En L'An 2000 - The Life Aquatic

En L'An 2000 (English: In the Year 2000) were a series of cigarette cards produced in France at the turn of 1900. The initial series was released between 1899 and 1901, in conjunction with the 1900 Paris Exposition Universelle, when excitement about the advancements of the coming century were accelerating. A second series was produced in 1910.

This second set of cards from the series goes on and beneath the waves. This vision of the year 2000 not only has humankind taking to the air, but also taming the wild depths of the sea. 

The Perils of Pauline and the First Female Action Stars

In December 2022, movie star Jennifer Lawrence came under fire on social media after a Variety interview in which she recollected her pride at being the first ever female action star. “I remember when I was doing Hunger Games," Lawrence said, "nobody had ever put a woman in the lead of an action movie because it wouldn’t work — were told — girls and boys can both identify with a male lead, but boys cannot identify with a female lead." 

Volunteer fact-checkers were quick to reply with names like Sigourney Weaver, Linda Hamilton, Michelle Yeoh, Pam Grier, Angelina Jolie, Milla Jovovich, Kate Beckinsale, Carrie-Anne Moss, and Uma Thurman. But one name that seems to escape even the most vehement critic of modern activists' urge to throw all past progress under the bus was Pearl White. It was Pearl White who dazzled audiences in 1914 with The Perils of Pauline, a 20-part serial that wowed audiences with stunts and daring. It also  introduced such words as "cliffhanger" to the English language and invented tropes that had become such staples of cinema that they had already become antiquated cliches before Jennifer Lawrence's mother was even born. About the only trope that didn't come from Perils of Pauline was tying women to train tracks... That was in The Hazards of Helen, an imitator that began later in 1914 and ran for 117 episodes. 

The Perils of Pauline was not the first cliffhanger serial, or even the first to star a woman. The year before, the Selig Polyscope Company released The Adventures of Kathlyn, a now lost 13-part series. Only a few clips, likely from the first reel, are known to exist. The cast was reunited in 1916 for a feature length version that is also lost. Kathlyn Williams was the star of both. 

Extant clips of The Adventures of Kathlyn.

Even Kathlyn Williams was preceded in 1912 by Mary Fuller in What Happened to Mary, an Edison 12-part serial that was too early to employ the cliffhanger format. A cliffhanger, of course, breaks up the main action set pieces of a serial so that the audience is left in breathless anticipation of what happens next, and dutifully ensure they pay to see the next installment. What Happened to Mary didn't have cliffhangers, but it did coincide with a literary serial in the pages of The Ladies' World magazine. Presently, What Happened to Mary is a rare film, with only a couple episodes available online.

Extant episodes of What Happened to Mary.

Despite the pedigree of daring women preceding her, Pearl White and The Perils of Pauline became the smash hit that was remembered and satirized for generations thereafter. In it, grand old Sanford Marvin would like nothing more than to see the marriage of his son Harry to his ward, Pauline. Pauline, however, would like nothing more than to travel the world and lead a life of adventure. So a deal is struck that she will marry Harry after being able to live her life of adventure for one year... And this deal was struck not a moment too soon. Sanford passes from illness immediately thereafter, leaving Pauline in the care his his assistant Raymond Owen (or "Koerner" in the French release), along with a princely inheritance to be bequeathed to her on her marriage to Harry. But such fabulous wealth would be wasted on the girl... Owen enlists his network of criminal colleagues to ensure that Pauline never returns from her adventures.

This is the perfect setting for inventive ways to try and kill someone on screen. The first episode has Owen convince Pauline to begin her life of adventure with a ride in a balloon, which he orchestrates to fly off with her by herself. She gets hung up on the Palisade cliffs of New Jersey, and rappels down to a perilous ledge. Harry finally catches up and climbs down a rope to get her... Only to have Owen cut the rope! Fiend! When they manage to deflate the balloon and use its remaining rope to climb the rest of the way down, an accident knocks them out and Pauline is kidnapped by Owen's henchman, who locks her in a burning cabin! Zounds! Subsequent adventures take place in the Wild West, the High Seas, aero races, gypsy camps, and to the bottom of the ocean.    

