L'inhumaine (Marcel L'Herbier, 1924)

 

Marcel L’Herbier’s L’inhumaine is a feast of eye-popping design (the only film able to boast Fernand Leger as art director), audacious (albeit, by later standards, not entirely smoothly executed) narrative, and instinctive cinematic know-how. The film’s opening section immerses us in the world of singer Claire Lescot, an impervious goddess (she claims no interest in humanity, only in those exceptional individuals who transcend it) surrounded and fawned over by a diverse circle of would-be suitors. When she rejects one of them, the inventor Einar, he apparently drives his car over a cliff; her decision the next day to go ahead with a scheduled concert bolsters her reputation as an “inhuman woman” (in one of many witty digressions, a butcher is seen opining she has no innards, as he lays out those of his inventory for sale). However, Einar turns out to be alive, leading into a second half in which he leads a more passive Claire through a new world of technology, culminating in a life-changing finale which causes her to transcend her earlier philosophy (one of Einar’s inventions, observed almost in passing, is a world-spanning device that allows a performer to survey all those who are wirelessly listening to her, its rather mystically intoxicating impact clearly anticipating the lure, almost a century later, of virtual events and interactions and godlike access). L’Herbier’s sense of style and play even extends to the intertitles, executed in varying layouts and typefaces; the film has fire-eaters, a poisonous snake, intimations of the supernatural, and all manner of modernist interiors, furniture, devices, and figurative bells and whistles. The film’s home stretch in particular feels incompletely realized in some respects though, the sense of Claire’s character rather dissipating, and the train of events not rendered entirely clearly, all of which does partially add to its cherishable singularity.