A Film Canon

Atlantis plays like a prototype for Scandinavian cinema's particular fascination with sublime landscape - and, more specifically, with a transcendent whiteness that precludes the melodramatic distinction between inside and outside endemic to American cinema at this time, as well as the preoccupation with cross-editing that it tends to engender.  To this end, Blom, screenwriter Axel Garde and novelist Gerhart Hauptmann eschew conventional narrative, effectively presenting a travelogue connecting two spaces - the whitewashed country house of Dr. Friedrich Kammacher (Olaf Fonss), imbued with the glary sterility accruing from his revolutionary bacteriology, as well as from the neaby institution in which his hysterical wife is incarcerated; and a snow-bound American mountain outpost, to which he retreats after the suicide of his wife, only to be rescued by a sculptress, with whom he returns to his country house, depathologising its pervasive glare. From this perspective, the film seems to advocate a return to a more organic, natural relation to everything supposedly outside domestic space - a vision that is encapsulated in the central sequence, in which the wreckage of the ship transporting Kammacher from Europe to America provides him with a dream of wandering through Altantis, its omnipresent liquidity providing just this common denominator, and culminating with an expansive field that anticipates the final mountain sequence, as well as the various surrogates (the glare of the ship's deck, a New York studio lined with bright white marble) that precede it. At the same time, it provides a poetic characterisation of gentlemanly travel (and possibly even mass immigration) as the search for an organic experience that has been submerged by the emergent modernist metropolis, itself beautifully elaborated in a series of sequences shot in Berlin, Paris and New York; or, alternatively, a clarification that true nature has been relegated to the recesses of the sea, for which the mountains are ultimately a mere cipher.