Die Unmenschliche

With Marcel L'Herbier's L'Inhumaine, whose sets were designed by Robert Mallet-Stevens, Alberto Cavalcanti, Fernand Leger, and Claude Autant-Lara, architecture became a supreme screen of sets. Concerned with modern ornament, L'Inhumaine would synthesize the design aesthetic of the 1925 Exposition Internationale des Arts Decoratifs et Industriels Modernes, for all who worked on this film (including Paul Poiret, who did the fashions) came to define avant-garde design at the Exposition in the following year. The architect Mallet-Stevens, who designed the pavilion of tourism at the Exposition, was the theoretician of the film set. In his writing on decor, he conceived the set of a film as a work of draftsmanship and a working drawing. He was particularly concerned with rendering hap-tic volumetric(s) and depth and emphasized aesthetic techniques of relief in the design of filmic decor.

L'Inhumaine, a film that turned the architect Adolf Loos into an enthusiastic film critic, opens with an industrial vista of Paris as displayed from the "moderne" villa of Mallet-Stevens. This house is inhabited by "the inhuman one" – a woman. Georgette Leblanc, who conceived the idea for the film, plays Claire Lescot. She is a soprano who presides over an international salon of men, hosting dinner parties served by masked waiters in an inner patio that resembles a refashioned impluvium. This particular set was designed by Cavalcanti, who, in his own Rien que les beures, would constantly return to the theme of food, conceiving the urban rhythm as its own metabolic matter.

Claire's salon is frequented by two suitors who battle of her affection. The engineer, Einat, ends up winning he love by showing her the workings of his very modern "cabinet of curiosity." Claire delights in the marvels of this laboratory (deigned by Leger), in which she can futuristic-ally watch her audiences on a screen just as they are able to hear her sing. As the inter-titles suggest, "she voyages in space without moving," reaching visions of artists in their studios, partaking of the bustling life on the street, and following people driving cars and riding trains. In this way, she lives "through the joy and the pain of human beings." No wonder her other suitor becomes jealous and poisons her.

But Einar's laboratory contains residual traces of its genealogy: it can perform alchemy. What is more, it is outfitted with an extra chamber, equipped with a mechanism for reviving the dead. This lab of transformation becomes activated in a sequence that resonates with Fritz Lang's Metropolis. With superimposition's and rapid montage, the laboratory offers what the inter-titles call "a symphony of labor," which brings our voyage-use back to life and to the liveliness of her urban salon.

The film was made by L'Herbier's own production company, who deliberately chose an awkward science fiction plot in which L'Inhumaine serves as the pretext for some virtuoso displays of cinematographic virtuosity, and as the narrative justification for some remarkable decors. The sets are a microcosm of the whole film: they are in very different styles, and going from one to the next produces an almost physical shock. The film was very poorly received, both by critics and by the public, and one can see why. It is arguably the first great example in the narrative cinema of the so-called post modernist aesthetic. For the coherence of a stable fictional world with suitably "round" characters who undergo various experiences, L'Inhumaine substitutes a fundamentally incoherent world of pastiche, parody, and quotation. Its flat characters provide no stability; they are but puppets in the hands of an unpredictable, perhaps even mad storyteller. The film uses many devices from the stylistic repertoire of cinematic impressionism, but rather than amplifying and explicating the narrative, they serve instead to call it into question.

Goerge Antheil, in his autobiography "Bad Boy of Music," claims that the concert riot scene is actual footage of his own October 4, 1923 concert at the Théâtre Champs Elysées. This event helped seal his reputation as one of the leading modernists of the day. If this is true, then actual artistic history was made because of a reaction at least partially staged for the making of this movie. Among the luminaries present -- and possibly visible -- are Eric Satie (looking like a "beneficent elderly goat") and Darius Milhaud. A few days later, Antheil announced that he was looking for a motion-picture accompaniment to his Ballet Mécanique, a call answered by Fernand Leger.

Parisians in 1924 took their cinema seriously. As an example, when November 1924's "L'Inhumaine" was being screened at a Paris theater, it was reported audience members shouted insults at one another inside while the movie was being shown. Those viewers who hated the movie voiced their displeasure against those who passionately loved it, and vice versa. Female patrons especially were in the majority who disliked "L'Inhumaine" and demanded their money back. The men, if they weren't engage in fisticuffs inside the movie houses, would carry on with the fighting outside.

The amazing aspect of "L'inhumaine" was the conflicts were over its visual and technical innovations the movie introduced to cinema, which was a focus more on the art than an actual plot-driven film. The so-called elites loved its presentation, with architect Adolf Loos commenting, "As you emerge from seeing it, you have the impression of having lived through the moment of birth of a new art."

French artist Marcel L'Herbler, a former auxiliaryman during the Great War, saw the potentiality of silent movies when viewing Cecil B. DeMille's 1915 'The Cheat.' After writing a few screenplays, L'Herbler directed several films before forming his own production company, Cinegraphic, in 1923. His background in canvass painting, almost bordering on the avant-garde, steered him towards the direction of creating a novel filmmaking process geared more towards its artistic merits than the standard run-of-the-mill productions. An old friend, opera singer Georgette Leblanc, proposed she could obtain at least half of the financing and United States distribution costs for a film she would star in. L'Herbler saw this as an opportunity to synthesis all the known arts into a motion picture, securing the services of Paris' greatest talents in painting, set design, clothing fashion, and dancing, along with an original live accompanying musical score, all in a "fairy story of modern decorative art."

Leblanc plays a famous cold-hearted singer who's wooed by almost every man meeting her, especially a young scientist. She later discovers the admiring scientist killed himself over her, but feels no pangs for his loss during a concert she gives that was greeted by a boisterous audience upset by her apathy. She later dies from a snakebite administered by a jealous boyfriend, only to be resurrected by the alive-again scientist that was previously thought to have killed himself.

The barebones plot gave L'Herbler the opportunity to film one of the liveliest theater crowd scenes captured on celluloid. Renting out Paris' Theatre des Champs-Elysees, he invited society's elites, including Pablo Picasso, Man Ray, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, the Prince of Monaco among others to act displeased, appreciative, aggressive and even belligerent to each other during the filming. Other scenes incorporated surrealistic cubist-designed art deco settings that shook the sensibilities of viewers, while the actors floated in and out of the unique backdrops comfortably.

One sequence especially prescience about future communications is the young scientist demonstrates his television linkage to several parts of the globe while Leblanc sings into a studio microphone. Television was at the very early experimental stage in the mid-1920's and was more of a theoretical possibility than a practical device.

L'Herbler threw every cinematic device known to filmmakers up to that time in the concluding sequences. When the scientist and his assistants throw the switch to begin the resuscitation mechinism to revive the dead singer, the director showcases a orange-tinted kaleidoscope of effects bouncing around in every direction. The whirlwind action created a unique otherworldly view of a soul being reinjected into the body.

Movie goers worldwide weren't as aggressive as the Parisians were when "L'Inhumaine" was distributed. Today's critics have appreciated L'Herbler's innovative work, with one blogger writing it's "the sort of film that commands a little more respect - and attention. Without films like this, cinema would be lost."

It is hard for film buffs today to see silent cinema as a modern art. What strikes us nowadays is the immense debt that DW Griffith owes to Victorian fiction, that FW Murnau owes to Romantic painting, that Fritz Lang (and this is true even in Metropolis) owes to ancient German myth. How strange and wonderful then, to see a silent film that owes no debt to anything or anybody, that sums up the notion of 'modernity' in a way no work of art had done before - and precious few have done ever since. Eighty years on from its catastrophic release, Marcel L'Herbier's 1924 masterpiece L'Inhumaine remains the first, perhaps the only, totally modern film.

Most famous, of course, are the sets. A Cubist and Art Deco fantasy world designed by the artist Fernand Leger. Whether it's the salon of seductive chanteuse Claire Lescot (Georgette Leblanc) - a dining table afloat on an indoor pool, servants hidden by perpetually smiling masks -or the laboratory of visionary inventor Einar Norsen (Jacque Catelain) -vast and potentially lethal electronic gadgets, assistants in black leather fetish gear - we have entered a world where the past might never have existed, where the future can only be a continuation of now.

Just as striking, though, is L'Inhumaine's 'emotional modernism'. While so much silent film acting makes us laugh at its melodramatic excess, Claire and her circle of admirers underplay their emotions as coolly as the high-fashion zombies in Last Year at Marienbad by Alain Resnais. (A fervent admirer of L'Herbier, Resnais has acknowledged the influence of L'Inhumaine on his own work, though he insists that "its ambition is more impressive than its achievement.") Leblanc and Catelain make a gorgeously impassive pair of lovers. Hieratic icons for an age whose one true god is the Image.

David Melville

Leave it to Flicker Alley to come up with a silent movie that I wasn't aware of. I may have come across Marcel L'Herbier's 1924 L'INHUMAINE (The Inhuman Woman) in some silent film reference book but I don't recall it. I knew of the director's later movie L'ARGENT (1928) but not this one. Having just watched the film, this is rather surprising as it is quite remarkable on a number of levels. Some of the futuristic design especially in the laboratory scenes recall a Soviet sci-fi film called AELITA, QUEEN OF MARS which was released 6 months earlier while Fritz Lang's METROPOLIS (1927) may have borrowed a thing or two from them later on. L'Herbier envisioned the film as being a "miscellany of modern art" and there is indeed something for everyone in an artistic sense. From an entertainment sense, it's a different matter as its appeal outside of artistic circles would be very limited (just like art films today).

The melodramatic plot tells the story of a callous opera singer (real life opera singer Georgette Leblanc who co-produced) who throws lavish parties and toys with men's affections. When one of them suddenly commits suicide, her fans and detractors clash at one of her concerts recalling THE RITE OF SPRING premiere in 1913. A jealous suitor poisons her with a deadly snake and then it's up to a former lover to bring her back to life in his state-of-the-art laboratory. That's just the basic outline. L'Herbier uses every cinematic trick he can think of from rapid montage editing to a saturation of color tints to enhance his story. The real star here is the decor, a riot of art nouveau as conceived by several leading artists of the day. The sets (especially the laboratory) and the fashions must be seen to be believed. As the plot would indicate, this is not meant to be realistic in any sense of the word which makes it ideal for the medium of silent movies.

The restoration by Flicker Alley and Lobster Films may be the finest that they have ever done regarding the overall look of a film. An original nitrate print in good condition (courtesy of the director's daughter) was the source material and the original color tints as specified by L'Herbier were utilized in the transfer to a digital medium. The two set pieces, the tumultuous concert and the lab resurrection, remain astonishing even to this day. If you carefully look at the 57 minute mark, you'll see composers Erik Satie (ill with less than a year to live) and Les Six member Darius Milhaud (who wrote the original score which is now lost) in the audience at the concert. This Blu-Ray offering comes with two brand new scores, one by percussionist Aidje Tafial, the other by the Alloy Orchestra. Both are effective but I prefer the former. If ever a silent movie was made for Blu-Ray release, it's this one and Flicker Alley & Co have done it up proud. Thank You!... For more reviews visit The Capsule Critic.