L'Inhumaine (1924), the “Plastic” Arts, and Cinematic Specificity

This chapter examines the medium-specific conception of cinema as a synthesis of the other arts propounded by influential members of the French art world in the 1920s as well as what was meant by the term “plastic.” It then shows how L'Herbier attempted to put this conception of cinema into practice by creating “vertical plastic harmonies” in L'Inhumaine . Probably the most common medium-specific argument found in early film theory asserts that cinema affords better perceptual access to phenomena than the other arts. The chapter concludes by briefly suggesting that this “plastic” conception of cinema reemerged, albeit somewhat altered, in post-World War II modernist French film culture, in the formalist film theory of Noël Burch. L'Herbier's films of the 1920s were a major influence on Burch's post-war modernist formalism.