Unfortunately, more of The Perils of Pauline are lost than remain. Of the original 20 episodes, only 9 are known to exist. These are the Pathé version, in which Owen is renamed Koerner to curry anti-German sentiment in the months before The Great War. These episodes have since been retranslated back into English. 

The first episode of The Perils of Pauline,

followed by each subsequent, extant episode.

Pauline eventually settles down from a life of adventure, but Pearl White did not. She would go on to star in a series of three serials across 1914 and 1915: The Exploits of Elaine, The New Exploits of Elaine, and The Romance of Elaine. These an subsequent serials like The Iron Claw (1916), Pearl of the Army (1916), and The Fatal Ring (1918) established White as "The Queen of the Serials." She was even notable for doing her own stunts, though she did have stand-ins for the most dangerous among them. That didn't save her from injury, however. Spinal damage during The Perils of Pauline dogged her entire life, and she only found relief for it in the drugs and alcohol that eventually claimed her. White died of liver failure in Paris in 1938. 

She did live long enough to see a remake-in-name-only of The Perils of Pauline. Universal Studios acquired title from Pathé for their own serial in 1933 that bore no resemblance to the original. This version, starring Evalyn Knapp, involves more globe-trotting archaeology in the Golden Age of Hollywood adventure film tradition. Weird decades-later remakes that have virtually nothing in common with the original are not a new phenomenon.

The complete 1933 Perils of Pauline.

 
Then in 1947, Paramount released their own Perils of Pauline. But this version was not a remake... It was a biographical film about Pearl White herself and her rise to fame, cashing in on the Gay Nineties aesthetic that was starting to permeate post-WWII film.

1947's The Perils of Pauline.

Perils of Pauline also inspired countless parodies, homages, and imitators. "The Peril of..." became an easy go-to title for studios pitching dangerous adventure in any locale. The medium of serials and the genre of Northerns were lampooned in Dudley Do-Right of the Mounties. The Perils of Penelope Pitstop (1970) by Hannah-Barbera took the serial tropes and applied to a spin-off of Wacky Races (1968-69), which was itself inspired by The Great Race (1965), Blake Edwards' somewhat overlong and insensitive satire of silent films. 

It's frankly surprising in our glut of streaming content that some enterprising conglomerate hasn't dredged up The Perils of Pauline for a tongue-in-cheek historical comedy. Maybe Jennifer Lawrence can star in that and be the first ever woman to play Pauline? 

Mr. Penney's Aerial Submarine by E.J. Rath

Pity the frustrated inventor, who has a remarkable idea that must be shaped to sheer dumb fact. Such is Mr. Penney, latest in the line of Darius Green and other hayseed inventors. Formerly of the city, forced to the countryside for his health, Mr. Penney cannot acclimatize to the condition of being a farmer. His workshop lures him ever onward to misadventure, undaunted by his numerous setbacks.

Written by E.J. Rath, pseudonym of Edith Rathbone Jacobs Brainerd, Mr. Penney's Aerial Submarine appears here as it originally did in the August 1908 edition of Cosmopolitan Magazine. Brainerd was a well-established author, many of whose stories had been adapted to film. Tragically, she died at the age of 37 when the roof of the Knickerbocker Theater in Washington D.C. collapsed under heavy snow on January 27, 1922. The incident also claimed the life her husband Chauncey and 200 others. Illustrations for Mr. Penney's Aerial Submarine are by Horace Taylor. Click on each image for a larger version. 

The Mysterious Island: The Original Silent Film

At the end of what is unarguably his most famous novel, Jules Verne sent his tortured mariner Captain Nemo to an apparent death in a mighty maelstrom. The tempest echoed the tempest in Nemo's own soul, but it left behind the question of what might have happened to him after that. Did he survive? How? And what was his story? Why did this mad genius declare war on war, and who was he that he could afford so extravagant a machine of vengeance as the Nautilus?

