★★★★★
When Marcel L'Herbier made
L’inhumaine, cinema was still in a state of creative flux. It had settled down into a narrative form to a large extent, and some of its most important elements like editing, cinematography and mise-en-scene were well-understood and established. But in 1924, L'Herbier wasn’t focused on using these accepted elements in a conventional way. Instead,
L’inhumaine is excited about the out-of-the-ordinary, expressive possibilities that the elements of the new medium of film had to offer.
In launching this experiment, L’Herbier kept one foot in convention in order to maintain audience engagement. A key element of that effort is the overall narrative of a love story between an earnest, young engineer – Einar – and Claire Lescot, a middle-aged singer. Surrounded by older and better-off suitors, the object of his love at first rejects Einar, but as the young man makes headway with Claire, the love story morphs into another conventional storyline, that of a villain threatening a woman. L’Herbier uses a clever combination of tried-and-true stories to keep his audience with the film.
He also makes ample use of conventional melodrama in this film. Melodrama is the lifeblood of silent cinema, and
L’inhumaine is laced through with overwrought situations and poses. A rejected lover threatens to kill himself, and a grieving singer decides the show must go on. A rejected suitor kills for revenge, and an innocent dies in the arms of her mother, comforted by the beauty of music. In an emotional moment when an overcome lover must identify the body of the beloved, a gusty wind blows up and L’Herbier shifts tinting to a strong red. Even the dead are saved, a resurrection that L’Herbier draws out by the requiring a second attempt after the first fails. In fact,
L’inhumaine stretches out every melodramatic moment, wringing from it the maximum amount of audience sentiment and angst to keep the viewers firmly engaged in the film.
Counting on a love story and melodrama to keep the audience in their seats, L’Herbier is then free to test new ways of using what had become standard elements of movies. In his cinematography, he uses tints aggressively. Brilliant reds appropriately tint the Mongolian revolution and heighten the emotion of the Apostle’s plotting to ruin Claire’s performance out of jealousy. The same tint expresses the intensity of the body identification scene. To opposite effect, a saturated, cold blue tint informs the nighttime search for the body of a suicide. Most daring, L’Herbier sometimes inserts frames of pure color to express emotion.
L’Herbier also plays with other aspects of cinematography. He uses blurring and double exposures to communicate Einar’s emotional distress, first as the young man is late for Claire’s dinner and later when she’s rejected him. The manipulated shots of roads and woods as seen from cars communicate speed as well as the young man’s strained emotional state. In another scene, L’Herbier borrows some Expressionist lighting to communicate Einar’s frustration and fear as he watches Clair’s suitors approach her one-by-one. In his garden niche, a low light casts a grotesque, elongate silhouette of Einar on the wall behind, an image of his heightened emotions. In another bravura moment of cinematography, L’Herbier frames only the legs and torsos of guests as they rush out of party after word of the accident, a shot that shows us the urgency of the moment very effectively without relying on facial expressions. In still other places, the director uses silhouettes on a paper wall to show us the action. All these are instances of L’Herbier pushing the expressive possibilities of cinematography.
He also experiments with the possibilities that editing offers.
L’inhumaine has many examples of rapid cutting to build suspense and intensity. During Claire’s party, the rapid cutting between the dancing, juggling and guests shows us what a great time is being had. Likewise, at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, quick cutting between Claire’s performance and faces of the audience first builds our suspense at how they’ll react and then shows us her wild success. In a later scene, L’Herbier also builds suspense by cutting rapidly between the face of the driver of Claire’s car and Claire in the passenger compartment behind with the venomous snake. Here, the cuts increase in speed as Claire moves from finding the snake to the effects of the snake’s bite. And L’Herbier also uses fast cuts between the laboratory and the re-animation to build suspense around the success of the experiment.
In addition to building suspense,
L’inhumaine has edits that accomplish other expressive purposes. As each suitor proposes to Claire at the party, L’Herbier cuts to a fantasy of her life if she were to marry the individual. We see her imagined as an American theatrical success, the leader of a Mongolian revolution, and the center of an exotic wedding in India. And
L’inhumain uses intercutting in a poetic way, to provide images for the emotion or action of a moment. While Einar is trying to tell Claire of the intensity of his love for her, L’Herbier intercuts their conversation with scenes of the fire eater and the hot jazz band that is performing at Claire’s dinner. These images become correlatives of the young man's emotion. And when Claire sends Einar a razor blade to mock his vow to kill himself if she refuses him, L’Herbier intercuts a sword fight. All these moments show L’Herbier testing the expressive possibilities of the new film medium.
He does the same with the mise en scène. From the opening of the film, we’re aware of the director’s interplay between realism and self-conscious artificiality. The portrayals of Claire’s house and Einar’s car oscillate between these poles of representation early in the film. We first see Claire’s house as an architectural model that even has the lighting and shadows painted on it; likewise, the model of Einar’s car jerks with exaggerated artificiality when we see it pull up to the model of the house. But in each case, L’Herbier soon cuts to the real objects -- a real house and a real car -- as though to highlight the way his mise en scène is playing with the notion of art, reality and representation.
In Clair’s house, this same play continues. There is no reality to the space of her house. The main room features a dining platform floating in a pool with ducks paddling around it. There is a garden area with models of plants that are botanical abstractions more than vegetal, and while Einar can see Clair from there, it’s not at all clear where the garden is in relation to the rest of the house. Likewise, we can’t imagine where the jazz band is seated in relation to the guests. And through all the festivities, servants attend the guests in disturbing, smiling masks, a flourish of artificiality that gets a realistic explanation when Claire points out that they can’t frown if they’re wearing such masks.
L’Herbier’s play with the artificial and the real reaches its high point in Einar’s lab. Functionality and plausibility have only a minor role in this mise en scène, with its set designed by modernist Fernand Léger. Einar’s lab is, in fact, a large art installation of pendulums and geometrical lines, angles, and circles designed around a theme of science. And Einar moves around this installation in an exaggerated jacket with impossibly highlighted lines and, later, a rubber raincoat. In this part of
L’inhumain, as in the earlier, L’Herbier plays with mise en scène in a creative way that has the film questioning its own representational status while still functioning in a representational way.
L’Herbier also uses unique mise en scène for more typical purposes. For example, when he wants to show us Einar’s tele-vision device, which lets us see where the broadcast sound is going, we have stereotypical vignettes that show us Arabia, Africa, an artist studio, Latin America, a man in car, and people in front of store. And in a borrowing from previous films, when Einar wonders what Claire meant when she said “something” might keep her in in France, L’Herbier scrolls the French word for that, “quelque chose,” all along the scenery to show us Einar’s obsession. All these show L’Herbier using mise en scène in creative ways.
L’inhumaine is also, no doubt accidentally, a primer on silent acting. As Einar, Jaque Catelain is wonderful. His body language and facial expression communicate so effectively that we know exactly what he’s feeling when he's hesitant about going into the dinner he's late for and when he's getting pushed aside by the older, richer suitors. We’re with his every thought. This is in contrast to the performance of Georgette Leblanc, who was a stage performer but not a silent film actor. She communicates little of what’s in her heart; she squints instead of performing open-eyed, and her stand-and-deliver stage posture means she uses little to no body language to involve us in her emotions. Although she funded much of this film, her performance is the weakest element of it.
L’inhumaine is a wonderful silent film experience. It shows us what was powering the medium in 1924, but more than that, it gives us a look at the experimentation behind what cinema was becoming. And
L’inhumaine should be obligatory viewing in every engineering school where what Einar calls the “magic of modern science” wins the heart of the beloved when romance and money fail.
