Eldorado (1921)

Director:

Marcel L'Herbier

Writer:

Marcel L'Herbier (scenario)

Release Date:

28 October 1921 (France)

Genre:

Drama

Plot Keywords:

Violation | Suicide | Ballerina

Cast

  (Credited cast)

Ève Francis	...	Sibilla
Jaque Catelain	...	Hedwick
Marcelle Pradot	...	Iliana
Philippe Hériat	...	Joao, le bouffon
Claire Prélia	...	La comtesse suédoise
Georges Paulais	...	Esteria
Édith Réal	...	Conception
Max Dhartigny	...	Le patron de l'El Dorado
Émile Saint-Ober	...	L'aveugle
Jeanne Bérangère	...	Flore
rest of cast listed alphabetically:
Michel Duran
Noémi Seize

Also Known As:

El Dorado (France)

Runtime:

100 min

Country:

France

Color:

Black and White

Sound Mix:

Silent

Filming Locations:

Granada, Andalucía, Spain

Company:

Gaumont Série Pax

One of the unsung jewels (sic?) in silent cinema's crown (possible spoiler)

*** This review may contain spoilers ***

The plot is not the thing - pure 19th century, it boasts the virtues and vices of its genre. The virtues are a lurid plot (involving a hothouse strip joint, illegitimate, sickly children, callous aristocrats, an arranged marriage, attempted rape etc)., which runs the gamut of extreme emotions, from passion and cruelty to terror and hate. And, in its story of a woman tossed aside by her bored, socially superior lover, forced to gyrate for leering strangers to pay for her son's medicine; and a young girl forced into wedlock with an impotent old bore, there is a critical dimension about society and the way it treats women.

There is a heightened realism to the nightclub scenes, the smoky, sweaty atmosphere, full of unshaven men dizzy with lust, throwing things at the other acts, their female companions unconvincingly feigning indifference to the great Sibilla and her endearingly graceless, though presumably suggestive moves. But, in plot terms, the film does not escape the flaw of most old-style melodrama: it's punishing of transgressive women, even if they prove themselves uncommonly brave and good.

Sibilla was an adultress; she also stepped outside her social class - her 'crime' is figured in her sickly child, who has literalised her moral sickness. The only way the boy can survive is if he is taken away from her to another mother, Scandanavian, austere, nun-like. Now that even her maternal functions have been removed, Sibilla has nothing left to live for, and kills herself. You can read this as progressive (a cry against a world that treats women like this), or reactionary (just punishment; it's significant that though her lover is socially humiliated, HE doesn't have to die). It is perhaps noteworthy, even subversive, that the new couple who adopt this child are perhaps taking also his sickness - there is a suggestion that they got up to more than just comfort when locked up in the Alhambra.

Like I say, the plot isn't quite the thing. The melodrama, for all its hysterical improbabilities, is the stuff of life, of recognisable locales and characters, dealing, literally and figuratively, with the body, its desires and its enforced control by society. L'Herbier's remarkable achievement is to take this subject matter (and place, Spain, with its blaring sun and overripe passions) and turn it into a dream.

Resnais has admitted his debt to L'Herbier, and there is a MARIENBAD-like quality to this film, unique in the silent era. This is largely achieved through architecture, which on one level are realistic in their evocation of parched, chalky Spain; on another they suspend reality, their lines, curves, gleaming presence, their sheer impassive size, intruding on, indifferent to, minimising the human drama. Faced with these constructions, a bizarre, potent mix of colonial and modernist, the protagonists can't help seeming dwarfed, and this sieving of their humanity, gives their movements an oneiric feel, especially in the hypnotic Alhambra sequences, this gorgeous, gleaming space, labyrinthine, full of intrusive exteriors and mysterious, sexually charged interiors, where the narrative seems to break down, where dreams, imaginings, flashbacks all break the narrative flow, where the inexplicable, the coincidental, the implausible all converge.

This is heightened by L'Herbier's filming, the unearthly clarity of his images, where the geometric lines seem to extend to his actors; his use of a kind of deep focus, revealing an astonishing, disorienting, liberating depth of field, but also jolting when characters seem to be able to reach out of the screen, extending the link between dream and reality, to film and audience.

The film's strange geometry extends to place, eg the teeming, lurid nightclub cut to the austere dying child's room, orange tints giving way to icy blue; the unexpected intrusion in the Scandanavian home of striking, almost gaudy (Gaudi?!) decoration; and thematically - wealth/poverty, young/old, parent/child, male/female, servant/master, fate/free will etc - but L'Herbier's lazy, dreamlike breaks them down, questions their easy categories.

This illuminates the characters' vision of reality which becomes subjectively mediated, blurred, dissolved, hallucinatory, dazed - his stunning recreation of intoxication predates MEAN STREETS by over half a century. One scene, where Sibilla, on stage, begins to break down, dissolve into fragments, jerks, lunges, fades, the cinematic equivalent of Ravel's La Valse, is at least as good as the best of Murnau and Keaton. This kind of abstraction is difficult to pull over a whole feature, and so the last third drags a bit, but, overall, this is a stunning, eerie example of a national silent cinema that has been cluelessly ignored in favour of Teutonic gloom and Soviet propaganda.