The answer came a few years later in The Mysterious Island. The story begins much like the Robinson Crusoe type of story does, with a group of Union soldiers and their Confederate prisoner who escaped from a Confederate POW camp via aerostat, only to be blown out to the Pacific and washed ashore on the titular volcanic spit of land, south of French Polynesia and East of New Zealand. While enjoying their tropical getaway, an anonymous observer constantly supplies the Crusoes with the necessaries of survival. Eventually this benefactor is revealed to be Captain Nemo, who survived the maelstrom and has lived out his remaining years in a secret lair beneath the island. 

The novel's first adaptation to film came in 1916's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. Though under the title of its predecessor novel, this film fused the two together. The sequences from Twenty-Thousand Leagues Under the Sea imparted some good action scenes and made use of the still-new technique of underwater photography. The sequences from The Mysterious Island provided the dramatic gravitas. After The Great War, the works of Jules Verne unfortunately fell into some disrepute. 

Verne had always suffered from poor English translations that excised much of his literary and dramatic achievement in favour of two-fisted adventure and technological innovation that would be most appealing to children. By the end of WWI, most of Verne's predictions came true and his work gathered the reputation of simply being outdated... The simple artifacts of grandfather's simpler times. That reputation, despite being consistently overturned in academia since the Sixties and Seventies, still holds a lot of sway, as when Science Fiction author Robert J. Sawyer accused Verne languishing in obscurity because "nothing is less interesting than old technology" (supposedly).  

Consequently, the majority of Verne's books to be adapted to film between the two World Wars were his spy thrillers. The most popular of these was Michael Strogoff: The Courier of the Czar, adapted no less than six times between 1914 and 1943. Luckily for Verne, his body of work was diverse enough to lend itself to non-Science Fiction films. Only 20 of his 84 novels and short stories involved any kind of technological speculation. Verne supplied a wanting, literate public with pedagogical adventure in the far-flung locales of the world, whether the wastes of Siberia or the deeps of the ocean.

There is one outlier to this tendency towards adapting the French author's spy novels: The Mysterious Island, released by MGM in 1929. Whereas Verne was not an author of Science Fiction as we think of it, that genre was becoming established by the late Twenties. There is no bigger example than Fritz Lang's masterpiece Metropolis, released in 1927. He followed that up in 1929 with Frau im Mond ("Woman in the Moon"). Tolstoy's 1923 Science Fiction novel Aelita, or the Decline of Mars was adapted in 1924. More poignantly, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's 1912 dinosaur adventure story The Lost World was adapted to film in 1925. There was a distinct possibility that Verne could be rehabilitated as a source for Sci-Fi stories in the age of Art Deco and Radium.

Fitting it into that genre was another feat which renders the use of Verne's title somewhat moot. In this version, Count Andre Dakkar (played by Lionel Barrymore) has created a fleet of two submersible craft to explore the depths of the ocean, where he is sure there exists a form of aquatic man. His volcanic island off the coast of the fictional Eastern European nation of Hetvia is a worker's paradise without class distinctions... So much so that Dakkar's sister, Countess Sonia (Jaqueline Gadsden, billed as Jane Daly), and the engineer Nicolai (Lloyd "Lost World" Hughes) carry on a love affair. None of this sits well with the duplicitous Baron Falon (Montagu Love, who played opposite John Barrymore in Don Juan), who wants the submarines as weapons of war and the Countess as his aristocratic bride. What ensues is a submersible chase to the bottom of the sea and back again, where they encounter sunken wrecks, giant octopi, and strange mer-men that occupy the dark and the cold of 20,000 fathoms. 

With the only connections to the original novel being the name of Dakkar and the fact that submarines are in it, one wonders why they bothered to call it The Mysterious Island at all. There must have been some mental loops in the decision to ascribe the name of Verne to it for marketing purposes when that name did not carry a whole lot of weight at that time. Inspiration is also taken liberally from Twenty-Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, and I would imagine that the proliferation of Michael Strogoffs had some influence on the decision to set the story in Eastern Europe and dress the cast in generically Russian clothing. An influential Franco-German production of Michael Strogoff, starring Ivan Mosjoukine, had been released only 3 years before.

