L'inhumaine

The eye in motion, usually emblematic as a subjective shot from a speeding car; this has been at the center of this first great French tradition in film. Which is to say, a fleeting glimpse, the opening-up of the point of view from its fixed, static place in history and time to encompass a new, exciting view of life hitherto impossible; a mobility on the whole in all directions of perception, with finally the visibility of soul as the utmost aim.

Two scenes here really take the breath away, both pertaining to the distinctions, and ultimately the inseparability, of reality and art, performance and life, external and internal image.

The first takes place on the stage. The theater at Champs Elysee is packed full with an audience who have gathered to satisfy their morbid curiosity at the scandalous woman - a singer - who is about to appear; so everyone in the auditorium is at the grip of paroxysm not at the prospect of the anticipated performance, the stylized image, the evocative art, but the flesh and blood woman, the reality behind - again though a reality rumored from mouth to mouth, or read from the gossip column of a newspaper. So even before she has had the chance to sing, at the mere sight of her, the place is already in chaotic uproar - everyone wildly gesticulating, booing, others clapping and cheering on - already deeply affected, but unwittingly by another image - the immoral, scandalous woman - which they have projected upon her. And then she sings, and everyone pipes down.

(a prelude to this image-within-an-image, or behind it, is the opening act of a dancing troupe; we see them dance, while on the backdrop behind them are painted figures of dancers, and when the curtain falls, it's again painted with dancers).

The other powerful scene, involves the apparition of a young man thought to have died in a horrible car accident. Moments earlier we had been in the crypt with the dead body, a wind rustled the curtains, a gramophone played presumably eerie music. So, again a performance outwitting the performer, with reality - the kind of which you read from the obituaries in a newspaper, and hence the official, public reality - revealed by art as this unreliable facsimile of hearsay and conjecture.

As with more famous American filmmakers - DW Griffith, Chaplin - it is this institutionalized, hypocritically objective 'humanity' that threatens to destroy the passionate, living individual who can barely make his own intentions known to himself; here it is the leader of some fund for the betterment of humanity who, having been turned away by the woman at a gala, scornfully turns against her.

Purely in terms of images though, you will want to see a scene where - through the use of a 'scientific' device - we are quite literally transported on the lives of people by a singing voice. We steal upon them through a screen.

This is how the filmmaker - who permits our vision to wander - was considered at the time then, as is also evident from theoretical writings of the time; a 'wizard' of science, as the intertitle informs us.

And then the final reel. It is suddenly like Frankenstein's laboratory - full of mysterious futuristic machinery, whizzing with sparks of electricity - animated by bunraku play puppeteers. Figures dressed in black rushing everywhere, rapid-fire montage of faces, pistons, levers, jolts of energy, chaotic but coordinated movement in all directions. I've said it elsewhere about the advent of sound; cinema just wasn't going to be as adventurous, as audaciously freewheeling, freeform, freejazz and ahead of itself, for the next thirty years.

Mostly everything takes place in some fanciful cubist sets, it's the first thing to note I guess, which you may want to see if you're interested in carpentry. But with such marvelous cinema on display, it's merely a footnote.

I'm a fairly avid film guy -- especially when it comes to the avant garde and silent tributaries of cinema. (I mean, come on, I took film classes from Stan Brakhage for cryin' out loud.)

Maybe I'm the stupidest kid on my block, but I'd never even HEARD of L'Humaine until it played at the San Francisco Silent Film Festival's "Day of Silents" last week at the Castro Theatre.

It is absolutely stunning.

You could get all snooty and long-winded about this film, but in my mind it all boils down to this: Metropolis meets Frankenstein in geometry class.

I'd even go so far as to say this movie is better than Metropolis ... But I'm the first to admit that my thinking may have more to do with the fact that I've seen that film a couple dozen times (ie. I know what to expect when I see it) and I'd never seen this movie at all.

When I first started this review, I gave it a 9 thinking nothing's perfect. But honestly, I can't think of something "wrong" with it. Viewing L'inhumaine for the first time was one of the most moving and significant viewings of film in my life. Right up there with 2001 in a Cinerama theater in 1968.

Georgette Leblanc stands out well above an otherwise truly great cast showing a remarkable amount of breadth in her role. What starts out looking like a 2D character becomes someone much much bigger (with a surprising amount of subtlety considering the acting standards of both the French as well as silent film of the time).

When I saw it, the movie was accompanied by the incredible Alloy Orchestra playing live (which kind of adds a very appropriate Devo overtone to it all). It's worth taking a look at their Website to see if/when they're playing with the film. If you've read this far in my review, it'd definitely be worth making a trip to see the whole spectacle. (I have very little doubt that they'll probably eventually release a version of the film with their soundtrack affixed. Get it if they do.)

Thanks for reading.

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."

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.

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.