Marcel L'Herbier (; 23 April 1888 – 26 November 1979) was a French filmmaker who achieved prominence as an avant-garde theorist and imaginative practitioner with a series of silent films in the 1920s. His career as a director continued until the 1950s and he made more than 40 feature films in total. During the 1950s and 1960s, he worked on cultural programmes for French television. He also fulfilled many administrative roles in the French film industry, and he was the founder and the first President of the French film school Institut des hautes études cinématographiques (IDHEC).
Early life Marcel L'Herbier was born in Paris on 23 April 1888Some reference sources erroneously give L'Herbier's date of birth as 1890. The correct date is confirmed in his autobiography, La Tête qui tourne, p. 16. into a professional and intellectual family, and as he grew up he demonstrated a multi-talented disposition for sports, dancing, debating and the arts. He attended a Marist school and then the Lycée Voltaire, followed by the École des Hautes Études Sociales in Paris.Marcel L'Herbier, La Tête qui tourne. Paris: Belfond, 1979, pp. 16–17. He worked hard at his education and by 1910 he had obtained his licence en droit, a qualification to practice law. He went on to study literature, and in his spare time he learned harmony and counterpoint with Xavier Leroux, with the ambition of becoming a composer. Another ambition was to join the diplomatic service.Jaque Catelain, Jaque Catelain présente Marcel L'Herbier. Paris: Vautrain, 1950, p. 8.
An early romance with the future dancer Marcelle Rahna ended in sensational publicity when she fired a revolver at him and then at herself. Both survived, but L'Herbier lost the use of a finger.Catelain, Jaque Catelain présente Marcel L'Herbier. 1950, p. 10. In 1912 he met Georgette Leblanc, the companion of Maurice Maeterlinck, and under her influence he started to write plays, poetry and criticism, and made many contacts in literature and the theatre. His idols were Oscar Wilde, Paul Claudel and Claude Debussy.Roy Armes, French Cinema. London: Secker & Warburg, 1985, p. 44.
The outbreak of war in 1914 changed L'Herbier's world. He withdrew from social life, and being unable to join the army immediately because of his injured hand, he went to work in a factory making military uniforms. He went on to serve with various auxiliary units of the armed forces and towards the end of the war in 1917–1918 he was by chance transferred to the Section Cinématographique de l'Armée, where he received his first technical training in film-making. His intellectual conversion to the medium of film had only recently occurred, initially through a friendship with the actress Musidora (he recalled that she took him to Cecil B. DeMille's The Cheat (1915) which awakened him to the artistic possibilities of silent films)L'Herbier, La Tête qui tourne. 1979, pp. 19–21. and subsequently through encounters with the critics Louis Delluc and Émile Vuillermoz who were developing their own theories of the new art form.
Silent films While still in the army, L'Herbier wrote two film scenarios for other directors, and then accepted an official commission to make a propaganda film about the image of France, which was funded by Léon Gaumont. He produced Rose-France (1918), a highly original and poetic film using many experimental camera techniques, which proved too fanciful for many but which established his reputation as a talented innovator. After making another more commercial film for Gaumont, Le Bercail (1919), he was offered a two-year contract with the company which gave him the means to choose more ambitious projects. On Le Bercail, he worked for the first time with the actress Marcelle Pradot who subsequently appeared in most of his silent films and whom he married in 1923.L'Herbier, La Tête qui tourne. 1979, p. 123.
Between 1919 and 1922, L'Herbier made six films for Gaumont, several in their Série Pax, and three of these stood out as major achievements of his period in silent films. He adapted a story by Balzac for L'Homme du large (1920), set and filmed on the Brittany coast. More ambitious was El Dorado (1921), a grand and visually spectacular melodrama filmed on location in Andalusia; it was noted for its visual experiments with dissolves and blurred images ("flous" in French). Tensions between L'Herbier and Gaumont were resolved into the project Don Juan et Faust (1922), also filmed partly in Spain; but when the film went over-budget, L'Herbier was unable to complete it as planned, and the resulting work was appreciated more for its technical mastery than for its intellectual confrontation of two literary archetypes. After this, L'Herbier felt the need to seek his creative independence and he founded his own production company, Cinégraphic, which produced his next six films.
L'Herbier's first production with his own company was an adaptation of Resurrection (1923) from the Tolstoy novel, but filming met a series of setbacks and the project was abandoned when L'Herbier contracted typhoid and was critically ill for several weeks. Later in 1923, L'Herbier was persuaded by Georgette Leblanc-Maeterlinck to consider a project in which she would star, and which would also attract some American finance; this developed into L'Inhumaine (1924), one of the most ambitious films of L'Herbier's career, in which he collaborated with leading figures from other art forms, including Fernand Léger, Robert Mallet-Stevens and Darius Milhaud. A striking visual spectacle was built around a fanciful plot, and the result proved highly controversial among audiences and critics alike.
L'Herbier had discovered the work of the playwright and novelist Luigi Pirandello during 1923 and was eager to introduce his ideas to the cinema. He chose the novel Il fu Mattia Pascal, and was delighted when Pirandello's mistrust of filmmakers was overcome and he agreed for the first time to the filming of one of his works,. The film Feu Mathias Pascal (1925) featured the expatriate Russian actor Ivan Mosjoukine in the leading role, and it became successful with critics and the public.
