. One of the men, named Saint Avit says that "it's all true." His interlocutor asks if he referring to the Morehange affair. Saint Avit says that Morehange is not missing but that he killed him. A subaltern brings a lantern and set it on the dried mud embrasure. Saint Avit says that he will explain this murder. The sun sets over the desert. Someone says that a storm is brewing.
In the bright dawn two years earlier, Saint Avit and Morehange set forth on camels. They join a caravan bearing salt to Timbuktu. The procession of camels comes upon a skeleton buried in the drifting sands. An attractive woman is now on camel herself riding between Saint Avit and Morehange. When the caravan camps, she uses a typewriter to write some kind of communique -- she is a journalist. The next morning, Saint Avit and Morehange depart again with four or five Tuaregs. They are on a secret mission to find traces of Atlantis buried under the sands. The female journalist cries "Au Revoir" as they set forth. Later, the two men come upon another Tuareg, his face covered in a black burnoose, alone and inexplicably dying in the empty desert. The party enters a rocky defile where one of their men, separated from the group, is found dead. It's cold at night and the men sit around a campfire; the masked and hooded Tuareg tribesmen are like enigmatic statues in the flickering firelight, silent and motionless. There's an alarum in the night. Morehange is missing. Some sort of attack occurs and Saint Avit is seized. There's a cut away from the fracas in the night to a shot of Saint Avit sprawled over the back of a camel in the bright sun; his eyes are open and he seems dead. There's another cut to black and, then, we see a ruinous village, broken arches and mud brick houses with narrow tilted alleyways. A blind man is singing monotonously to a group of hooded figures while a beautiful woman with huge hoop earrings looks on. There's a burst of music: a group of villagers is listening to Offenbach's "Can-Can" from Orpheus in the Underworld -- they have a large, old-style gramophone. Muslim men are prostrate praying in a courtyard and Saint Avit faints. In the next shot, we see him being carried down a long flight of worn stone steps. Saint Avit comes to in a grotto where a large basin seems to be pebbled with gold nuggets. Barber tools are on a tray. A woman has shaved him and cut his hair while he was unconscious and he is now wearing a slender black tie, white shirt, and a white jacket. A little man with a waxed upturned moustache appears -- he looks like a jolly boulevardier and wears a sort of tuxedo with a huge white rose in its lapel. There is a burst of Offenbach's Can-Can on the soundtrack and, then, the merry little fellow (his name is Hetland) starts mixing cocktails in a silver shaker. A disheveled man named Tolstetson stumbles into the arched crypt-like chamber. He seems deranged and keeps muttering the name "Antinea". Soon, Hetland, the boulevardier, says they will give us "Kuff", a compound that is 40% hashish and 60% opium. Hetland tells Saint Avit that he has been here 20 years but still doesn't know where he is. He says that Antinea is a woman and a goddess and that, as far as he is concerned,all women are goddesses. Tolstenton has a nasty scar over his right eye, a big cup-shaped dent in his face. A leopard sometimes slinks through the archways in the underground labyrinth. A hooded servant enters and says that "she has called for you". Saint Avit goes with the man down a buried corridor. Tolstenson lunges out of a niche in the wall and tries to strangle Saint Avit. His guide, like a sleepwalker, just continues walking down the tunnel. Saint Avit overcomes the deranged man. Tolstetson breaks a bottle and uses the shattered glass to slit his wrist.
In a richly appointed chamber, a woman with the features of a Greek sculpture, Aphrodite or Athena, is playing chess with the beautiful dark-skinned girl with the big hoop earrings. There are other girls playing stringed instruments. The woman, Antinea, plays chess with Saint Avit -- she puts him in check eight or nine times as his king flees across the chess board, but, then, it is checkmate. Antinea adjourns to a chamber dominated by a huge sculpted head -- the size of the front of a bus, the sculpture is an idealized portrait of Antinea. There is then a disorienting cut to a cabaret in Paris where a dozen women are dancing the can-can. Hetland is watching them. He goes to a dressing room where he caresses one of the dancers, a plump girl named Clementine. Just as he is about to enjoy her, a Berber enters the room and claims Clementine for himself. The flashback ends and we see Antinea gazing at herself in a mirror and caressing her own body. The leopard on a leash is leading Saint Avit through the underground hallways and arcades to a place where he can see Antinea with Morehange. Antinea says that she loves Morehange. Saint Avit, who has been smoking "Kuff", is jealous. The dark-eyed girl with the big earrings watches as Saint Avit embraces Antinea. He falls to his knees and buries his head between her thighs. She orders him to kill Morehange. No sooner commanded, then, done. Saint Avit batters Morehange to death with what looks like croquet mallet. Antinea stands brooding next to the colossal head and Saint Avit, appalled by his act, charges her with the mallet. He's swarmed by hooded, masked figures..The girl with the earrings spirits him away and, on a single camel, they escape across the desert. But soon enough they have exhausted their water. They stumble through the wasteland to a well, but, upon removing the capstone, they find the pit empty except for a corpse in the shaft. The woman with the big earrings dies. Saint Avit buries her and, then, staggers into a mirage of waves beating against a shore. He collapses but a small plane appears and the shadow of aircraft passes over his body. We see an electric fan -- the fan's rotors rhyme with the planes prop.
