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

Author(s): Felicia Miller Frank

Source: MLN , Dec., 1996, Vol. 111, No. 5, Comparative Literature Issue (Dec., 1996), pp.
938-953
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press

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

Felicia Miller Frank

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 uncon-
sciously racist. The filmed voice of its protagonist offers a representa-
tion 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' of the excitement
attending his 1924 film L'Inhumaine. La Femme de glace, as this project
of his fledgling company Cinegraphic was first titled, was to be a show-
case for le style moderne in French arts. L'Herbier wanted this "feerie
realiste," this "grande mosaique 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 Leger designed the sci-
entist's futuristic laboratory, Georges Antheil and Darius Milhaud con-
tributed music, and Jean Borlin, ballets. L'Herbier chose the singer
Georgette Leblanc, Maeterlinck's former wife, for the lead role, de-
spite the problems her age posed for the camera. She brought major
financial backing to the project, and had the clout to rename the film

MLN, 111 (1996): 938-953 ? 1996 by TheJohns Hopkins University Press

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 M LN 939

"L'Inhumaine." Visitors to the set included the not-yet-mad N

Erik Satie, and dada artist Picabia, who was miffed, according to
bier, to have been passed over as set designer. His revenge would
enlist the inexperienced young Rene Clair instead of L'Herbier to
Entr'acte for Reldche the following year. For his film L'Herbier s
riot by the artistic Tout-Paris at a performance of Antheil's mech
cal music: the footage was to serve for a scene of the public prote
an ill-timed recital after the death of one of the "inhuman" singe
mirers. In the crowd one sees Satie, Milhaud, James Joyce, P
Man Ray, Ezra Pound, the Prince of Monaco, some surrealists, and
Six. The film works for visual correlatives to music through mon
marking a jazz performance in one scene through futuristic b
of motion. Filmmakers of the period often metaphorized cin
music: the climax of L'Inhumaine is effected through a sequence o
celerated montage intended to evoke a musical synaesthesia of
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 pub-
lic view in 1987 as a result of the renewal of interest in silent film dur-
ing 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 technol-
ogy and modernism, but also for how the film interrogates the cate-
gories of humanity and the inhuman under the aegis of French uni-
versalism 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 (Cubist sets
designed and built by Fernand Leger). Confronted by this better art,
and by mysterious machines marked "Danger de mort," she feels an
emotion "almost like that of love." Einar proves he has the "some-
thing" to change her mind when he shows her a kind of television ap-

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940 FELICIA MILLER FRANK

paratus that allows her to sing while seeing her far-distant audie
composed of people of various races in varying circumstances. Cl
"L'Inhumaine," is humanized in becoming the very voice of Fren
culture that reaches every corner of the world. The symbolist i
queen melts to the warmth of a humanizing science: she yields t
evident pleasure in singing to the world, for she can thus "trave
wireless means, while staying put in the capital, as her auditors are
sented to us, the audience, in a trope of universality conveyed throu
the contrasted types and conditions of the marveling auditors see
her, and by us. The film offers the pleasure of seeing the couple
mantic union effected through the union of science and art: the tele
vision/filmic apparatus is panoptic, its reach, literally and figurativ
universal. This carefully structured scene is fascinating for its mise-
scene of futuristic technology fulfilling its promise, uniting Claire
humanity and with the audience in an embrace of simultaneous com-
munication, the triumph of French technological prowess.
It stages in this literal fashion the cultural voice of France, embod-
ied in the woman singer, extending its reach over the globe. The
choice of human types is not unmotivated. This was not only the pe-
riod of avant-garde experimentation in Europe, but of colonialist ex-
pansion abroad: along with shots of Europeans in cars and trains,
painter's studios and farming huts, L'Herbier includes a crowd of
Arabs wearing head scarves and a bewildered African woman sitting in
the dirt, shaking the speaker in ignorant wonder at the marvel it holds.
The film itself carries a freight of cultural assumptions about French
claims to universalism, transmitting other messages about the new
technologies and their role in French cultural expansion which imply
an unexamined sense of racial superiority and colonialist destiny
along with the film's conscious project of a proud and specifically
French intervention into modernist art and cinema. Edward Said
notes that "the universalizing discourses of modern Europe and
U.S. assume the silence, willing or otherwise, of the non-Europe
world."2 Literally silent here are images of Arabs, Africans, "captiva
natives," as it were, listening to the voice of the "inhumaine". In
spersed with images of Europeans in various settings, the scene sets
a universalizing trope that implies the uniting of humanity by Nors
transcendental machine: all are drawn together within the panop
gaze available, however, not to everyone, only to the French singer
mitting her ecstatic broadcast. It is a kind of "imagined community
as described by Benedict Anderson, evoking a shared experience
across space by means of media that produce a common point of tem-
poral reference.3

