L'Inhumaine, La Fin du monde: Modernist Utopias and Film-Making Angels

The silent film L’Inhumaine thematizes the triumph of a specifically French cultural activity in its blend of technological abstraction and social agendas both universalist and nationalistic, utopian and unconsciously racist. The filmed voice of its protagonist offers a representation of an idealized vision of the possibilities represented by film and television and of the social codes they mobilize. Related to this film are texts by Blaise Cendrars and Abel Gance that present these media in terms of a unifying, panoptic, even apocalyptic vision.

Marcel L’Herbier, maker of over sixty films between 1917 and 1967 and founder of IDHEC, tells in his autobiography ¹ of the excitement attending his 1924 film L’Inhumaine. La Femme de glace, as this project of his fledgling company Cinégraphic was first titled, was to be a showcase for le style moderne in French arts. L’Herbier wanted this “féerie réaliste,” this “grande mosaïque de l’Art moderne,” to weigh in for French film on the international scene, to show the German and American competition what French film could do. A manifesto for French artistic modernity, it featured decors by Cavalcanti, Mallet-Stevens, Autant-Lara, and Lalique; Fernand Léger designed the scientist’s futuristic laboratory, Georges Antheil and Darius Milhaud contributed music, and Jean Borlin, ballets. L’Herbier chose the singer Georgette Leblanc, Maeterlinck’s former wife, for the lead role, despite the problems her age posed for the camera. She brought major financial backing to the project, and had the clout to rename the film “L’Inhumaine.” Visitors to the set included the not-yet-mad Nijinsky, Erik Satie, and dada artist Picabia, who was miffed, according to L’Herbier, to have been passed over as set designer. His revenge would be to enlist the inexperienced young René Clair instead of L’Herbier to film Entr’acte for Relâche the following year. For his film L’Herbier staged a riot by the artistic Tout-Paris at a performance of Antheil’s mechanical music: the footage was to serve for a scene of the public protest of an ill-timed recital after the death of one of the “inhuman” singer’s admirers. In the crowd one sees Satie, Milhaud, James Joyce, Picasso, Man Ray, Ezra Pound, the Prince of Monaco, some surrealists, and Les Six. The film works for visual correlatives to music through montage, marking a jazz performance in one scene through futuristic blurring of motion. Filmmakers of the period often metaphorized cinema as music: the climax of L’Inhumaine is effected through a sequence of accelerated montage intended to evoke a musical synaesthesia of images abstracted into color and motion.

Because of its heavy-handed storyline, it was considered an artistic failure at the time, and largely forgotten. The film came back into public view in 1987 as a result of the renewal of interest in silent film during the 1980’s: a restored version of the film, given a new soundtrack and its closing images re-tinted, came out amid great fanfare in Paris. L’Herbier’s film merits attention, not only for what it can tell us about what its distinguished group of collaborators thought about technology and modernism, but also for how the film interrogates the categories of humanity and the inhuman under the aegis of French universalism in ways both intentional and tellingly unintentional.

The film’s protagonist is a renowned diva, the wealthy, ultra-worldly Claire Lescot. It introduces the belle dame sans merci at her very moderne De Stijl-style mansion (dining room by Cavalcant, exterior by Mallet-Stevens) attended by a circle of distinguished admirers. She spurns them all, announcing her imminent departure on a trip around the world unless “something” happens to change her mind. In despair one admirer fakes his own death. He is the young scientist Einar Norsen, called a disciple of Einstein: their names are almost anagrams. With his Bugatti automobile and his high-tech lab, he belongs to the new world linked to the promises of science.

Through Norsen’s ruse, Clair comes to his laboratory...