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 Léger, 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’.