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 M LN 941

The film thus pulls between the two poles of abstraction and
significance, yoking the one uncomfortably to the other. It is, ho
the very awkwardness of this combination that makes L'Inhumain
teresting: the project condenses the era's sometimes contradic
themes and ideas, mobilizing the thematics of the moderns, co
and the fragmented object, Leger's sets, the motifs of Clair's man
Norsen's Bugatti, etc., but packaged with an unexamined ideol
freight.
To begin with the film's technical innovation, one of the "clous" of
the drama is Clair's murder by a jealous suitor as she returns to see
Norsen. The rejected Maharajah-one of a number of ethnic stereo-
types-slips a poisonous snake into a bouquet offered to her. Her
death upon arrival at Norsen's house ("Danger de mort") sets the stage
for her resuscitation by Leger's machinery. Like the bride of Franken-
stein, in a process like the creation of the robot Maria in Metropolis, she
is eventually brought from death back to life by Norsen's mechanical
wizardry. During the climactic sequence filmed in rapid montage of
shots of the machinery, these shots are interspersed with others of
pure color, the frames tinted blue, red, white, creating an abstract ef-
fect in the montage that takes the film beyond the repertoire of im-
pressionist techniques used in avant-garde narratives. L'Herbier was
proud of this innovation, meant to "faire chanter la lumi&re."4 The ar-
chitect Adolf Loos understood his intention, calling the film:

[U]ne chanson 6clatante sur la grandeur de la technique moderne. Toute

cette r6alisation visuelle tend vers la musique et le cri de Tristan devient vrai:
"J'entends la lumiere." La realisation des dernieres images de l'Inhumaine
depasse l'imagination. En sortant de la voir, on a l'impression d' avoir vecu
l'heure de la naissance d'un nouvel art.

Yet the film weakens the technical effects of its conception by yokin
them to the 19th-century machinery of melodrama. Ortega y Gasset
spoke of the dehumanization of art in cubism and expressionism and
other contemporary movements as a gesture of revulsion against this
very type of all-too-human art. In his review Emile Veuillermoz, who
knocked the film for its "scenarios d'une puerilite aggressive" re-
proached L'Herbier for this failure:

I1 n'est pas possible de ne pas lui tenir rigueur en voyant avec quelle pauv-
ret6 d'imagination ce poete, aussi timide qu'un Picabia, a amenuis6, ap-
pauvri et etriqu6 la divine f6erie du "merveilleux scientifique" en traitant
d'une facon aussi enfantine et aussi primaire les themes somptueux qu'of-
frent a un artiste les miracles des ondes hertziennes, de la teleaudition et
de la television.6

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942 FELICIA MILLER FRANK

Its melodramatic harnessing of these elements, and the heroine

dated quality as a cold Symbolist woman notwithstanding, the film p
motes the aesthetics of the mechanical, of the cinematic avant-garde'
preoccupation with the possibilities of montage sped into abstract
of the fragmentation of the object, and the dream of panoptic vis
The enchantment with technology we see in twenties film has som
affinities with a certain take on modernism that assimilates it to a
process of abstraction, to the pole of the inhuman, but other texts pro-
duced by some of the same artists complicate this picture.
The centrality of L'Inhumaine to the circuit of artistic exchanges that
included Abel Gance, Marcel L'Herbier, Blaise Cendrars and Fernand
Leger has been documented in Standish Lawder's Cubist Cinema,
which demonstrates the cross-fertilizing of cubist analysis of vision in
painting, photography, and avant-garde film, showing the explora-
tions of aesthetic ideas in both film and painting by people like
Ruttman, Eggeling, and Richter. He goes on to trace the common in-
terests and working relationships between these artists, demonstrating
the close collaboration of Fernand Leger, Blaise Cendrars, and Abel
Gance on the latter's 1923 film La Roue, quite influential because of its
innovations in montage structure and thematic use of machinery.
The plot of La Roue constructs a parallel between the heroine, cen-
ter of a melodramatic love-triangle, and the locomotive named after
her. A romantic defeat has its external correlative in the catastrophic
locomotive wreck toward which the film builds. Shots of the wheel (a
key image in Cendrars's poetry and other writings) and other parts of
the locomotive organize the imagery of this key sequence, where
Gance works toward and heightens the devastation of the wreck
through a new and dramatic use of an accelerating montage of shots,
close-ups of parts of the locomotive, the track in the snow, etc. The
wheel, of course, is metonymic for the whole machine, as well as sym-
bolic, as is the railroad track, of the functioning of the film track itself.
The wheel reappears in Fernand Leger's set in L'Inhumaine. Leger,
who had himself been painting disks and machine elements during his
"mechanical period," saw this with interest, like everyone else. So im-
pressed was he by La Roue that he vowed to make a film as well: it would
be Ballet Mechanique, which opens with an animated Charlie Chaplin,
sending disks, egg whisks, pot lids and other elements of the batterie de
cuisine spinning, juxtaposing abstracted and prismatically fractured
forms with close-ups of the face and eyes of the famous artist's model,
Kiki of Montparnasse. Leger proclaimed that the object itself would
become the star of the cinema. He did not make Ballet Mechanique,

