L’Inhumaine (1924) - film review

A young scientist, Einar Norsen, has fallen in love with the world famous singer Claire Lescot.  She of course rejects his mad protestations of love, and, heart-broken, Einar resolves to kill himself.  The scientist then decides to use his discovery of resurrecting the dead to win the object of his desire…

Although much has been written about L’Inhumaine’s status as a showcase for 1920s avant garde art, this is true primarily for only the first half of the film.  In reality, L’Inhumaine could be said to be two films in one, somewhat clumsily joined at the hip. The first half is indeed something of an artistic canvas which seemingly flaunts Cubist set design for its own sake. But if viewers manage to wade through this rather meretricious display of puppets and papier-mâché, the second half offers a remarkable change of pace. This section begins at approximately the point at which the main character, an operatic diva named Claire Lescot, becomes trapped in a relationship with an inventor, Einar Norsen.  The latter tries to win her, but after initially rejecting his advances, she finds herself entering Norsen’s eerie-looking laboratory in a scene curiously anticipating Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, which did not appear until three years later.

Moreover, there’s a story evolving here in which Norsen, a sort of Mabuse figure, has plotted to kill off Lescot, partly out of revenge, and partly as a sinister experiment in reanimation. We’re witness to what may be the first sequence in feature-film history to show a proverbial mad scientist putting an unfortunate victim through a Faustian experiment. There’s a panorama of whirring machinery and futuristic gadgetry that would be seen again, not only in Metropolis, but in James Whale’s Frankenstein films, and in virtually every science-fiction film from the silent era to the present.

For this reason, I believe L’Inhumaine deserves much greater recognition for its seminal influence in the sci-fi genre, and in the realm of fantastic film generally. It deserves a DVD release so that a wider audience can see what Fritz Lang, James Whale, Rex Ingram, and many other directors had already seen well before the mid-point of the twentieth century.  In short, L’Inhumaine, at least in its latter half, is a pioneering work in the development of early science-fiction.

© Paul Kesler (Bridgeport, Pennsylvania, USA) 2009  

With contributions from the artist Fernand Léger, the architect Rob Mallet-Stevens, the couturier Paul Poiret and the Swedish ballets of Rolf de Maré, L’Inhumaine is not such much a film drama but more a striking celebration of mid 1920s art, in its various forms.   Most impressive are the art-Deco sets, which seem to be a feature of Marcel L’Herbier’s films (most famously in his 1929 masterpiece L’Argent ).

The film illustrates L’Herbier’s impulse to reconcile the avant-garde, with its emphasis on artistic form and style, with the popularist, although perhaps less successfully than some of his other works.  The contrived fantasy plot robs the film of any sense of realism and perhaps too much emphasis is given to its visual side, putting artistic form before characterisation and narrative coherence.   Nevertheless, the film is undoubtedly a work of art which conveys the unbridled excesses of the 1920s more vividly than most films from this period.

© James Travers 2002

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