One year before the Exposition internationale des Arts Décoratifs et industriels modernes in 1925, which would give rise to the concept of Art Deco, Marcel L'Herbier set out to create a major work. With "L'Inhumaine", together with outstanding artists of his generation, he created a synthesis of all the arts, just as the theorist Ricciotto Canudo had demanded of cinema. His manifesto for modern French art and technology combines 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 now lost music by Georges Antheil and Darius Milhaud to create a great synthesis of the arts.

Characterised by a mechanical aesthetic, an abstract montage, a fragmentation of objects and the dream of a panoptic vision, the film not only bears eloquent witness to how this important group of artists from all disciplines imagined the unification of modernity and technology, but also how the French universalism of the 1920s staged the categories of the human and the inhuman. The embodiment of inhumanity, the opera diva Claire Lescot, only returns to humanity when she is introduced to the fantastic world of the latest technology by the scientist Einar Norsen and ultimately literally brought back to life.