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 M L N 943

however, until the year after he worked with L'Herbier on L'Inhumaine,

where his sets evoke a "spirit of deliberate modernism."7 These are the
mechanical forms that Norsen sets in motion at the end in L'Herbier's
own use of rapid montage to evoke the drama of Clair's electrical re-
suscitation by the rotating animation of the parts of the machines.
They resemble the spinning forms of Leger's own film, made the next
year; Fritz Lang, another associate of L'Herbier, would himself use just
such a rapid volley of frames of mechanical apparatuses flung at the
audience in rapid montage to create the climactic ending for Metrop-
olis several years later. This film shares other material and montage
techniques with L'Inhumaine, including the use of television in its mise-
en-scene, and evinces some thematic similarities to the earlier film as
well.
Lawder shows how the imagery of the technological, the urban, the
fragmented object that emerges in painting and film of the twenties
attests to a fascination with the mechanical, with the abstracted object
that signifies modernity. They fill out the features of that portrait of a
modernist cinema that replaces human with mechanical elements, a
yielding or assimilation to the motif of the technological in art. This
aesthetic response to modernity via technology is a process similar to
what K. Michael Hays describes in the modernist architecture of the
period. In his book, Modernism and the Posthuman Subject-examining
the work of modernist architects Hannes Meyer and Ludwig Hilber-
seimer specifically, but also Loos, Walter Gropius, Mies van der Rohe,
and Le Corbusier-Hays proposes "posthumanism" as a term to de-
scribe their aesthetic and epistemological response to modernity,
where a collective surrender to technological forces replaces an indi-
vidual subjectivity.8 It seems useful to cite Hays's work here, since the
film makes very explicit reference to the modern look in art and es-
pecially in architecture, allying itself with this movement generally as
it bases its mise-en-scene on architectural decors by Mallet-Stevens and
Cavalcanti that create a very willed, hyper-modern, cool look (sup-
ported by the ensemble of effects of the acting, costumes, etc.). This
"post-human" subjectivity, called by others an "anti-humanistic" aes-
thetic stance, bears some relation to Lyotard's notion of the inhuman
in modernist art in his 1987 collection of essays, L'Inhumain. His "in-
human" suggests itself as a kind of short-hand for this take on mod-
ernism; it would be tempting to read L'Inhumaine through L'Inhumain.
One reading of L'Inhumaine supported by Lyotard's account bears on
the representations of women in this and certain other contemporary
films, where in the treatment of feminine figures one sees a thematiz-

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944 FELICIA MILLER FRANK

ing or meta-figuring of technological transformations of the world,

and of the possibilities of machineries of vision, art forms most proper
to the age of mechanical reproduction.
An interpretation of L'Inhumaine by way of L'Inhumain is suggestive,
allowing one to trace out some threads of this modernist presentation
of the "inhuman woman." The view of modernist film art it provides
does not seem entirely adequate, however, and inhibits a more general
view of the thematization of the categories human/inhuman in the
new technological media. Rather, I suggest that Lyotard's account
does not so much explain the modernism of L'Herbier's film and oth-
ers as it reflects and can be historicized within the tradition that pro-
duced them both. This period is much more confused, much richer
than Lyotard's narrative of art as dehumanized abstraction suggests,
for the ferment that produced cinematic gestures by Cubists, Futur-
ists, and Dadas also produced some curious texts of a different kind.
Lyotard's argument about the avant-garde and the aesthetic of the
sublime turns on the idea of the inhuman. He traces the genealogy of
the avant-gardes to a pressure within Romanticism toward an aban-
donment of the representational. From Kant's idea of formlessness he
traces a decline in the belief in a natural convergence of matter and
form, leading to the conditions for avant-garde explorations of the aes-
thetic space of the indeterminate, the materiality of the artwork itself.
(One may think in this regard of Dada artist Hans Richter's sketching
and scratching directly on film stock, drawing attention in this way to
the materials of the medium). For Lyotard, the space of indeterminacy
is that of the inhuman, the element in art that escapes representation.
Implicit in his thesis is the notion that this indeterminacy is the trace
of a sense of infinity as what eludes the formal, of the failure of the
imagination faced with an object it cannot encompass. This effect, the
sublime, is sometimes figured as an angel: infinite, unrepresentable.
What is seen in terms of magnitude in Kant, or very intense sensory
experiences in Burke, elements provoking a mix ofjoy and anguish in
a suspension of the mind's critical faculties, persists through Roman-
ticism and into the avant-gardes, and is allied with the move away from
an organic model in art to the aesthetic of "art for art's sake" that em-
phasizes art as artifact, as "simulacrum."
I have developed this argument elsewhere,9 suggesting that many lit-
erary representations of women in the late nineteenth-century and af-
ter are assimilated to the artificial, becoming figures of artifice itself.
As Kermode and Praz have shown in differing ways, the Symbolist

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 MLN 945

woman, in particular, serves as a figure of art. In the sam

of texts affiliate women with a new valuation of artificia
ing term of modernity, first expressed by Baudelaire, th
many others in an explicit association with machines from
part of the century on, as in Villiers de L'Isle-Adam's L'E
One way to look at the heroine of L'Inhumaine, then, is
ice queen, allied with artiface, if not a machine or par
herself. The literary lineage is right on the surface: the
Symbolist Maeterlinck, creator of waxwork theaters, inv
time poet L'Herbier to play the "femme de glace" in a fil
fantasy. The inhuman woman is recuperated for huma
entist's lab, where plugged into ("branchee") an appa
and sound, she rejoices in an electrical transport, sing
in far away places: as described above, an African woman
ground, a pipe-smoking man in his luxury car, a sick gir
poor house.
Although we are more used to associations of femininit
cles of the seasons, organic and animal forms-in short
is not actually a contradiction here. In fact, the feminine
J.J. Goux10 and Alice Jardine 1 1 tell us, stood in for mat
ality, masculinity for spirit and activity over matter. In t
late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in whic
the networks of railroads, telegraphs, then telephon
seemed to be replacing the natural world with one organi
artifacts, it is not surprising that in representation the f
linked to matter, always what is the matter, both heimlich
at the same time-is identified with technically-worked m
Already evident in such stories as Poe's "The Fall of the House of
Usher," where the living woman dies as she is turned into a pure rep-
resentation of herself, this motif continues to appear in the films of
the twenties. The literary pattern of representations of women sym-
bolizing art and representation is taken up in these films in their sym-
bolization of the properties of photography and the filmic apparatus.
To point to a few examples: in Jacques Feyder's L'Image from 1926,
four men fall in love with the photograph of a woman unknowable in
person; the Jean Epstein film, La Chute de la maison Usher, fuses several
Poe stories, but in particular, it presents the death of Madeleine who
perishes mysteriously while her husband Roderick paints a huge por-
trait of her. Richard Abel analyzes the film's alternation of Roderick's
hands in close-up with shots of Madeleine, progressively ailing and

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946 FELICIA MILLER FRANK

trapped, literally caught in the frame of a harp, then in the frame o

his painting:

As the paintbrush strokes the canvas, Madeleine reacts as if struck, as if her

face were being taken away. Roderick's desire is being defined as a com-
pulsion to transfer life to the painted image ... at the expense of life itself. 12

