31 Facts About Marcel L'Herbier

Marcel L'Herbier 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 etudes cinematographiques.

Marcel L'Herbier was born in Paris on 23 April 1888 into a professional and intellectual family, and as he grew up he demonstrated a multi-talented disposition for sports, dancing, debating and the arts.

Marcel L'Herbier attended a Marist school and then the Lycee Voltaire, followed by the Ecole des Hautes Etudes Sociales in Paris.

Marcel L'Herbier worked hard at his education and by 1910 he had obtained his licence en droit, a qualification to practice law.

Marcel L'Herbier went on to study literature, and in his spare time he learned harmony and counterpoint with Xavier Leroux, with the ambition of becoming a composer.

Marcel L'Herbier's idols were Oscar Wilde, Paul Claudel and Claude Debussy.

Marcel L'Herbier withdrew from social life, and being unable to join the army immediately because of his injured hand, he went to work in a factory making military uniforms.

Marcel L'Herbier produced Rose-France, a highly original and poetic film using many experimental camera techniques, which proved too fanciful for many but which established his reputation as a talented innovator.

Between 1919 and 1922, Marcel L'Herbier made six films for Gaumont, several in their Serie Pax, and three of these stood out as major achievements of his period in silent films.

Marcel L'Herbier adapted a story by Balzac for L'Homme du large, set and filmed on the Brittany coast.

Marcel L'Herbier's first production with his own company was an adaptation of Resurrection from the Tolstoy novel, but filming met a series of setbacks and the project was abandoned when Marcel L'Herbier contracted typhoid and was critically ill for several weeks.

Later in 1923, Marcel L'Herbier was persuaded by Georgette Leblanc-Maeterlinck to consider a project in which she would star, and which would attract some American finance; this developed into L'Inhumaine, one of the most ambitious films of Marcel L'Herbier's career, in which he collaborated with leading figures from other art forms, including Fernand Leger, Robert Mallet-Stevens and Darius Milhaud.

Marcel L'Herbier had discovered the work of the playwright and novelist Luigi Pirandello during 1923 and was eager to introduce his ideas to the cinema.

Marcel L'Herbier chose the novel Il fu Mattia Pascal, and was delighted when Pirandello's mistrust of filmmakers was overcome and he agreed for the first time to the filming of one of his works,.

In spite of his successes, Cinegraphic was steadily losing money, and for his next film Marcel L'Herbier chose a more popular and straightforward subject, Le Vertige, filmed in the south of France, which was a commercial success.

Marcel L'Herbier had been responsible for some of the period's most innovative developments in his own films, and he provided support to other filmmakers such as Louis Delluc, whose final film L'Inondation was financed by Cinegraphic.

Marcel L'Herbier gathered around him a group of regular collaborators, including Claude Autant-Lara, Philippe Heriat, and Jaque Catelain.

Marcel L'Herbier began a court action against the producers Pathe, claiming their civil responsibility, and the eventual judgment of the case in his favour recognised for the first time in French law the right of the director to be considered as an author of his film, rather than merely as an employee of the company.

Between 1935 and 1937, Marcel L'Herbier directed seven features, including a trio which were characterised by their patriotic spirit, Veille d'armes, Les Hommes nouveaux, and La Porte du large.

Marcel L'Herbier went on to direct four films before the Liberation, the most successful of which was La Nuit fantastique.

Marcel L'Herbier was interested in what made television distinctively different from cinema, and he wrote articles developing the idea that each medium had its own aesthetic.

Whereas for Marcel L'Herbier the cinema was a creative art-form, television was a medium for recording, for reproducing, for disseminating to a wide audience; television would not kill the cinema - on the contrary it could be the means of deepening the public's understanding of cinema.

Marcel L'Herbier presented eight series of programmes which combined critical discussion and interviews about cinema with extracts from films, and sometimes the transmission of a complete film that had been featured in the discussion.

Marcel L'Herbier directed five television plays which were mainly transmitted live.

Marcel L'Herbier was the first established filmmaker to work in French television, and he brought to the task an evident seriousness of purpose and concern for its educational possibilities.

In March 1941, Marcel L'Herbier was elected president of the Cinematheque francaise, but his plans for major reorganisation soon brought him into conflict with its secretary and founder Henri Langlois.

Marcel L'Herbier continued as president until 1944, when he was finally outmanoeuvred by Langlois, and he was replaced by Jean Gremillon.

Marcel L'Herbier became its first president in 1944 and held the position until 1969.

Marcel L'Herbier wrote over 500 articles for magazines and newspapers, some of which were collected in his book Intelligence du cinematographe.

Marcel L'Herbier died in Paris on 26 November 1979 at the age of 91.

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.