The Dadaist film of Fernand Léger combines the dynamic abstraction of constructivism with the absurd and unruly qualities of Dada. This masterpiece of experimental cinema is associated with the Parisian Dada movement around Francis Picabia and Marcel Duchamp. A movement primarily directed against André Breton and the surrealists, and particularly against the First Surrealist Manifesto which had just been published. According to the Dadaists, André Breton was not a revolutionary, but an arriviste, or in Picabia’s words: “a petit bourgeois who loves little collections of paintings.”

A year before the Exposition internationale des Arts Décoratifs et industriels modernes of 1925, where the word Art déco would come into being, Marcel L’Herbier reached for a big feat. With “L’Inhumaine“ he created a synthesis of all the arts together with his generation’s most exceptional artists, just as the theoretician Ricciotto Canudo had demanded it for the cinema. His manifest for modern French art and technology unites design by Alberto Cavalcanti, Claude Autant-Lara and Fernand Leger, architecture by Robert Mallet-Stevens, costumes by Paul Poiret, furniture by Pierre Chareau and Michel Dufet, ballet by Jean Börlin and music by Georges Antheil und Darius Milhaud – which has since been lost – to create one large ‘Gesamtkunstwerk’.

The film is defined by an aesthetic of the mechanic, with its abstracting montage, fragmentation of objects and dream of a panoptic vision. It not only testifies to how an eclectic group of artists from all disciplines imagined the union of modernity and technology but also how French universalism of the 1920s staged the categories of humanity and inhumanity. Thus, personified inhumanity in the form of prima donna Claire Lescot only finds back to humanity when she is introduced to the fantastic world of newest technology by scientist Einar Norsen that restores her to new life.