As Madeleine is "transubstantiated" into the painting, Epstein draws

attention to the properties of film to suggest this transition from mo-
bility to immobility, building intensity through the use of slow-motion:
the portrait completed, one sees the female figure move briefly in its
frame, as though it were a film still brought momentarily to life. Ep-
stein renders uncanny the moment in which the woman's life enters
the painting, while underscoring the cinematic nature of this process.
Just as the woman dies into artifice, painting becomes film.
In Prix de beaute from 1930, scripted by Rene Clair, a scene depicting
a woman dying "into" a filmed image symbolizes the death of silent
film itself. At the end of the silent era Clair, like Eisenstein, was con-
cerned about the limiting effects of synchronous sound, fearing with
good reason the restrictions that primitive sound techniques, and
their inevitable yoking to simplified narratives, would place on film.
He knew the advent of sound would mean the death of creative mon-
tage. For Prix de Beaute, starring the quintessential silent film star,
Louise Brooks, he conceived a story that ends with a metaphor of the
death of silent film: the Brooks character wins a beauty contest and is
being groomed for stardom, to the rage of her jealous husband. The
film ends with the following extraordinary scene set in a darkened
screening-room: while the starlet delightedly watches a film of herself
singing and dancing, her husband secretly enters in silent-film villain
style and shoots her dead. Intercut with his approach to the theater
are shots of the projector, the film scrolling through, and the words
"Projection." As we watch Louise Brooks die, the camera is focused lov-
ingly on her face, illuminated by the strobe-like flickering of the film
showing above her, where her image continues charmingly to sing and
dance, fresh but "in the can," as they say. As in L'Eve future, the
fetishized woman becomes spectacle (ellefait du cinema) while the real
woman dies into her simulacrum. Metropolis gives yet another example
of the same process in which a living woman is replaced by her image-
substitute: the good Maria is replaced for a time in the viewer's eye by
her evil simulacrum, the robot Maria who dances, Salome-like, a
fiendish dance of the seven veils: the technologically produced simu
lacrum becomes a fetishized object of desire; the woman becomes a

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 M LN 947

metafiguration of the work of art as mechanical reproduction, of

chanical reproduction as art.
There is more, however, to L'Inhumaine's modernist response to the
new technologies of vision. In Norsen's lab, the inhuman woman "ex-
periences an emotion almost like that of love." Clair's manner is "hau-
taine"; her main fashion accessory, her house, is explicitly and coldly
moderne; she denies any interest in humanity, specifically with regard
to "Kranin's great movement afoot in outer Mongolia"; however, hor-
rified by Norsen's death, she avows feelings that are "trop humaines,"
and when she sings into television-like apparatus that shows her the
faces of her auditors all over the world, including African and Indian
villagers, she is moved: implicitly, she acknowledges some tie with
them in their common humanity, for the range of types shown is meant
to suggest universality.
Television was known at this time, though it was not yet commer-
cially exploited. Leger was aware of Friedrich Kayssler's decor for
Capek's robot drama R. U.R. that used similar electrical and mechan-
ical motifs and a television-like screen enclosed in an iris, like an eye,
that showed robots at work; in Metropolis, Lang later used a similar
videoscope device showing the workers to their masters. Through it we
also see the destruction of the dystopic city in a rapid display of pat-
terned light and movement probably borrowed from L'Inhumaine.
Television is keyed in these texts to social questions: in Metropolis it
comments on the relations of workers to the plutocrats who control
them; in L'Inhumaine, the singer becomes humanized by this techno-
logical marvel that lets her travel around the world, as she had wished,
while remaining at home in the lab. The spectator enjoys this won-
derful machine compounded of voice and vision: something, but not
much, like sound cinema before the fact. In these texts, television of-
fers a special kind of vision across space, creating, as does the cinema,
new ways of seeing.
In their article on the early history of German television, Monika
Elsner and co-authors contextualize the reception of television by its
early publics in "the transformation of perception through the tech-
nical media." They link television to a constellation of new ways of see-
ing ushered in during this epoch:

Today we unhesitatingly connect the illusionary worlds of staged immedi-

acy, the aesthetics of sensory surprise, and the acceleration of perception
with the medium of television, even though media historians use the ex-
ample of the film medium to describe the genesis of this new way of see-
ing.13

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948 FELICIA MILLER FRANK

They emphasize TV's debt to old dreams of "seeing at a distance,"

dreams which were spurred in the late nineteenth-century with the in-
vention of the cinema, and with efforts to connect transmission of im-
ages with telescopes, even attempts to transmit images through tele-
phone lines, just as the desire for the phonograph preceded the
technical capacity to construct it. The dream of film and TV existed
before the fact. In the twenties, though TV technology existed, it had
not yet been developed, so that people's ideas of what it would mean
were somewhat different from what we think of as television, as Elsner
and her partners show. They point out how free-wheeling early imag-
inings of TV were, quoting a 1926 account in a Berlin paper that
seemed to show people looking at any theater performance as well as
each other on television from home. Pointing out its mix of clarity and
confusion they ask:

Can television "look at" whatever it wants to look at? Who is controlling it
and its pictures? The unbridled imagination in this text is still considerably
influenced by the old vision of seeing at a distance, and still very far from the
idea of the medium television with which we are familiar today: a fixed offering
of programs, which we are always in charge of through home reception.14

Another article promoting television offers the picture of a man lying

in bed with a fragmented dashboard in front of him, steering an ap-
paratus of some kind and looking at a mountain panorama, seen from
a bird's eye view on a projection screen, (like a kind of personal IMAX,
home flight simulator, or virtual reality set-up). Elsner emphasizes the
fantasy in such imaginings and argues that traditional utopian dis-
course is taken up and re-synthesized in the excitement of new tech-
nological invention.
There is indeed a certain utopian aspect to the transcendental tele-
vision in L'Inhumaine: its ice queen is humanized through its marvels,
and her "feeling much like love," is not only love for Einstein's disci-
ple, but more generally for humanity as well. As Elsner suggests, one
seems to be able to look at whatever one wants in Norsen's lab: his tele-
vision has a magically panoptic power to show people anywhere, them-
selves looking. Later, Fritz Lang would give Dr. Mabuse in the epony-
mous series infinitely evil power through such all-seeing video, but
here the intention is purely beneficial. Such a hope in the regenera-
tive possibilities of new media technology for the world was in factjust
as much a part of the thinking of certain of these artists as their fasci-
nation with machines, or their love of the cool style moderne. Although
one would not want to accuse the elegant L'Herbier of popular senti-
ments, Leger was a different matter.

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 MLN 949

Writing on Leger, Richard Bender shows how his "P

his love for mechanical imagery with a populist belief
promises of technological progress.15 Like Leger, Cend
vated by the possibilities of film to express the moder
ABC du Cinema he sings a paean to cinema as a new art fo
reading the signs of a "new synthesis of the human spirit ... a new
humanity ... a new race of man. He calls cinema a "new language"
saying

Everything becomes possible! Tomorrow's Gospel, The Spirit of Future

Laws, Scientific Drama, The Anticipatory Legend, The Vision of the Fourth
Dimension of Existence, all the Interferences. Look! The Revolution.16

Leger and Cendrars had been close since 1912; during the post-war
period they had worked together on Gance's film. Both returned
wounded from the war, where Leger had been gassed and Cendrars
had lost a hand. Shortly after their return Cendrars wrote a playfully
bitter little novel La Fin du mondefilmee par l'ange de Notre-Dame, which
Leger illustrated with colored lithographs. The "novel" reads like a sce-
nario for a film, a real blockbuster.
The plot goes like this: God is in his American office smoking a
cigar; he calls together his chiefs of staff: the Pope, the Great Rabbi,
the head of the Holy Synod, the Dalai Lama, Rasputin. Having taken
the reports of the world's spiritual leaders and checked his balance
sheet, he feels pleased: the war has brought in a lot of income in reli-
gious services for the deaths of millions of souls. He knows, however,
that peace is on its way. Needing to come up with something new, he
takes his hat and cane and gets on a train to Mars. In the little chapter
titled "Le Truc des propheties" Cendrars writes: "Dieu annonce qu'il
a l'intention de monter un cinema et qu'il a les plus beaux films de
guerre."'7 He plans to let total war break out on earth, to fulfill the
prophecies, despite the faint-hearted objections of the Martians. He
gives the job of filming the end of the world to the Angel of Notre
Dame. At the moment of apocalypse the angel raises his trumpet: the
signal for the millenium doubles for the gesture of the angel filming
the end of the world.

The fourth chapter, "L'Ange Notre Dame, operateur" consists of a

series of synchretic views, from the bird's eye perspective of the angel,
of various scenes in Paris. This section and the last two, "La Fin du
monde" and "A Rebours," are composed of short descriptions, para-
tactically composed. It thus reads more like a film script than a novel.
Beyond explicitly relating "point of view" to the camera, Cendrars' text
correlates the camera with the point of view of an angel: panoptic, uni-