There is an underlying theme of Old World, European aristocracy versus New World, American egalitarianism, and the use of technology for scientific discovery or for war, and those sorts of things. Nothing is really said or developed about them. They're just there. Lots of rousing action happens, especially when the Hussars under Falon commandeer the island, suppressing the workers while lying in wait for the first of the two submarines to surface from its first test run. The special effects are quite good for the time, and shine when the two submarines find themselves trapped in the underwater chasms belonging to the ancient lost race of marine men. When one of the submarines begins to flood, as submarines in submarine films are wont to do, effects deftly handle the tragedy. The costumes of the mer-men are a bit silly, but that's par for the course.

What is of particular note is that, just as the 1916 20,000 Leagues was an early experiment in underwater photography, Mysterious Island is an early experiment in sound. 

The advent of Talkies pushed back the completion of the film by several years. Production began in 1926 under the direction of Maurice Tourneur and Benjamin "Witchcraft Through the Ages" Christensen, but after Al Jolson started singing, many silent films were shelved or retooled. Tourneur walked off the set after a dispute with the producers, giving Lucien Hubbard the sole director credit. The entire film had been shot in expensive 2-strip Technicolor (with the coloured print only recently being rediscovered and restored), and then a trio of sound sequences were tacked on to the largely silent film. While it could have been a pointless novelty, Hubbard used sound to great advantage. The first of the sound sequences is right at the beginning: after a short, silent prologue establishing the setting, there is the astonishment of Barrymore and Love talking... Talking!! In the process of wowing audiences with their own voices (thankfully they both had good voices for cinema, unlike many silent era stars), they also got to knock out a good chunk of cumbersome exposition. The next two sequences are ingenious. While on its first test run, Dakkar surprises Falon with a device that allows them to communicate wirelessly with the submarine. They do, to the actual sound of Lloyd Hughes' voice. Later, when all Hell has broken loose, the submarine is lured into a trap by use of the same radio. The communication system is pushed within the film as a wonder of technology, and the theme is driven home by playing the scene out in a wonder of real-life film-making.

Where The Mysterious Island is also notable is that it is sometimes cited as the beginning of the modern age of Scientific Romances in film. No specific date for The Mysterious Island is given, but it is clearly meant to take place before the proliferation of either submarines or radio. This would place it before the early 1900's, as modern submarines had come into their own in the first decade and were employed to devastating effect in WWI (providing a bit of the subtext for Dakkar's reluctance to see his ships used for violence). Radio was already a significant mass medium by the Twenties. Whenever it takes place, it was clearly not modernized in the same way that The Lost World was. While set in the Victorian Era, much of The Mysterious Island resembles the sleekness of Science Fiction in the Twenties and early Thirties. Nevertheless, Rod Bennett, in his survey Voyages Extraordinaires on Film, argued that it was the first to deliberately set itself in that era:

I think we can say with confidence that the producers of The Mysterious Island were the first filmmakers in history who'd ever dared, with a breathtaking flash of invention, NOT to update a hopelessly out-of-date book. They took Jules Verne's daring predictions about the day-after-tomorrow and turned them into something else entirely—into a huge, elaborate alternate universe story. They created a 19th century of the imagination, where British Imperialists reached the Moon 75 years before Neil Armstrong, and electric submarines prowled the deep while Buffalo Bill was still prowling the West.

Unfortunately that gamble did not pay off for them the way it did for Walt Disney some 25 years later, when his 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea was a smash hit that provoked a rash of adaptations from Verne and other 19th century authors. It cost a staggering $1 million to produce (equivalent to $14 million today) and only earned back $55,000. To the minds of Hollywood, this only proved how outdated Verne was and even cast a pall over Science Fiction as a genre for a few years. The USSR would try their own version in 1941, Hollywood gave it a go in a 1951 serial that featured an invading army from the planet Mercury, and it finally got its due in 1961's epic effects film by Ray Harryhausen.

The Mysterious Island, while far removed from Jules Verne, is at least worth seeing as a unique window in the development of motion picture arts and sciences. Without further ado, the complete 1929 adaptation of The Mysterious Island...

