User Reviews

I must have seen a different print to the one watched by Snow Leopard (on one of the Retour de flamme DVDs) because the one I saw was in extremely good condition with good colour. There's no real plot to speak of as the film is really more of a showcase for the film-maker's special effects and imaginative sets. There's an almost dreamlike quality about films like this - most of which were made by the French - which makes them still enchanting to this day. The trick photography obviously looks a little ordinary today, but no doubt it was quite impressive in its day. And, of course, the influence of Melies, the giant of film pioneers, can be seen in every frame...

This interesting, imaginative Ferdinand Zecca feature was probably very enjoyable and satisfying to its original audience. It is still fun to watch, even though the print has suffered quite a bit from the process of physical aging. In particular, almost all of the color tinting has now faded away, and you can only get a dim idea of what it might have looked like in its original form.

It still has more than enough to make it worth seeing. The story follows the fantastical adventures of a diver, as he encounters sea creatures and much more in the ocean depths. The French cinema pioneers, like Zecca and Méliès, seemed to have a knack for this kind of material.

Certainly, many of the visual effects will look less impressive now, but they still remain interesting, and most of them are still fun to look at. The story itself is pretty lively, and almost all of it shows some imagination as well as technique that is pretty good for its era.

There is still a good deal of confusion in people's minds about the difference between hand-colouring (very much a Pathé speciality because of their automated stencil process - very rare, for instance, in US film) and tinting (which is very common in all "silent" films and only goes out of fashion, for reasons not entirely clear, with the advent of the "talkies" but, from the producers' point of view, because of the additional cost involved as well as the availability of natural colour if colour was required).

As a result of confusing the two, people often talk at cross-purposes. The original version of this film was largely hand-coloured not just tinted, in other words different parts of each frame would have been picked out in different colours not simply going between different ambient colours from frame to frame. Tinting itself became very sophisticated with toning use to create shade-variation even in a single frame, but, although it gives a very strong illusion of colour, it is still basically tinted.

The version of this I saw was tinted with some toning but only a very few remnants of the hand-colouring. The chances are that a restored version will have improved the tinting but, since it is not a very major film, not have restored the hand-colouring.