L'Enfer d'Henri-Georges Clouzot

Okay, this is an insiders' movie for the die-hards, but it works for everyone.

The director presumably got the idea when he got stuck with Clouzot's widow in an elevator - he even thanks the elevator for its technical failure in the credits.

What do we learn? Overall, we learn about flawed genius, about how unlimited budgets can send a brilliant director off-track. we learn about how far actors will go to satisfy their director's requirements.

What do we see? First, being born in 1964, the year the movie was filmed, I loved the stilted, post-industrial surroundings at the lake and the hotel were the film was supposed to be set. I loved the costumes, the modernity and became totally nostalgic (to going back to being a baby, I suppose). Romy... Does it add anything we haven't seen from her? Perhaps not, but it sure is nice and especially to see her with Serge Reggiani who only makes her beauty shine more.

Does it work as a documentary? Yes, very well, in my humble opinion. The director does not ask (irrelevant) questions, but he simply presents the material and gives us an insight that perhaps, there was more than Clouzot's seizure to halt filming. He uses beautiful background music to make-up for the missing soundtrack. The dialogues read by two really good actors: well, perhaps it was a bit contrite, but I was thinking all the time that one of the things that would have been quite mediocre had the film been completed, would have been that: the dialogues were flat, boring and superficial (but the actors read them well).

My friend asked me: how many movies are there about a movie. Lots, but yesterday evening I could not think of one. But this is more, this is a documentary about a movie about failing to make a movie.

Highly recommended.

This, apparently, is a film where you gain prestige by saying you like it, thereby associating yourself with the great insane folk of the past, always a sure way to build cred. In my view, if someone has to tell you that someone is (or was) great, they probably don't know what they are talking about. If your greatness is limited to a time or place, you're not great. Sorry, but that's the way it is.

In this case, the emperor has no clothes.

Half of the audience I saw this with could not bear to sit through it to the end, and like Serge and Jean-Louis, they simply walked out. If that was the desired effect, then the filmmakers did great -- at failing.

This film didn't know whether it wanted to tell the story IN the film, or the story OF the film, so it tried to do both, thus failing at both. You've got footage mixed in with experiment mixed in with interviews mixed in with acting, and then there's a soundtrack which we're told didn't exist.

What I liked most about the film was the experimental footage, but even that got old rather quickly. There's only so long a person can be dazzled by the idea of rotating a light about someone's face in different colours. We get it already. To be fair, there are a number of other quite interesting shots, including for some reason a sea of noses, and a sparkly cellophane strangulation.

I do hope to one day see the 1994 L'enfer, which was adapted from the 1964 failure. It currently has a 7.0 score on IMDb, so I hope it will be time well spent.

A most interesting film surrounding the making of Clouzot's unfinished, Inferno. Abandoned in 1964 ostensibly due to the director's heart attack, a substantial amount of filming remains and much use has been made of the original footage. Intended as a film about a husband's obsessive jealousy over his wife's apparent philandering, it seems Clouzot became himself obsessed. The b/w footage appears to have some promise but is without soundtrack so hard to judge, but no the real interest here is the experimental reels. Determined to make a film like no other, Clouzot recruited any number of technicians and artists to help create devices to give him surreal or psychedelic affects. Along the way the director has clearly fallen for the lovely Romy Schneider who for instance spent four days with a camera close up on her lips whilst exhaling cigarette smoke and wearing various colours of lipstick, including blue. Valuable as an insight into the attempted making of Inferno but a little frustrating in that it asks more questions than it answers, like the true mental state of the director and why nobody else might have carried on. It is possible that a lot was left out here because Clouzot's widow was to have last say on the film but it would be nice to know and maybe someone else one day will have another go, there seems enough footage.

A view of Henri-Georges Clouzot's filmography cannot be complete with at least acknowledging his lost, partially shot film, Inferno. Production began in the summer of 1964 and fell apart in about a month. Incomplete and unable to find funds to continue, Clouzot abandoned the film, eventually adopting some of his ideas into Woman in Chains, his final feature film. The story of the disruption of the film remained something of a mystery to the more casual of film goers until 2009 with the release of this documentary by Serge Bromberg. Part re-creation, part rediscovery, and part behind the scenes documentary, it's a fascinating look at a filmmaker gone, potentially, as mad as his main character.

After the relative success of La Verite and the murk that was the changing French film industry brought on by the rising French New Wave, Henri-Georges Clouzot decided to embark on his most experimental film based on his large, 300-page script titled L'enfer. The story of a middle-aged man, Marcel (Serge Reggiani), who married a younger woman, Odette (Romy Schneider), and the hell he goes through as he suspects her of infidelities in their vacation in the small town French town they honeymoon. The driver of the film, in Clouzot's mind, was the experimentation he could bring to the film's subjective point of view from Marcel as he sees what may or may not be happening. The parts of the film that were unquestionably in objective reality would be filmed in black and white, and the films tainted by Marcel's point of view would be in color.

The documentary lays out Clouzot's working process, explicitly called out as one of his great strengths on his previous films. There are some contrasts with the French New Wave filmmakers who prioritized improvisation over planning, one of the main reasons that they rejected Clouzot (though they loved Hitchcock who did the same thing...whatever) as representative of the old way of doing things. Clouzot would retort with the idea that his improvisation happened on paper. He would plan to such a degree that he could focus purely on the actors on set, having meticulously pre-planned camera angles, lenses, and framing before they ever showed up to set.

Where Clouzot broke from his previous method of work, though, was the experimentation. He spent several months with his core crew of cameramen and sound technicians just trying things out, whatever distortions and effects they could come up with wholly in the camera. This experimentation was free-flowing and seemingly never ending, helped not at all by Columbia executives seeing the tests and throwing money at Clouzot to continue. The central experiment we get a look at is a color sequence on a lake where Clouzot planned on having the water turn red but everything else in camera to retain their original colors. This could only be done chemically at the time through inversion of colors, so everything from makeup to costumes had to be replicated in the opposite color. Unfortunately, we only ever see tests of the effect and never what might have been the final product, but it does sound like a great idea.

And that was ultimately Clouzot's downfall. He preplanned everything minutely, but he got lost in the experimentation. That seems to have infected his entire way of doing things, and he spent days reshooting the same scenes over and over again. He was reportedly always an exacting director with his actors, demanding many takes to get exactly what he wanted (like Kubrick would later be known for), but he seems to have lost the plot during the production of Inferno. He had the idea of using three crews that he was responsible for, but if he spends all day with the first crew redoing the same stuff he did last week, he's just burning not only money on things he already has in the can but on two other crews who are just sitting around, waiting to be told what to do.

As the cinematographer, William Lubtchansky, says in his interview, Clouzot was always a workaholic, and even an insomniac, and would expect everyone to work at any time he demanded, day or night (this was why he rented a house several miles from the main production offices in the small town's hotel, to avoid that), but Clouzot strained himself until he had a heart attack on set. That was ultimately what shut the production down. In retrospect, Lubtchansky concludes, Clouzot needed a producer to direct his energies, to keep him on schedule and to stop the experimentation.

Inferno is going to be one of those mysterious what-ifs in film, and I think it might have been compelling even if Clouzot hadn't been reigned in and managed to somehow finish production on his own terms. It might have been a complete mess, but it might have also been an interesting complete mess. Claude Chabrol did make a film from Clouzot's script in the 90s, which I'll have to check out at some point, which combined with this documentary is the closest we'll ever get to seeing the final product Clouzot had in mind.

'L'Enfer d'Henri Georges Clouzot' is one of those documentaries, like Fulton and Pepe's 'Lost in La Mancha,' about a movie that never got finished. This one concerns a film of 1964. Not a suspense thriller like the director's famous 'Wages of Fear' (1953) or 'Diabolique' (1955), which gained him art-house notoriety in the States and made him seem a French competitor of Hitchcock, or his earlier detective meller masterpiece 'Quai des Orfevres' (1947), 'Inferno' ('L'Enfer') was a psychological study of jealousy, with Serge Reggiani as stricken husband Marcel and the young, but already stellar, Romi Schneider as his too-pretty, flirtatious wife, Odette (references to Proust?). But things got too complicated and the movie never happened.

In 1994, Claude Chabrol did his film of 'Inferno,' having purchased the script from Clouzot's widow, Inez. In both cases, the essence of the tale is that the hotel owner's suspicions lead to paranoid delusions that overpower him. But Chabrol represents one of the primary Cahiers du Cinema branch of the French Nouvelle Vague, which was at its peak during the period of Clouzot's ascendancy, but represented new, freer, more inventive ways of working in film.

Clouzot on the contrary was old school, and was particularly noted for writing and story-boarding everything out ahead of time in the most scrupulous detail, as well as for working actors too hard. His 'Inferno' was to have been highly inventive in one respect, at least: he shot reams of experimental, "op-art" and prismatic lens shots, even creating "optical coitus" with spinning geometry and a zoom lens, as well as on-location reverse color images, planning visual equivalents of the Reggiani character's growing madness. The latest techniques were used, though the concept seems rather more like the surrealism of the Forties and Fifties than something new.

Still, there's no way of knowing how well the film would have turned out. What is clear is that those experimental shoots took too long, and ate up funds as well as time. When it went beyond pure optical illusion in the studio and more and more required the participation of Reggiani and Schneider, the shooting, much of it extraneous to the script, began to strain the stars. Clouzot was a chronic insomniac and would wake crew members at two a.m. with new ideas. He made Reggiani spend an entire day running, shooting the same sequence over and over and exhausting him. Reggiani walked off the set, pleading a mysterious illness, and never came back. Jean-Louis Tritignant was called in to interview as a replacement, but that didn't work out. Shortly later Clouzot, then 56, had a heart attack. That was it. Clouzot only made one more film, La Prisonniere, and died in 1977, aged 70.

Because the film wasn't finished, all the "preuves" were kept, and this film is interesting and unique for its lavish sampling of the experimental footage in which day-glo images spiral hypnotically or Marcek or his (imagined?) rival's faces merge, or Reggiani's or Schneider's faces are distorted as in a fun house. There's also detailed footage showing work to use color reversal to make the lake of the setting turn red when Marcel sees Odette water-skiing with Martineau (Jean-Claude Bercq), the local womanizer with whom she apparently has a fling.

The trick as Bomberg, a specialist in cinematic history and film restoration, told it in a NYFF Q&A, was to get hold of the 185 cans of footage controlled by Clouzot's second wife, Inez. Getting caught in a stalled elevator for two hours with her convinced her that her experience with Bomberg was "special" enough to give him the rights she'd denied to many others, and she also passed the completed documentary, without cuts.

The 'Inferno' footage is largely without sound, though there are test recordings of Reggiani uttering mad repetitious ravings as the wacked-out Marcel. Bomberg uses voice-overs to reconstruct some scenes of the film, and introduces five short scenes in which contemporary actors Berenice Bejo and Jacques Gamblin read from the script, to extrapolate.

Though it's all a bit after-the-fact, and the value of the Clouzot film remains moot, the documentary has interviews with nine cast and crew members, including Catherine Allegret, then-production assistant Costa Gavras and assistant cinematographer William Lubtchansky. Details of the breakdown emerge, and it's due to Clouzot's employing three separate film crews unaware of each other's activities, and his endless re-shooting of simple sequences. As one talking head points out, the film might have gotten made if Clouzot hadn't been writer, director, and producer. A real producer might have speeded things up, thus saving everybody's nerves and the production.

This is a glossy, beautifully crafted MK2 production and is a must-see for film buffs, particularly those interested in French cinema history. However as 'Variety' reviewer Todd McCarthy points out, important context is omitted in the failure to mention Clouzot's being out of commission throughout the Thirties in sanatoriums for mental problems. Maybe the widow wouldn't have wanted his lack of mental balance to be further discussed.

McCarthy is also right that the dominant image you come away with is the radiant and obviously cooperative young Romi Schneider. Dany Carrel as "Marylou" is another pert sex kitten in the cast who shows off plenty for the camera. It's puzzling that in the Q&A the flamboyant but otherwise informative Bomberg (so chatty he who was reluctant to relinquish the mike both before and after the NYFF public screening), never once mentioned co-director Ruxandra Medrea. Anyway, this is a rich and evocative piece of cinematic documentation.

Shown as part of the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center 2009. