L'Atlantide

Jacques Feyder’s 1921 film adapts Pierre Benoît’s 1919 novel. Two French legionnaires lost in the desert come upon a hidden kingdom in the middle of the Sahara and its ruler, Queen Antinéa. When Feyder acquired the rights he insisted the film be shot in the desert rather than in a studio, which nobody had attempted at this scale. The unit worked in Algeria for eight months, filming in the Hoggar mountains and among the Tuareg, with interiors done in an enormous improvised tent studio outside Algiers. It became one of the most expensive French films made up to that point and then ran in Paris for a year, which settled the argument about the method.