El Dorado (1921)
Directed by Marcel L'Herbier

Film Review

Birth of the soundtrack

Innovation was the lifeblood of Marcel L'Herbier's early years as a film director.  Between 1918 and 1920 he had made five full-length films and, in doing so, established himself as one of the leading lights of the French Avant-Garde, a group of radical young screenwriters and filmmakers that was committed to extending the poetic reach of the already staid medium of cinema.  L'Herbier's experiments with camera effects, lighting and cinema technique introduced impressionistic tropes that gave his conception of film art a distinctive visual look - one that took the spectator beyond the hard outer world of appearances, into the much more malleable inner worlds of his protagonists.  There was one domain that remained stubbornly out of his reach, however - that of sound.  To realise his vision of cinema fully L'Herbier saw the integration of sound and image as essential, but as the problem of synchronizing the two remained, apparently way beyond the capabilities of the technology of the time, it must have seemed a distant dream.  Many of L'Herbier's contemporaries believed that whereas colour cinema was just around the corner, fully synchronized sound cinema would be decades away - if indeed it was even a technical possibility.

For his sixth feature, the 33-year-old L'Herbier committed himself to achieving at least a partial solution to the problem.  His idea was to commission a complete musical score that would be fully synchronized with the pictures making up the film.  It was not the first time that music had been written for a silent film, but it would be - as L'Herbier insisted for the rest of his life - the first attempt to fully integrate music and the moving image into a single, coherent work of art.  As the director conceived it, El Dorado was to be a radically new kind of film - a Mélodrame.  It was a melodrama not only in the present-day sense of the term (a sensationalised piece of theatre), but also in the original sense, a composition in which music and drama would be harmoniously married.  L'Herbier's brainchild was effectively cinema's first ever musical - so essential is music to the telling of its story.

In this task, the director enlisted the help of a talented 21-year-old composer, Marius-François Gaillard (also a great pianist, renowned for his recordings of Claude Debussy's piano music).  Gaillard's brief was to compose an original modern score that was in perfect alignment with the fully edited film, following its constantly changing moods and assisting the narrative flow.  Six years before the release of the first talkie - The Jazz Singer (1927) - L'Herbier's film created a sensation and was his first major success.  The first public screening of El Dorado on 20th October 1921 at the Gaumont-Palace in Paris was an important milestone in cinema history - the arrival of the film soundtrack.  It marked the beginning of the end of silent cinema and the start of a whole new era - sadly an era in which L'Herbier's reputation as a great film innovator would rapidly dwindle to practically nothing as a brand new generation of filmmaker rose up to take his place.

A Spanish interlude

El Dorado was the last but one of the six films that Marcel L'Herbier made for Gaumont as part of its prestigious Série Pax range, a series of experimental but polished works that included his first unqualified masterpiece L'Homme du large (1920).  This latter film had benefited from an extensive location shoot in Brittany and this was an experience that the director was keen to repeat in a more exotic setting - southern Spain.  Influenced by the important French Symbolist writer Maurice Barrès, a noted Hispanophile, L'Herbier saw the immense artistic possibilities for shooting a film in Spain.  The distinctive architecture, the colourful culture and the stunning countryside vistas were all crying out to be captured on celluloid.

L'Herbier could hardly believe his good fortune when he was granted permission to take a film crew into the famous Alhambra Palace in Granada, one of world's greatest examples of Islamic architecture dating back to the early 13th century.  (L'Herbier was the first filmmaker to be accorded this immense honour, a sign of his importance at the time.)  With its elaborate arches and ornate marble columns, set in stunningly geometric gardens laden with sculptured shrubs and gushing fountains, the Alhambra was a gift of a location for any filmmaker, but only a director with such a keen visual sense as L'Herbier could capture on film its ageless grandeur, spiritual ambiance and haunting mystique.  Around this miracle of design and construction he weaves a dream-poem worthy of its reputation as one of the world's true architectural marvels.

