L'INHUMAINE

L'INHUMAINE ("The Inhuman One" / "The Inhuman Woman"). Marcel L'Herbier, director, co-script, "inspired by non-fiction novels [sic] of Joris-Karl Huysmans," with Georgette Leblanc and Pierre Mac Orlan.[1] Current listings, IMDbPro: France: La Société des Films Armor and, for initial production, Cinégraphic / Boîte à Images (the newly restored version of 1986) and US: Film Associates, (1926), 1924.[2] Laboratory set: Fernand Léger;[3] Art Directors: Claude Autant-Lara and Alberto Cavalcanti.[4]

See for what the Wikipedia entry describes as "the mechanical laboratory of Einar Norsen," the "young Swedish scientist" courting "the inhuman woman" star: a set design by no less than Léger![5]

From Film Architecture: From METROPOLIS to BLADE RUNNER: the plot,

a mishmash of science fiction, love story, and thriller, chronicles three days in the lives of the glamorous, notorious soprano Claire Lescot, the "inhuman one" of the title, and two rivals for her affection, Einnar Norsen, an engineer who is the hero [...] and the Maharajah Djorah, the villain. [...] Norsen gives the reformed Lescot a tour of his laboratory, which features such marvels as a device that enables her not only to broadcast her singing around the world on radio but also to see on a television screen the delighted reactions of listeners from Chicago to Paris. This inspires the jealous Djorah to murder Lescot, and — to further torment Norsen — to leave her body at his laboratory[,... not knowing] that the lab contains a subterranean room, the purpose of which is the revival of the dead. In a dramatic sequence of quick-cuts and montage which recalls the creation of Maria the robot in Fritz Lang's Metropolis, the lab comes alive with moving machinery, bubbling chemicals, and superimposed views of lightning and static electricity. Lescot appears to revive. (p. 80)

Note the suggestion of a mechanized underworld in the lab's "subterranean room" and cf. and contrast such settings in works ranging from "The Machine Stops" to GENE AUTRY AND THE PHANTOM EMPIRE. The underground room might also be seen as a liminal space between the modern(ist) laboratory and whatever chthonic territory we think appropriate for raising the dead (so contrast the elevation of the lab and the Creature in James Whale's 1931 FRANKENSTEIN).

RDE, finishing, 25May23