Background
Marcel L’Herbier was born on 23 April 1890 in Paris, Ile-de-France, France.
Marcel L’Herbier was born on 23 April 1890 in Paris, Ile-de-France, France.
Attended a Marist school and then the Lycée Voltaire, followed by the École des Hautes Études Sociales in Paris.
In the early 1920s he assembled a number of outstanding supporting talents and made some aggressively expressionist films: Eldorado, with its distorted images suggesting subjectivity; L'Inhumaine, involving architect Mallet Stevens, painter Fernand Léger, designer Alberto Cavalcanti, and composer Darius Milhaud; and Feu Mathias Pascal, from a Pirandello novel. Alain Resnais has talked about how far the ambition of these films now seems more valuable than their actual achievement.
Within a few years, LHerbier began making much more conventional films, and diverting his conviction about cinema’s importance into institutional channels. As well as writing several books—including Intelligence du Cinématographe—in 1932 he became advisor to the Comité Internationale du Cinéma d’Enseignement et de la Culture. During the Second World War, he founded IDHEC and served as president of the Cinémathèque Française. As soon as TV was active in France, he made a series of programs proclaiming and explaining cinema.
L’Herbier was a Parisian intellectual and literary critic who served in the army film unit during the First World War and emerged convinced of the new art form.