20,000 Leagues Under the Sea: The Original Silent Film

While the most renowned of the adaptations of Jules Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Disney's 1954 film starring James Mason and Kirk Douglas is not the first time the Nautilus sailed onto the silver screen. On the contrary, the first major adaptation of Jules Verne's classic Scientific Romance premiered at Chicago's Studebaker Theatre on October 9th, 1916. The greatest novelty the film had to offer audiences of the time, however, was as "the first submarine photoplay ever filmed."

The process of underwater photography was still a recent invention by Ernest and George Williamson, who created the "Williamson Tube" device and personally supervised the filming of 20,000 Leagues. Being a new technology, the underwater sequences were the standard experimental fare... Rather than pushing themselves to thrill audiences, just being able to see the sea floor was thrill enough and the major underwater sequence is more of a travelogue. From the viewing portal on the Nautilus, the characters watch in amazement as Captain Nemo points out sponges, sharks and barracuda.

While it is easy to be facetious about it now that underwater photography is only a Discovery Channel away, there was a timeless flaw with the filming in 20,000 Leagues: the sequences were filmed in the lagoons of the Bahamas, which, with the technology at hand, didn't look particularly appealing. No doubt many a person watching the film for the first time thought that the ocean bottom was decidedly unattractive. However, recognizing the innovation made and allowing oneself to get caught up in the antiquity more than makes up for it.

The story itself is a combination of Verne's Nemo cycle: Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and The Mysterious Island. In fact, it is really more an adaptation of latter than of the former. The main body of the plot is lifted from The Mysterious Island and it is in the context of that where most of the action occurs. This version also explores the origins of Captain Nemo more deeply than later versions, and retains his ambiguously East Indian ethnicity.

Unfortunately though, sacrifices have to be made. There is no giant squid battle in this version, and many of the characters are rendered superfluous... Ned Land and Professor Arronax serve no useful purpose except to introduce us to Nemo. The balloonists of The Mysterious Island serve a bit more of a purpose, but overall there is the sense that everyone on ship and on land are as much spectators of the central drama of Nemo as the people watching the film in nickelodeons.

It is also worth noting that the credibility of this and other early submarine films were helped along by the Great War waging in Europe and on the high seas. Submarine warfare was making headlines almost daily, so the prognostications of Verne were especially relevant at this time, even if 20,000 Leagues discreetly chose not to fully explore the lineage between the Nautilus and the U-Boat.

Nevertheless, 1916's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea is still a worthy first entry into adaptations of this classic tale. All adaptations since 1954 have languished in the long shadow cast by that Nautilus, but this early piece of silent film history has emerged to provide an alternative glimpse on the life and times of Captain Nemo.

The full 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea silent film.

Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea

Due in no small part to the Disney film adaptation, Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea has emerged as the pre-eminent classic of Victorian Scientific Romances. Verne alone published 54 Scientific Romances during his lifetime, bearing the brand label "Voyages Extraordinaires." The term was invented by Verne's publisher, Jules Hetzel, to describe a brand new genre of literature designed "to outline all the geographical, geological, physical, and astronomical knowledge amassed by modern science and to recount, in an entertaining and picturesque format...the history of the universe." Twenty Thousand Leagues is, arguably, the greatest of them all.

Illustration of Captain Nemo based on Jules Verne,
by Alphonse de Neuville.

As some critics have observed, based primarily on shoddy English translations, Twenty Thousand Leagues is for the most part a novel about fish. Though an inventive extrapolation on existing submersible technology, the Nautilus is for the most part a plot device by which Verne takes his readers on an unparalleled oceanographic expedition through each of the seven seas. Over its 200-some pages, Captain Nemo is a tourguide through oceans, beneath icecaps, past famous shipwrecks, and beyond Atlantis. But Verne was also an insightful critic of society as well as a literary inventor of technological contraptions. There is more to Twenty Thousand Leagues than fish, or submarines.

Peering out of the salon window,
by Alphonse de Neuville.

Film versions have tended towards the character drama of the Nautilus' captives - French Professor Aronnax, his assistant Conseil and French-Canadian harpooner Ned Land - though their attempts to escape their maritime prison were a minimal aspect of the novel. Twenty Thousand Leagues is not really about them. Rather, they are the lens through which we are invited to, first, see the world beneath the ocean surface and, second, to see into the life of the mysterious Captain Nemo.

