Marcel L’Herbier: Dossier

This ‘dossier’ is dedicated to Marcel L’Herbier, a seminal figure in twentieth-century French cinema who, although very prolific, remains little known outside France. It grows out of the 4th Fashion in Film Festival,1 a film season which celebrated L’Herbier’s unique position in French cinema – and cinema more generally – as a driving force behind many significant artistic collaborations, with an emphasis on the extraordinarily fruitful years between 1918 and 1932. Spanning the silent and early sound eras, this was the period in which L’Herbier most succeeded in his vision to enrich cinema by ‘synthesising’ a wide range of creative fields, including painting, sculpture, architecture, music, furniture, textiles, costume design and, of course, fashion.

Like the festival, this dossier is aimed at an English-speaking audience, and we hope above all to generate more interest outside France in L’Herbier’s remarkable but rarely seen work. The dossier assembles newly commissioned essays as well as an array of quotations (compiled by Marlène Van de Casteele), photographs, illustrations and other documentary material. We wanted to spotlight texts from the period because only very little of this material has been translated into English.