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950 FELICIA MILLER FRANK

versal, outside of time, infinitely and instantaneously displacable: w

the angel can do, so can cinema. One of the sections, titled "Cinema
accelere et cinema ralenti" explicitly invokes the innovative tech-
niques filmmakers Gance and Epstein would soon exploit. Cendrars
wittily ends by running the "film" backwards, undoing everything to
end at the beginning, with God and his cigar back in his American of-
fice.
While Lawder mentions Cendrars' Fin du monde, pointing out that
certain images from the novel actually did get filmed in Ballet Mecha-
nique ("Un oeil obscur se ferme sur tout ce qui a et6" becomes Kiki's
magnified eye closing before the camera), he makes no connection
with Abel Gance's film La Fin du monde, a project Gance had toyed with
since 1913, but which had changed substantially by the time it was ac-
tually realized in 1930. Gance's Fin du monde was based on Camille
Flammarion's 1893 fiction about a comet observed to be on a terrify-
ing collision course with earth (a conceit it shares with the science-
fiction tale When Worlds Collide). Since Cendrars, Gance, and Leger
were part of the same artistic community, the shared theme is no co-
incidence: the astronomer's observatory offers a bird's eye view much
as Notre Dame does but the tone of the resulting text is not compara-
ble: Cendrars' witty little book is a far cry from the millenial ferver of
Gance's blockbuster. Although the notion of the angel as operator sub-
tends both, Gance's text, based as it is on Flammarion's, shares some
of the latter's mystical orientation. An astronomer, Flammarion was
also a follower of Theosophist Madame Blavatsky. He is said to have
compared "astral light" to the action of photographic plates, and re-
ferred to the occult tradition in Christianity of the "recording angel."'8
Gance's project was a very serious matter: it was the last of a series
of idealistic projects he conceived that connected film with humani-
tarian and spiritual concerns. He sought, at the same time, to partici-
pate in the organization of the League of Nations. He wrote a letter to
the delegates of the League of Nations proposing the creation of "La
Section cinematographique de la S.D.N." which would extend the in-
fluence of the League with the aid of radio and cinema.19 He insisted
on the importance of tapping the immense social force of world reli-
gions for peace, seeing Russian Bolshevism, Italian Fascism, American
"technical spiritualism" as so many aspects of the same spiritual force
working toward the creation of a new type of humanity.
Another of his ideas was to promote world peace by using film to
demonstrate the unity of the principal religions of the world. Gance
wished to based a series of films on the writings of Edouard Schure,

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 MLN 951

whose book Les Grands Inities from 1889 devoted a chapte

prophets of the world's religions, in order to demonst
lying unity of the eternal spiritual truth animating them
book belonged to that efflorescence of late-nineteenth-ce
tualism that produced table-turnings, Kirlean photogr
crucians, and figures like Madame Blavatsky, friend o
While it may seem odd to see illuminism emerge among t
cussed in Cubist Cinema, mystical or spiritual ideas cr
where in artistic and literary expressions: Kandinsky was
the "spiritual in art," and the Orphic movement in litera
recent. Another way to think of these versions of moder
to read them in terms of the profound tensions between
and the irrational that run through these years. If Gance, L'Herbier,
and Leger celebrated the mechanical and a technological future, they
also saw a new humanity as part of this future.
Gance developed the idea of creating a worldwide film "Holding
Company," a channel to provide French expertise, funding and so on
to enable people of other religions and cultures to produce their own
contributions to the great cycle of the Grands Inities. In his plan, cin-
ema would be an instrument of evangelical light, enabling the peoples
of the world to tell their own spiritual adventures. The underlying
racism of L'Inhumaine is paralleled here by Gance's assumption of the
inherent superiority of the French, it being their mission to provide
the benighted of the world with the technological means of their self-
expression. Gance's project was weak tea, however, compared to the
explicitly propagandistic colonialist films that would be produced by
the French army in the thirties.
For Gance, film would become a kind of universal language. In a
1929 lecture, Gance called it "un art du peuple," "un art de la lumiere,"
"un art pour toute l'humanite." Speaking of the changes cinema
would undergo after the advent of sound, Gance predicted that it
would operate a synthesis between speech and "la musique uni-
verselle." Not only would cinema become capable of projecting images
into space, in color, in three-dimensions, it would give speech to all:
human, animals, plants and inanimate objects.
After failed business negotiations for a Syndicat Europeen de Produc-
tion, Gance returned to his early project La Fin du monde. The final ver-
sion of this old idea was like the idealistic projects cited above: a huge
"fresque evangelique," it would present the apocalyptic sweep of world
panic in the face of the doom-bearing approach of the comet. With
the masses going crazy with terror, the cataclysm would be a triage of