The fiery fate of Atlantis, by Alphonse de Neuville.

Though much has been made of Disney's Nemo as the tortured political refugee seeking revenge against and refuge from the rulers of the surface world, this cinematic version is actually the crudest caricature of Verne's mariner. While he has the airs of waging war on war - and it might prompt a post-9/11 society to ask if you can wage wars on tactics like war and terrorism - his is really a much simpler story of revenge. Verne's character is more complicated and politically charged, to the point that the published version was actually censored from the original manuscript. The author's intention was to make Nemo a Polish refugee escaped from tsarist Russia, but Hetzel felt it would alienate the Russian audience. Eventually, in the sequel novel The Mysterious Island, Nemo was revealed as an Indian prince escaped from British India.

Preparing for battle, by Alphonse de Neuville.

Verne is still more ambiguous about Nemo than even simple anti-colonial interpretations permit. Nemo reflects one of the fundamental anxieties of post-colonial Western society, which wishes to redress the endless ream of crimes that made possible its existence and economic prosperity while simultaneously refusing to leave that advantage behind. On the one hand he is the avenger of the poor and oppressed, but on the other he is a colonialist par excellence.

Though professing a desire to escape the world above, he does so only in terms that allow him to take the fruits of that land with him. He fishes the sea for food, but trawls the land for treasures of books, paintings and other things that occupy his salon and library. His library, Aronnax estimates, contains some six or seven thousand volumes, which Nemo corrects at 12,000 with the addendum "These are the only ties which bind me to the earth." Not quite, as amongst the artistic treasures in Nemo's salon are,

...a Madonna of Raphael, a Virgin of Leonardo da Vinci, a nymph of Correggio, a woman of Titian, and Adoration of Veronese, an Assumption of Murillo, a portrait of Holbein, a monk of Velasquez, a martyr of Ribeira, a fair of Rubens, two Flemish landscapes of Teniers, three little "genre" pictures of Gérard Dow, Metsu, and Paul Potter, two specimens of Géricault and Prudhon, and some sea-pieces of Backhuysen and Vernet... Delacroix, Ingres, Decamp, Troyon, Meissonnier, Daubigny...

Add to this the composers whose works rest upon the organ - Weber, Rossini, Mozart, Beethoven, Haydn, Meyerbeer, Hérold, Wagner, Auber, Gounod - and what we have is a cultured man of means possessing refined tastes. Feebly he objects that these "Masters have no age" and that "in the memory of the dead all chronological differences are effaced," invoking the timeless objective value of artistic excellence against the direct social, cultural, economic and chronological processes that permit artistic excellence.

The salon, by Édouard Riou.

The Nautilus which houses such treasures is not the unique product of a lone inventor's sweat and elbow-grease, but is itself very much the product of colonial industry. Nemo reveals his process:

Each separate portion... was brought from different parts of the globe. The keel was forged at Crensot, the shaft of the screw at Penn & Co.'s, London, the iron plates of the hull at Laird's of Liverpool, the screw itself at Scott's at Glasgow. The reservoirs were made by Cail & Co. at Paris, the engine by Krupp in Prussia, its beak in Motala's workshop in Sweden, its mathematical instruments by Hart Brothers, of New York, etc...

The most physical labour was in the jigsaw piecing together of the craft on a desert island. The final tally of Nemo's privileged escape from the terrors of the surface world? "It came therefore to £67,000, and £80,000 more for fitting it up, and about £200,000 with the works of art and the collections it contains." Keep in mind that he is speaking here of the investment capital, prior to having been able to access the riches of the ocean depths. In his life on land, Nemo was obviously a man of considerable wealth and education by anyone's standard. "Immensely rich, sir;" he tells Aronnax, "and I could, without missing it, pay the national debt of France."

The Nautilus, by Alphonse de Neuville.

