The Inhuman Woman

Marcel L'Herbier's extravagant, visually intoxicating melodrama — a high-society fever dream that pushes the French Impressionist style to its most ornate and excessive. Georgette Leblanc plays Claire Lescot, a famous singer so beautiful that she drives men to ruin and suicide without ever reciprocating their passion. Among her desperate suitors is a young scientist who has invented a machine that can broadcast moving images worldwide — an invention that Claire, the ultimate media creation, seems born to exploit. L'Herbier recruited actual avant-garde artists to design the sets and costumes — including Fernand Léger and Robert Mallet-Stevens — and the result is a visual feast of Art Deco excess and Cubist design. The plot is pure pulp, but the imagery is extraordinary: a laboratory party sequence that looks like a Bauhaus hallucination.