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.
© James Travers 2015
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Next Marcel L'Herbier film:
Feu Mathias Pascal (1926)