The land is still required for the operation of the Nautilus' engines. Unlike the Disney film, which ties the electrical power of the ship to atomic power, Verne's device was a sodium extraction method that requires coal in the production of the sodium. The coal, Nemo proudly states, comes from beds beneath the ocean. The burning of the coal for the sodium needs must occur on land, in the shelter provided by the exhausted crater of an extinct volcano in the Atlantic.

Nowhere are Nemo's ties to the land more obvious than when he literally plants his flag and his name over a whole continent. Later on in the novel, without any hint of the irony or hypocrisy, Nemo plants the black flag embroidered with a golden "N" on the snow and gravel of Antarctica and proclaims,

I, Captain Nemo, on this 21st day of March, 1868, have reached the south pole on the ninetieth degree; and I take possession of this part of the globe, equal to one sixth of the known continents.

When asked by Aronnax in whose name he lays this claim, Nemo brusquely replies "In my own, sir!" Finally as the sun slips out of sight on its half-year retreat, he bids it farewell:

Adieu, sun! Disappear, thou radiant orb! Rest beneath this open sea, and let a night of six months spread its shadows over my new domains!

Gone are any pretences of escaping the land or its systems of colonialism and domination. Nemo becomes the sole monarch of the Antarctic, and happily so.

Nemo surveys his new empire, by Alphonse de Neuville.

But for the most part, Nemo's chosen domain of colonial exploitation is the ocean, which serves as his personal political territory, larder and bank. On the one hand he speaks of the liberty of the depths, but on the other hand speaks of his ownership of them:

... the sea supplies all my wants. Sometimes I cast my nets in tow, and I draw them in ready to break. Sometimes I hunt in the midst of this element, which appears to be inaccessible to man, and quarry the game which dwells in my submarine forests. My flocks, like those of Neptune's old shepherds, graze fearlessly in the immense prairies of the ocean. I have a vast property there, which I cultivate myself, and which is always sown by the hand of the Creator of all things.

A hunting excursion, by Alphonse de Neuville.

The society he creates aboard his ship, which makes for the efficient exploitation of the fruits de mer, is a definite mirror of the hierarchies above the waves. The library and salon are Nemo's alone, granted to the three captives, but with no indication that they are at the service of the Nautilus' mostly silent crew. This crew is a nameless presence that exists to serve the needs of the protagonists. Like the Disney film, this has a practical narrative purpose of not bogging the story down with additional characters, with the unfortunate side-effect of creating a deeply classist society aboard the ship. A later Verne film - Master of the World starring Vincent Price and written by Richard Matheson - does give personality to the crew, to much better effect in explaining their loyalty to the mission and their captain.

Repeatedly Nemo demonstrates compassion for the oppressed and impoverished. He reveals his ethnicity only briefly by identifying with an East Indian pearl diver he rescues from the clutches of a shark attack (likely because this is as close as Verne got to figuring out who Nemo was going to be by publication time, if he could not be Polish). He is again shown sending gold ingots up to another fisherman, as well as demonstrating the source of this wealth. Upon seeing the shipwrecks that supply Nemo with his millions in net worth, Aronnax remarks that he pities "the thousands of unfortunates to whom so much riches well distributed would have been profitable, whilst for them they will be forever barren." Nemo angrily retorts,

Do you think then, sir, that these riches are lost because I gather them? Is it for myself alone, according to your idea, that I take the trouble to collect these treasures? Who told you that I did not make a good use of it? Do you think I am ignorant that there are suffering beings and oppressed races on this earth, miserable creatures to console, victims to avenge? Do you not understand?

Saving the pearl diver, by Édouard Riou.

He hands charity to these suffering masses, and certainly claims solidarity, but the question must be raised as to the exact extent of the solidarity. What does this solidarity even mean when one has fled from the life conditions of the suffering into a perpetual escape of relative ease and luxury? Nemo's life is not one of real involvement in the struggle of others as one among them, or attempting to use a position of wealth and authority to affect systemic change to benefit the poor. As Aronnax observes, "I understand the life of this man; he has made a world apart for himself, in which he treasures all his greatest wonders."