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952 FELICIA MILLER FRANK

strong and weak: while the latter seek oblivion in last-minute

bauchery, the elite prepare a universal republic, "Les Etats-Uni
monde." When the cataclysm is averted, all join hands in a new go
age. Gance wanted to film the millenium. La Fin du monde was Ga
Apocalypse Now, in several senses. Top film-makers (Epstein, I
worked under him to film endless sequences of panic, orgies, viol
Overbudget, no end in sight, and already hours long, the film
taken away and so radically cut that the result appeared incohe
even the most sympathetic viewers. Gance's capacious dream of
lenial renewal was an enormous flop, permanently damaging h
reer.

The utopian use of cinema and television seen in these texts by

Gance and L'Herbier seem a far cry from a celebration of the frag-
mentation of the object and the beauty of the machine that Lawder
discusses in Cubist Cinema, of the aesthetic that produced Ballet
mechanique, La Roue, and L'Inhumaine. They also pose a counterweight
to Lyotard's inhuman as defining term for modernity, technological
and artistic. The avant-garde had its roots not simply in a refusal of the
representational derived from Kant's sublime, but was equally strongly
rooted in the social and ideological soil that produced the French "cul-
tural voice." L'Inhumaineand LaFin du mondeoffer the panoptic dream
of universal vision, but the angel's eye view is itself framed within a
French national perspective.
Gance's film about the threatened end of the world was made at the
end of a world in 1929-30: we remember those fervent years between
the Armistice and the Depression as an astonishing burst of energy,
testing in every way the constraints of the pre-war culture, through
artistic experimentation, hot jazz, cool clothing, and fast fun, and the
silent films everyone went to see, rich, poor, poet, workman, everyone.
Anything seemed possible at the end of one world and the beginning
of a new: looking back now from the edge of the next millenium, with
angels appearing in romance novels and on Broadway, with militiamen
arming in the woods for Armageddon, it is especially poignant to think
how brief, yet how persistent such dreams would be.

Washington, D. C.

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 MLN 953

NOTES

1 Marcel L'Herbier. La Tete qui tourne (Paris: Belforn, 1979), 103.

2 Edward Said. Culture and Imperialism. (New York: Knopf, 1993), 35.
3 Benedict Anderson. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Original Spread o
tionalism. (London: Verso, 1983).
4 L'Herbier, 103.

5 Adolf Loos, NeueFrie Press, July 29, 1924, quoted in L'Herbier, 105.
6 Emile Vuillermoz, "Une Grande Premiere cinematographique: LInhumaine," Paris
Midi, 4/12/24.
7 Standish Lawder, Cubist Cinema. (New York: Yale University Press, 1975), 101.
8 K. Michael Hays. Modernism and the Posthuman Subject: The Architecture of Hannes
Meyer and Ludwig Hilberseimer (Cambridge: Massachussetts Institute of Technology
Press, 1992.)

9 Felicia Miller Frank. The Mechanical Song: Women, Voice, and the Artificial in Nineteenth
Century French Narrative. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995).
10 Jean-Joseph Goux. Symbolic Economies: After Marx and Freud. Trans. Jennifer Curtis
Gage. (Ithaca, N.Y: Cornell University Press, 1990), 215-216, 236.
11 See AliceJardine. Cynesis: Configurations of Woman and Modernity. (Ithaca, N.Y: Cor-
nell University Press, 1985).
12 Richard Abel. French Film: The First Wave. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University
Press, 1984), 466.

13 Monika Elsner, et al. "The Early History of German Television: The Slow Develop-
ment of a Fast Medium," in Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television. 10,
2(1990), 194. My thanks to Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht for bringing this article to my
attention.

14 Elsner et al., 199.

15 Richard Bender. "Functions of Film: Leger's Cinema on Paper and on Cellulose,

1913-25." Cinema Journal 24, #1, (Fall, 1984), 41-61.

16 Blaise Cendrars. "ABC du Cinema," 1921, in Blaise Cendrars, Aujourd'hui, Paris,

1931. Trans. Serge Gavronsky, in Film Culture, 40 (Spring, 1966), 20. Quoted in
Lawder, 79-80.

17 Blaise Cendrars. La Fin du monde filmee par l'ange de Notre-Dame (Paris: Seghers,
1949), 22.
18 Sylvia Cranston. HPB: the Extraordinary Life and Influence of Helena Blavatsky. (New
York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1993), 445.

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