L'Herbier's location filming extended to other areas around Grenada, Seville and the Sierra Nevada, effectively contrasting the oppressive, morally draining character of the dense urban settings with the more Elysian, spiritually curative aspects of the surrounding Andalusian countryside.  L'Herbier took advantage of the Easter festivities to film the Holy Week processions in Seville.  This not only adds to the film's realism and visual impact, it also provides a potent metaphor, connecting Christ's martyrdom with the ultimate fate of the heroine as she endures her own personal Calvary of suffering, humiliation and violent death.

Once the exterior filming had been completed, L'Herbier returned to Paris to shoot the interior scenes at Gaumont's Buttes-Chaumont studios, with sets designed by Robert-Jules Garnier.  An incredibly prolific designer, Garnier's career spanned four full decades, his main claim to fame being his impressive work on the Fantômas series of films directed by Louis Feuillade for Gaumont in 1913-14.  Garnier's design for the nightclub in El Dorado conveys perfectly the alcohol-sodden seediness of this maison de plaisir and has the dank, claustrophobic feel of an underground burrow frequented by all manner of vermin.  At the same time, it occupies a vast space - large enough for L'Herbier to show us the full range of clientele that is drawn to this popular haven of sin and debauchery through his customary deep-space mise-en-scène.

A model martyr

Intense burning passion is so much a part of the Spanish psyche that without it any cultural reference to Spain would be as dead and hollow as a dried-up husk.  From the poetry of Lorca to the paintings of Picasso and the music of Rodrigo - to cite just three defining examples of Hispanic culture - extreme emotions are what drive the native Spaniard's soul, so full-on melodrama was the natural choice for L'Herbier's florid Spanish interlude, despite its unfortunate reputation as 'low culture' in Europe's more temperate countries.  (Pedro Almodóvar had the same instincts as L'Herbier and managed to turn Spanish melodrama into a fine art, making it the lustrous core of his oeuvre sixty years later.)

El Dorado is almost the exact antithesis of L'Herbier's earlier, far more naturalistic drama L'Homme du large.  Its heroine Sibilla is a faded beauty who is forced to perform as an exotic nightclub dancer so she can buy the medicine she needs for her chronically ill infant child after being abandoned by her vile lover.  Temperamentally and physically, Sibilla is a close cousin of Bizet's Carmen, just as capable of arousing the fieriest of lust in the men who fall under her spell, but just as prone to self-inflicted torment as her wild passions take possession of her.

Through Ève Francis's blazingly intense portrayal of her, Sibilla is one of French silent cinema's most memorable protagonists, the template for the host of female martyrs stoically bearing the cross of betrayal and rejection in countless subsequent film melodramas, most notably the classic American weepy of the 1940s and '50s.  The agony and injustice experienced by a strong and passionate woman in a world dominated by cruel, selfish men is evoked with an almost unbearable pathos by Ève Francis, as it would later be done in Hollywood classics featuring (among others) Bette Davis, Joan Crawford and Olivia de Havilland.

L'Herbier's decision to cast Éve Francis in El Dorado's lead role was no accident - at the time, no other actress was more closely associated with the Parisian Avant-Garde.  For one thing, she was married to Louis Delluc, the highly influential film critic who became one of the movement's leading proponents, contributing a series of significant impressionistic films before his untimely death in 1924.  Francis starred in his best films - Fièvre (1921), La Femme de nulle part (1922), L'Inondation (1924) - but before this she had lent her immense talents to another trail-blazing star of the Avant-Garde, Germaine Dulac.  In the 1930s, the Belgian actress sallied forth to the other side of the camera and became an assistant director, working with L'Herbier on several of his films of this decade, including Le Bonheur (1934), La Route impériale (1935) and Forfaiture (1937).

The two faces of Galatea

El Dorado's lead male role - that of the romantic Swedish painter Hedwick - was an easy shoe-in for Jaque-Catelain, L'Herbier's friend, protégé, collaborator but, most importantly, his principal muse.  Catelain's boyish, androgynous features and almost female sensitivity made him the perfect jeune premier for L'Herbier's modern conception of masculinity, although what set him apart was an acting style that was quite revolutionary for its era - so subtle and understated that he scarcely seems to be acting at all.  It was with the director's blessing that Catelain was able to develop not only his acting skill (allowing him to become one of France's most prominent film stars within just a few years) but also his wider artistic talents - as film editor, assistant director, make-up designer and film director (La Galerie des monstres).  For El Dorado (as he would later do on L'Argent) he tried his hand at set design, contributing the sets inhabited by his own character.