It's now dawn on the parapet of the fort. Saint Avit and the other man have talked all night. A black masked man appears and seems to lead Saint Avit away. The commander at the fort sends a party after him, tracking his movement across the desert by camel hoofprints in the sand. But the big storm promised earlier occurs and the trail is lost in the blinding sandstorm.
The whole thing is like a fever dream. I had to watch the movie twice to verify that what I thought I saw was actually on-screen. The movie is shot in the style of silent films, with luminous close-ups and monumental sets. The desert scenes are filmed documentary style and, so, the picture is a weird combination of exquisite hallucination and bluntly realistic footage. The movie's pace is oddly languorous, stunned it seems. Much of the desert scenes features tiny ant-like figures moving in the huge, stony wilderness. All transitions are elided -- it's never clear how characters move from one place to another. Most of the narrative is concealed, hidden behind the veils of mask, burnoose, and blowing sand. A paradigm sequence involves the well that Saint Avit and the desert girl come upon near the end of the movie. The well is covered by a flat slab of rock that they can move only with the most arduous effort -- there is something dreamlike about their prolonged and desperate struggle with rock covering the well, itself just a tiny spider-hole in the endless desert. As they push the stone aside, the camera tilts up to show their faces looking down into the pit --the man and woman are shot in a way that makes them seem enormously glamorous, hyper-sexual, even, though, supposedly they are dying -- their eyes leak light. Behind their faces, however, we see sinister cascades of sand falling into the hole. Then, we are shown their point of view -- the pit is a dark shaft with the figure of hooded corpse lying below them, most sand falling in trickles down the side of the pit.
The DVD is strange, a curious artifact with next to no information written on the box. The cover shows Antinea in a black peplos glaring at the camera next to the colossal classically sculpted head. The DVD box says that the picture comes from Long Island City. It's a Mr. Fat W Video. There's no menu and the DVD, once activated, just begins playing with the movie's titles. But there is a 5 second prelude, an odd figure shaped like a plucked chicken with eyes on its breast -- this is apparently Mr. Fat. He raises his drumstick arms and jumps up and down.
L'Atlantide is a film directed in 1932 by G. W. Pabst, apparently shot in three versions: German, French, and English. (The DVD presents the French version). Antinea is played by Brigitta Helm, the actress who played the dual role of the humble, Christ-like Maria and the lewd, destructive robot in Fritz Lang's Metropolis. (She also plays the abused blind girl in Pabst's 1927 The Love of Jeanne Ney). She presents an alarming somnambulant spectacle in the film, an embodiment of detached, abstract eros. The beautiful dark-skinned girl with the big earrings (in profile she looks Navajo) is someone named Telo Tchai. The film is far weirder than I am able to describe. Some of the sequences seem quasi-experimental and the gramophone playing Offenbach to the hooded Berbers is a surrealist image worthy of something from Werner Herzog's Fata Morgana, his peculiar picture about, among other things, desert mirages in the Sahara. Apparently, the film adapts a novel by Pierre Benoit, popular enough to have spawned several film versions -- I count, at least, five iterations including a notable 3 1/2 hour version by Jacques Feyder made in 1921, a Hollywood version with Maria Montez from 1948, and made-for-Tv movie in 1992. Pabst's picture has been hard to see and is not well-regarded critically, although I wonder how many people have actually watched this movie. In fact, it's very good and stands for the proposition that Pabst is always a more interesting director than he is given credit for.
(Research shows me that Brigitte Helm plays three parts in the movie -- the lady journalist (who seems to be writing the script for the film), Clementine, and Antinea. Some reviews says that Clementine and Antinea are the same character -- that the Queen was originally a dancer in French cabaret. Tela Tchai aka Marth Noemi Winterstein was a Romi actress, a model for people like Picasso, and, later, a painter in her own right.)
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