Marcel L’Herbier au carrefour des avant-gardes: Feu Mathias Pascal et le dédoublement

Work on Feu Mathias Pascal has tended to emphasize its coherence. This paper takes the opposite view, showing how the film is incoherent, and celebrating that incoherence. Focusing on the second half of the film, we will show how the film is structured on a series of doublings. But whereas Abel considers that these doublings work to make the film more coherent, we will show how they do the opposite, and will also show how they are tied to surrealist preoccupations during the 1920s. This will allow us to hypothesize that in this film at least Marcel L’Herbier was at a focal point of the avant-gardes of the decade