Nemo is very much the embodiment of the modern, or post-modern, age. It is acutely aware of the processes of colonial exploitation of people and the environment, but at the same time still insistent on benefiting from those processes. It dispenses charity in the name of solidarity while setting a world apart for itself (which, granted, is still better than doing nothing or, even worse, claiming solidarity while doing nothing). In the end, Nemo is prohibited from reconciling this ambiguity to himself, as the symbolic Maelstrom sends a crazed spectre of himself and his ship to the bottom of the seas, from whence it will emerge in The Mysterious Island.

Aronnax and co. escape during the Maelstrom,
by Alphonse de Neuville.

A New Way of Travelling

In this hand-tinted 1908 Pathé Frères short by Segundo de Chomón, a trio of slapstick Chinese explorers (interpreted through very 1908 caricatures) figure out a new way to venture into the depths of the ocean. Once they dash themselves on the rocks of the seabed, the oddities of the submarine realm reveal themselves in a very Mélièsian cavalcade of cinema trickery.

Wojciech Ostrycharz's World of Jules Verne

The following images are by Polish artist and animator Wojciech Ostrycharz, currently of Barcelona, Spain, drafted for an interesting Jules Verne exhibit. His credits include work on Dead Island and the Call of Juarez game franchises, and a cross section of his excellent work can be found at his website  Art Way Studio. The exhibit - The World of Jules Verne - was put together by Branzo Artistic Agency, photos of which can be seen on their website. 

Song of the Deep and its Sources

Insomniac Games' Song of the Deep is a charming 2-D action-puzzle game in a rich underwater fantasy world. The company's first "Metroidvania"-style game, the story revolves around young Merryn, a 12-year old girl who lives by the sea. When her fisherman father goes missing one terrible night, she must descend below in her own makeshift submarine to find him. There, she discovers that the mystical world of sea creatures, sunken wrecks, and ancient civilizations he told her about in bedtime stories actually is real. 

Song of the Deep's reveal trailer.

Disney's Atlantis: The Lost Empire and its Sources

It was very appropriate, and most likely unknowingly so, that Disney set 2001's Atlantis: The Lost Empire, in 1914. Indeed, in many ways it could not truly have been otherwise: the middle Victorian era saw the beginning of an explosion of interest in the lost continent that would not subside beneath the waves again until the 1960's. In the decade spanning 1895 to 1905, there were no less than 16 fiction novels, standing alongside countless ostensibly non-fiction pseudoscientific and spiritualist explorations, which solidified the Atlantis we know today: not as a holdover of ancient myth, but as an artifact of Victorian cultural anxieties.

Trailer for Atlantis: The Lost Empire (2001)

Deutschland im Jahre 2000

In January 1900, the German chocolate company Hildebrands placed these depictions of the Fatherland in the year 2000 in packages of cocoa and chocolates. Like En L'An 2000 and Moscow in the XXIII Century, these cards depict the usual turn of the century ambitions: airships, submarines, covered cities, television, and improved security. The overriding theme is bringing the hitherto unobtainable into the everyday. Aerial travel becomes everyday, and can even be used to venture to impenetrable locales like the Arctic. The oceans become accessible, and what isn't directly accessible is observable through mass media. So, in many ways, we are living in the golden age of Victorian futurism... I just wish it looked as good as these cards.   

Chocolat Lombart en l'an 2012

Founded in 1760, Chocolat Lombart was, in its heyday, the oldest and largest company in France. By the 1889 Exposition Universelle, the company was considered a model of efficiency and employee welfare. Their modern factory employed 500 people and provided health insurance, housing, and offered workers a share in the annual profits. All this had to be paid for by chocolate. Like cigarettes, fanciful collectors cards were included in chocolate packages to bolster those sales. In 1912, Chocolat Lombard presented its vision of all the amazing ways that customers could buy Lombart chocolates a century in the future.  

Don't forget the Lombart chocolates!

Stopping off at the chocolaterie.

On the video-phone with their son in Asia.

Chocolate delivery by air.

Le voyages dans la Lune.

Unda' the sea.

Unfortunately, if this advertising worked and you want to enjoy Chocolat Lombart yourself, you're out of luck. The company was absorbed by Menier Chocolates in 1957.