Given the importance of Jaque Catelain in both his private and professional life, L'Herbier's decision to romantically link him in the film with the other great love of his life, Marcelle Pradot (soon to become his wife), is hardly a surprise.  Pradot had previously played Catelain's brother in L'Homme du large and his object of desire in Le Carnaval des vérités (1920), but it is as the delicate Iliana in El Dorado that L'Herbier - the most accomplished actor-moulding Pygmalion in French silent cinema - was most successful in deploying her acting skills and aristocratic beauty.  Pradot's real-life mother Claire Prélia also appears in the film, in the part of Catelain's on-screen mother - as she had done in L'Homme du large and would later do on the director's subsequent melodrama Le Vertige (1925).

The other notable name in the cast list is Philippe Hériat, who makes an impact in one of his earliest screen roles as the genuinely frightening lecherous clown Joao.  It wasn't long after this that Hériat embarked on a career as a writer and soon become one of France's most distinguished novelists.  El Dorado marks another important cinema debut, that of Alberto Cavalcanti, who would start his impressive directing career in France with an influential city symphony Rien que les heures (1926), before going on to become one of the leading directors at Ealing film studios in England in the 1940s - helming such classics as Went the Day Well? (1942) and Champagne Charlie (1944).  Before becoming a director, Cavalcanti worked as a set designer on two of L'Herbier's finest silent films - L'Inhumaine (1924) and Feu Mathias Pascal (1926) - but before this he claimed his first screen credit as costume designer on El Dorado, for which he provided Sibilla's stylish dance costumes.

Distorting reality

The sensational subject matter of El Dorado and the passionate nature of its central protagonist gave L'Herbier ample scope for further developing his distinctively oneiric and subjective style of cinema.  Most striking are the bold optical effects which are employed throughout to stress the emotional turbulence experienced by the characters as feelings of resentment, hatred, desire, fear and dejection take hold.  A sublime example of this occurs in the sequence in the nightclub near the start of the film, where Sibilla becomes partially blurred whilst her surroundings and the people around her remain sharply in focus.  This effect is intended to show the character losing touch with reality as her mind strays elsewhere - to her sickly bedridden son in an upstairs room.

One man who was singularly unimpressed with this innovation was L'Herbier's boss, Léon Gaumont, who took the director to task for what he believed was an unacceptable flaw in the photography.  Relations between the golden boy of the Avant-Garde and his indulgent patron were already strained by this point and the fact that El Dorado went over-budget by 300,000 francs (on an initial budget of 92,000 francs) did not help matters.  L'Herbier's lack of financial restraint on his next film - Don Juan et Faust (also partly filmed in Spain) - resulted in the director being deprived the opportunity of completing the film as he intended and precipitated his hasty exit from Gaumont.  L'Herbier's blasé attitude towards money would soon take a pasting when he started making films for his own production company Cinégraphic, a road to freedom that quickly led him to a humiliating bankruptcy.

Léon Gaumont may not have appreciated L'Herbier's artistic flights of fancy but without them El Dorado would occupy a far less significant place in his oeuvre.  The trippiest optical effect is found at the end of the film for the sequence in which the clown-dancer Joao pounces on the heroine in a pretty brutal attempt to rape her.  Sibilla's horrified reaction to this savage assault is palpably conveyed to the spectator through a dramatic distortion of the image, which elongates the already unusually tall Joao into the shape of a long, thin, slithering giant serpent.  It's a truly gruesome dive into nightmarish spectacle.

In a previous scene showing Hedwick looking at pictures of Spanish architecture, the images are similarly distorted to show the buildings as he sees them and presumably intends to paint them.  More subtle but no less effective are the huge close-ups in which the faces of the spectators in the nightclub are slightly transformed into sinister leering masks of inebriation and lust.  El Dorado's most terrifying images are undoubtedly the grotesque massive close-ups of Joao as his gaze falls on the unwitting Sibilla, his lascivious craving so nakedly exposed that it almost knocks you out of your seat.

