L'or des mers

Recently restored ,"L'Or Des Mers ",when it was released ,came too late ;the Synchro -Ciné process was stillborn in the world of the talkies .

The cast and credits tell us so :the movie was entirely filmed on location on an island on the coast of Brittany ,then dubbed in studio . A short prologue depicts the miserable life of the people there ,who starve half of the year ;we are not far from Bunuel's "las Hurdes" ,which was released the same year .

There the comparison ends ;"L'Or Des Mers" is a fiction,a rather simplistic fable that shows that the real gold is not to be found in a coffer found in the sea.

An old man,the last ,lonely and wretched person of the island,despised by everyone around ,finds a strange box which might contain a treasure:the villagers become friendly but their kindness is only a facade ;one of them wants his boy to marry the old man's daughter provided she brings him the gold .

The story is slow,and terribly derivative ;the most interesting is the documentary side:those people seem to live in Victor Hugo's "Les Pauvres Gens " time :nothing surfaces from the French civilization of the thirties:no radio,no newspapers,not even a book .The children who laugh at the old man behind his window,do not seem to have a school ;it's an illiterate world .

This movie is very different from what the French directors used to do in the early thirties and was doomed from the beginning:the problem is that Epstein probably wavered between pure documentary and fiction;the former ,as Bunuel did in "Las Hurdes" would have certainly been better.

Like this? Try these .....

" Finnis Terrae" (Epstein,1929) "La Femme Du Bout Du Monde " (Epstein,1937) "Dieu A Besoin Des Hommes " (Delannoy,1950) "Eaux troubles" (Calef ,1949)

On a small Breton island, where the land is heath and the fishing so poor the people starve half a year, an old man goes out to shoot a rabbit for dinner. He finds a box with something in it and hides it quickly. He is noticed, and the greedy islanders quickly come to think it holds gold. They try to get the location out of him.

Jean Epstein's movie is a silent movie, shot wild (without sound) on the Île d'Hoedic, with the islanders playing the roles. Their dialogue, music and a few sound effects were added in production. It's supposed to be based on a local legend, and the sea and shore and menhirs and buildings become characters in their own right. It is clearly a documentary, but not of the modern kind. It's clearly based on the work of Robert Flaherty, who went to exotic locations and built stories around the people he found there.

Whether the source was Epstein or Flaherty or both -- they were revered film makers in their day -- the influence split in two. Directors like Michael Powell would take their cameras to exotic locations and build stories in works like THE EDGE OF THE WORLD and I KNOW WHERE I'M GOING. Others, like Robert Bresson, also influenced by the Russian Academicians' "Theory of Types" would abandon trained actors, and use local individuals, sometimes even animals such as donkeys, in their movies.