Overture: L'Inhumaine

What is ‘modern’ about sound, and what is the significance of sound for modernism? How is sound represented in literature, and the other arts? A perfect way to begin answering these questions comes via a feature film, a minor classic, Marcel L'Herbier's L'Inhumaine (1924).

The plot revolves around a famous and enchanting singer, Claire Lescot, played by Georgette Leblanc. Because of her coquettish and unfeeling manipulation of men's affections, she is known as ‘the inhuman’; hence the film's title. However, her own affections are eventually engaged by Einar Norsen (played by Jacques Catelain), an engineer whose love for the singer is bound up with his invention of a thrilling and portentous machine. With this machine, Lescot's voice can be transmitted across the world, much as real-life radio in the early 1920s was starting to broadcast the voices of broadcasters across Europe and North America. However, unlike its real-life equivalent, Norsen's device also allows Lescot to see her audiences, as they listen. In the scene where the invention is unveiled, a series of moving images is displayed upon a screen as Lescot sings, much as in television – a word which itself appears on an intertitle, as part of Norsen's explanatory dialogue. Each set of images represents a part of Lescot's global fan base. And so, we, the film's audience, along with Lescot, come to see a group of Arab men sitting around a loudspeaker, somewhere in the Middle East (here, as in the following shots, people's location and ethnicity is signified by props and clothing).