Lasting impressions

In developing his optical effects and other camera techniques L'Herbier benefited greatly from his collaboration with Georges Lucas, a staff cinematographer who worked with him on all of the films he made for Gaumont.  Both men deserve credit for pioneering the use of the subjective camera, which is another of El Dorado's striking innovations.  The best example of this are the point-of-view shots showing what Sibilla sees as she spies, unseen, on Hedwick and Iliana as they wander like lovers in a dream around the eerily beautiful grounds of the Alhambra at dusk.  The dancer's voyeuristic thrill at what she sees acquires a subtle hint of malevolent intent, preparing us for the nastier turn the character takes a short while afterwards.

In a later scene, Hedwick's violent confrontation with his reluctant future stepfather Estiria takes on a surprisingly comical form when shown to us from the point of view of the butler who clearly revels in his employer's long overdue comeuppance.  This perspectival shift is all the more dramatic as it comes immediately after a scene consisting almost entirely of short portrait shots of Hedwick and Estiria.  The fast inter-cutting between the two men as they exchange heated words not only underlines the aggressive nature of the confrontation, it also shows the huge emotional and moral separation of the two characters, leaving no doubt that reconciliation between them is impossible.  Throughout the film, point-of-view shots are employed to emphasise the motives and intent of the characters, whether they are driven by tenderness, concern, lust or a burning desire for revenge.

Lighting is another way that the film suggests evil intent.  For the sequence where Sibilla is seen wandering around the gardens of the Alhambra, she is shot from a distance as an anonymous figure in black like a solitary bird of prey - a harbinger of doom steeped in brooding menace.  It is only when the camera moves in closer that the extent of Sibilla's poisonous malignancy becomes apparent, in shadowy profiles that make her resemble some twisted fiend in a Gothic horror movie.  This echoes an earlier sequence, in which the tiny black outline of Sibilla is seen despondently drifting down a street bordered with a huge expanse of white wall.  Here, the character has our full sympathies after being brutally ejected from the house of the former lover who, through vanity, refuses to have anything more to do with her.  By the time the dancer has formed her plan of revenge she no longer stirs fond feelings within us.  As she moves in on the unsuspecting lovers, her solid black form scuttling in the semi-darkness becomes a manifestation of pure evil, taking the film to its first dramatic peak when she entombs her victims in the ancient Palace.

Grim though this sequence is, it is nothing compared with the truly horrific spectacle that occurs right at the end of the film.  As Sibilla succumbs to her self-inflicted stab wound, the silhouetted outline of her former tormentor Joao is seen magnified to terrifying proportions on the backdrop behind her as he performs his comic prances on stage.  Not content with shocking his audience with an explicit self-mutilation, L'Herbier plunges us into unadorned visceral horror for Sibilla's final agonising moments as she releases her grasp on her crushed mortal coil.  There is nothing romantic about this screen suicide - it is about as cruel, ugly and painful as a piece of celluloid could render it, its impact heightened immeasurably by Marius-François Gaillard's extraordinarily well-matched score.

After L'Argent (his unsurpassed masterpiece), El Dorado is Marcel L'Herbier's most visually impressive film, and what makes the visuals so incredibly powerful is Gaillard's accompanying music, which is so perfectly married with the images on the screen that you cannot imagine the one being separated from the other.  Sibilla's emotional excesses, her immense suffering and brief excursion down the darkest of paths - these are so powerfully underscored by the music that you really do feel that you have taken a traumatic roller-coaster ride across the jagged undulations of her tormented soul.

The sequence that follows the final separation of the dancer from her infant son is almost too painful to watch, with Sibilla's broken heart shown on her face as she stands in a quiet empty street, a few steps away from a street guitarist strumming a suitably melancholic air on his instrument.  As the full orchestra cuts out abruptly to leave the plaintive melody of a solitary guitar the sense of abandonment that Sibilia suddenly experiences hits us like a gratuitous face-punch.  This remarkable scene - probably the most moving of any Marcel L'Herbier film - ends ominously with a dramatic fade to white, sending us unsuspectingly into the next grisly passages which provide even greater assaults on our already frayed emotions -  an attempted rape and suicide.

The golden legacy of an impressionist masterpiece

On its first release in October 1921, El Dorado was acclaimed by the French critics and went on to become a box office hit - one of L'Herbier's few commercial successes in the silent era.  Louis Delluc, a fellow impressionistic filmmaker, may have been biased (as his wife was the lead actress in the film), but he summed up the overall critical reaction to the film pretty accurately with his remark: Ça, c'est du cinéma!  As with all of L'Herbier's silent films, El Dorado languished in obscurity for many years until the resurgence of interest in early French cinema in the 1950s, spearheaded by the committed archivist Henri Langlois.  The film was restored to its former glory in 1995 by the Service des Archives du Film du CNC, meticulously reassembled with Marius-François Gaillard's original score.

One of El Dorado's most notable influences on later cinema was on Alain Resnais's 1961 film L'Année dernière à Marienbad.  The hauntingly lyrical quality of the sequences of the Alhambra in L'Herbier's film is mirrored by similar dreamlike perambulations around the no less striking garden vistas of Schleissheim and Nymphenburg in Resnais's somewhat cooler meditation on love and mortality.  It is, however, El Dorado's earlier impact that is perhaps of far greater significance.  Not only did it help to establish the melodrama as a respectable genre in cinema of the 1920s (providing a welcome break from the over-formal, over-respectful literary adaptations that had come to dominate the new medium), it also showed how important sound - specifically a specially composed score - was to cinema's expressive powers.  Silence may have been golden but it was not enough for the flourishing Seventh Art.

Film Synopsis

In a popular district of Granada Sibilla works as an exotic dancer at a seedy nightclub, El Dorado.  Her thoughts are constantly on her 11-year-old son, who is confined to bed with a chronic illness.  Struggling to find the money to pay for her son's medicine, Sibilla is forced to write a begging letter to her former lover Estiria, the man who promised to marry her twelve years ago.  Now Estiria is a rich and well-respected man-about-town, and he wants nothing to do with his impoverished old flame.  Her appeal for help rejected, Sibilla has to find the money she desperately needs another way - by working as a model and guide for the young Swedish artist Hedwick.  It so happens that the latter is madly in love with Estiria's daughter Iliana, who has been promised in marriage to the Duke d'Ormuz, an impecunious nobleman.  The young lovers meet in secret, unaware that their love affair has been discovered by Sibilla, who derives satisfaction from the fact that Iliana plans to meet up with Hedwick at the Alhambra Palace on the evening of her engagement party.

Returning to her stricken son, Sibilla is ever more fearful that he may be close to death.  As the doctor refuses to visit the child until his bills are paid, the dancer has no choice but to call on her ex-lover and beg him to help her.  Estiria is too busy hosting Iliana's engagement party to have anything to do with Sibilla, so she is unceremoniously thrown out of his grand mansion.  Recalling the planned meeting of Hedwick and Iliana that same evening, Sibilla sees at once a way to extort money from Estiria - by forcing the two lovers to spend the night together in the Alhambra.  When the scheme fails, Sibilla confesses what she has done to the artist and invites Iliana to stay at her modest lodgings as Hedwick goes off to ask Estiria for his daughter's hand in marriage.  Estiria is outraged by the artist's audacity and their meeting ends in a violent quarrel.

Hedwick sees only one way out of his difficulties - he must take Iliana with him to his mother's house, some distance away on the Sierra Nevada.  As they depart, the lovers take Sibilla's sick son with them, believing his health will improve in the better climate of the mountains.  Despite the artist's assurances that she will be able to visit her son whenever she wishes, Sibilla cannot help feeling sad at their separation.  It is in a mood of deep melancholy that she returns to the El Dorado nightclub, where she is instantly set upon by Joao, another cabaret performer.  Joao has lusted after the attractive dancer for many months and he cannot contain his bestial urges any longer.  Sibilla manages to fight him off but the humiliation of the assault is more than she can bear.  She goes on stage to perform one last dance to rapturous applause and then goes backstage to stab herself fatally in the neck.  As she dies, her fellow artistes gather around her, horrified by what has happened, not knowing that she has gone to a better place - her true El Dorado.