L'Inhumaine (1924)
Directed by Marcel L'Herbier

Film Review

Marcel L'Herbier's hopes of making a successful career as an independent filmmaker fell at the first hurdle when he contracted typhoid during the making of Résurrection (1923), the first film produced by Cinégraphic, the company he set up after his departure from Gaumont.  His health restored, L'Herbier was persuaded by the opera singer Georgette Leblanc to make a film with her in the lead role.  This was Leblanc's second flirtation with cinema - a decade previously she had played Lady Macbeth in one of the first screen adaptations of Shakespeare's 'Scottish play' - and it was also to be her last.  With Leblanc agreeing to secure half of the film's ample budget from American backers, L'Herbier had the confidence to allow his creativity to run riot, and what he envisaged was a totally new kind of film which brought together all of the arts and would feature prominently at the Exposition des Arts Décoratifs when it opened in Paris in 1925.

Leblanc disliked the original script that L'Herbier came up with so it was completely rewritten by Pierre Mac Orlan (the author of La Bandera and Le Quai des brumes, novels that were later adapted as two classics of French cinema).  L'Herbier's evident lack of interest in the plot - a hopelessly contrived melodrama pepped up by some wildly fantastic elements - is apparent in the film he ended up making,  What stays with the spectator after watching the film is not the plot, a stack of nonsense which is hastily forgotten, but the extraordinary spectacle that it presents, one celebrating virtually every aspect of the visual arts in what can best be summed up as a phantasmagorical hymn to modernity.

The first impression that L'Inhumaine makes is the boldly geometric nature of every aspect of its design.  Cubism and Art Deco are the strongest influences, employed with almost religious fervour in the construction of the interior and exterior sets.  The renowned architect Robert Mallet-Stevens designed the box-like houses belonging to the two main protagonists, each reflecting the complex personality of its owner.  For their work on the interiors, Alberto Cavalcanti and Claude Autant-Lara (later to become important film directors in their own right) take Deco to ludicrous extremes but came up with some stunning designs.  Most impressive is the palatial interior of Claire Lescot's Parisian residence, a Cathedral-sized structure which has, at its centre, a checkerboard-like dining area set on an indoor pool.  Most bizarre is Norsen's laboratory which, designed by the painter Fernand Léger, has a Cubist eccentricity that mirrors the multi-faceted identity of its owner whilst adding a satanic mystique to his experiments.  The dramatic impact of these two enormous, highly elaborate sets is exploited to the full by L'Herbier's trademark 'deep space mise-en-scène', which places activity in every part of the frame - the foreground, middleground and background - and endows the film with a dynamism that is unique to this filmmaker, reaching its apotheosis on his unequivocal masterpiece L'Argent (1928).

The bravura creativity is not confined to the set design and direction.  Leading fashion designer Paul Poiret supplied the costumes and the dances were performed by the Swedish Ballet, choreographed by Jean Borlin.  The film's cinematographer was Georges Specht, who had achieved some remarkable results on L'Herbier's previous Eldorado (1921) and who had, prior to this, worked with another of cinema's great pioneers, Léonce Perret, on such groundbreaking films as Le Mystère des roches de Kador (1912).  L'Inhumaine may have been made in the silent era, but L'Herbier had no intention of releasing it as a silent film.  Darius Milhaud was hired to compose a score, performed mostly on percussion instruments, to which the film was meticulously edited.  The fact that Milhaud's score, an essential part of L'Herbier's conception, has been lost to posterity is a tragedy, even if the rest of the film survives and has been restored to pristine condition.

L'Inhumaine is an explosion of art purely for art's sake, and in his attempt to forge a new kind of cinema Marcel L'Herbier is at his most uninhibited and inventive, unwittingly laying the foundation for a new genre of film, the science-fiction fantasy.  L'Herbier's most obvious hallmarks are the impressionistic touches that were beloved by the director and his avant-garde contemporaries, a means of expressing what a character feels rather than merely showing us what he might see as a passive observer.  In one scene, the heroine Claire Lescot imagines she sees the spirit of the man she has fallen in love with emerge from his dead body in a vault.  It's not a flight of fancy but a real manifestation, and this makes Norsen's sudden appearance 'in the flesh' a moment later all the more fantastic.  A grander use of impressionistic technique is the sequence in which Norsen drives his sports car at a dizzying speed towards what is clearly intended to be certain death.  This is strikingly similar to a sequence in Jean Epstein's Le Lion des Mogols (coincidentally released in the same week as L'Inhumaine) and has exactly the same impact - forcing the spectator into the protagonist's state of intoxication, to share his release from the constraints of society and life as he surges through a vortex of barely distinguishable form that screams unbridled freedom.  It is possible that, for this sequence, L'Herbier may have been inspired by Epstein's equally dramatic use of motion in the famous carousel sequence in Coeur Fidèle (1923).

Epstein is one possible influence, and so is another contemporary of L'Herbier, Abel Gance.  It is no doubt the latter's La Roue (1923) that inspired L'Herbier's use of accelerated montage in the dramatic climax to L'Inhumaine, the effect of the rapid cutting accentuated by colour tinting in a way that achieves an alarmingly psychedelic feel.  This is where L'Herbier's deep space mise-en-scène comes to the fore, so that the entire laboratory becomes a kind of living organism, an engine for defying not just the forces of nature but also the will of the Divine.  As Norsen attempts maniacally to resurrect Claire Lescot we are witness to the birth of one of the sci-fi genre's most enduring clichés, presaging not only the scene in Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1927) where the robot Maria comes to life, but also the first awakening of the monster in James Whale's Frankenstein (1931).

L'Inhumaine was a major technical and artistic triumph for its time, certainly one of the most innovative films to be made in the silent era, but its strangeness and artistic over-exuberance proved to be its undoing.  On its original release in December 1924, critics were unsure what to make of it and most were pretty disparaging.  Audiences were just as divided and many public screenings of the film ended with violent punch-ups between spectators.  The critical and commercial failure of a film which L'Herbier might well have considered his magnum opus came as a severe blow and led him to stick to far safer subjects in future, literary adaptations that were more likely to find an approving audience.  L'Inhumaine was virtually forgotten until its belated resurrection in the late 1960s, and it would take some years yet before it came to be regarded as one of L'Herbier's most important works.  Now restored to its former colour-tinted glory, one of the most dazzling films of the Parisian avant-garde of the 1920s is bound to enchant, delight and mystify a new generation of film enthusiasts.  For those who like their sci-fi wrapped in outlandish Art Deco trimmings and Cubist weirdness, there's nothing better.

Film Synopsis

Claire Lescot is a world famous opera singer who revels in the power she exerts over men.  To her grand residence on the outskirts of Paris, she invites her many admirers, all of whom are determined to make her their own.  These include Einar Norsen, a young scientist who threatens to kill himself unless Claire reciprocates his ardent feelings for her.  Claire reacts to this as she does to all protestations of love, with indifference and scorn, and she scarcely shows any emotion when she later learns that the scientist has carried out his threat by driving his sports car over a cliff.  The singer's inhumanity soon becomes public knowledge and at her next concert she is loudly booed by her audience.  Concern for the tragic fate of Norsen weighs heavily on Claire and in the end she is compelled to visit the vault containing his mutilated remains.  Her grief turns to joy when the young scientist appears before her, completely unharmed, and confesses to having faked his suicide.  Claire is soon being led by Norsen to his laboratory where he is busily engaged on research that will benefit humankind.  Jealous of his young rival's success in winning the singer's affections, the Indian mystic Djorah de Nopur plans a terrible revenge...