Marcel L'Herbier

Biography

Marcel L'Herbier (1888-1979) was a French filmmaker who achieved prominence as an avant-garde theorist and imaginative practitioner with a series of silent films in the 1920s. His career as a director continued until the 1950s and he made more than 40 feature films in total. During the 1950s and 1960s, he worked on cultural programmes for French television. He also fulfilled many administrative roles in the French film industry, and he was the founder and the first President of the French film school Institut des hautes études cinématographiques (IDHEC). In 1921, only three years after his first film, Marcel L'Herbier was voted by readers of a French film magazine as the best French director. In the following year, the critic Léon Moussinac marked him as one of the filmmakers whose work was most important for the future of cinema. In this period, L'Herbier was linked with filmmakers such as Abel Gance, Germaine Dulac and Louis Delluc as part of a "first avant-garde" (Impressionism) in French cinema, the first generation to think spontaneously in animated images.

Directed

1. L'Argent (1928) — Director
2. The Inhuman Woman (1924) — Director
3. The Late Mathias Pascal (1925) — Director
4. El Dorado (1921) — Director
5. Le Bonheur (1934) — Director
6. Fantastic Night (1942) — Director
7. The Man of the Sea (1920) — Director
8. The Last Days of Pompeii (1950) — Director
9. Forfaiture (1937) — Director
10. Little Devil May Care (1928) — Director
11. Scent of the Woman in Black (1931) — Director
12. Comedy of Happiness (1940) — Director
13. Le Vertige (1926) — Director
14. Le Bercail (1919) — Director
15. Rasputin (1938) — Director
16. Cordial Agreement (1939) — Director
17. Adrienne Lecouvreur (1938) — Director
18. Happy Go Lucky (1946) — Director
19. Rose-France (1919) — Director
20. The New Men (1936) — Director
21. What the East Wind Saw (1954) — Director
22. The Mystery of the Yellow Room (1930) — Director
23. Prometheus, Banker (1921) — Director
24. The Adventurer (1934) — Director
25. The Honorable Catherine (1943) — Director
26. Foolish Husbands (1941) — Director
27. The Father of the Girl (1953) — Director
28. Children's Corner (1936) — Director
29. Illegitimate Child (1930) — Director
30. The Imperial Road (1935) — Director
31. The Bohemian Life (1945) — Director
32. Nights of Fire (1937) — Director
33. Queen's Necklace (1946) — Director
34. Stolen Affections (1948) — Director
35. The Great Temptation (1936) — Director
36. Le Carnaval des vérités (1920) — Director
37. Don Juan et Faust (1922) — Director
38. Princely Nights (1929) — Director
39. Sacrifice of Honor (1935) — Director
40. Land of Fire (1939) — Director

Also appeared in

1. Autour de l'argent (1929) — Himself
2. Infatuation (1918)
3. Encyclopédie audiovisuelle du cinéma (1978) — Self (archive footage)