In spite of his successes, Cinégraphic was steadily losing money, and for his next film L'Herbier chose a more popular and straightforward subject, Le Vertige (1926), filmed in the south of France, which was a commercial success. This was followed by Le Diable au cœur (1928), a maritime drama set in the fishing port of Honfleur, and featuring the English actress Betty Balfour; this was the first French feature to be shot on panchromatic film.
The next and final Cinégraphic production (in collaboration with Société des Cinéromans) was another large-scale project, (also 1928), an adaptation of Zola's novel of the same name, transposed from the 1860s to the then present day. With an international cast, art deco design, and some spectacular location filming in the Paris Bourse, was a substantial work which effectively marked the end of silent film-making for L'Herbier. He had been responsible for some of the period's most innovative developments in his own films, and he also provided support to other filmmakers such as Louis Delluc, whose final film L'Inondation (1923) was financed by Cinégraphic. He also gathered around him a group of regular collaborators, including Claude Autant-Lara, Philippe Hériat, and Jaque Catelain (who became his lifelong friend and appeared in twenty of his films).According to the critic Noël Burch, Marcel L'Herbier and Jaque Catelain had a homosexual relationship. Noël Burch, "Ambivalences d'un réalisateur 'bisexuel': quatre films de Marcel L'Herbier", in Marcel L'Herbier: l'art du cinéma, sous la direction de Laurent Véray. Paris: Association Française de Recherche sur l'Histoire du Cinéma, 2007. pp.201-216.
Sound films After a transitional film, Nuits de princes, shot as a silent picture but given a complete soundtrack of music, songs and sound-effects, L'Herbier undertook L'Enfant de l'amour (1929), which, like many other early ventures in sound film, was an adaptation of a stage play. This was the first fully talking picture to be made in a French studio. In addition to the technical problems presented by the heavy new sound cameras, L'Herbier was also required to make the film simultaneously in three different language versions (French, English and German) which meant that several actors had to be used in some of the roles. The film was sufficiently successful to attract other similar offers, but L'Herbier felt the loss of his independence of action, and after making two detective films based on books by Gaston Leroux, (1930) and (1931), he withdrew from film-making for two years and returned to writing. In 1933, fearing that he was losing touch with the film business, he returned to make several more versions of stage plays, L'Épervier, Le Scandale and L'Aventurier, all of which enjoyed commercial popularity but gave little scope for the kind of cinematic invention that he sought.
L'Herbier's most successful film of the 1930s was Le Bonheur (1934), ("a miraculous conjunction of talents"N. T. Binh, "Le Bonheur: la plus belle mise en abyme", in Marcel L'Herbier: l'art du cinéma, sous la direction de Laurent Véray. Paris: Association Française de Recherche sur l'Histoire du Cinéma, 2007. p.272. "...une miraculeuse conjonction de talents dont Marcel L'Herbier ne retrouvera pas souvent l'équivalent."), adapted from a play by Henri Bernstein, with Charles Boyer and Gaby Morlay in the leading roles. During filming, L'Herbier was injured when a camera fell on him, and he consequently lost the sight of one eye. He began a court action against the producers Pathé, claiming their civil responsibility, and the eventual judgment of the case (1938) in his favour recognised for the first time in French law the right of the director to be considered as an author of his film, rather than merely as an employee of the company. This marked an important stage in L'Herbier's lifelong battle for greater recognition of filmmakers as creative artists.Binh, "Le Bonheur: la plus belle mise en abyme", in Marcel L'Herbier: l'art du cinéma, 2007, p. 265.
Between 1935 and 1937, L'Herbier directed seven features, including a trio which were characterised by their patriotic spirit, Veille d'armes (1935) (depicting the French navy), Les Hommes nouveaux (1936) (Maréchal Lyautey's pacification of Morocco), and La Porte du large (1936) (the navy again). Made during a period of intense political conflict between the left and the right in France, these films, by L'Herbier's own admission, represented a split in his own politics, which set his socialist sympathies against his impatience with the anti-militarism of the Front Populaire.Marcel L'Herbier, La Tête qui tourne. Paris: Belfond, 1979. p.251.
After trying to revive his own production company, this time under the name Cinéphonic, to produce some short documentaries, l'Herbier tried to develop more satisfactory material for himself in a series of dramatised histories which he called "chroniques filmées". The three which he completed before the outbreak of World War II were La Tragédie impériale (1938), about Tsar Nicholas II and Rasputin, Adrienne Lecouvreur (1938), filmed at the UFA studios in Berlin, and Entente cordiale (1939), which used the life of Edward VII to demonstrate the affinities between France and Britain; (its première in April 1939 took place in the wake of the German invasion of Czechoslovakia).
The outbreak of war in 1939 did not immediately interrupt L'Herbier's film-making, and in the spring of 1940 he was at the Scalera studios in Rome shooting a long-cherished project, La Comédie du bonheur, but the imminent entry of Italy into the war alongside Germany forced him to return to France before the film was fully completed (though it was subsequently released).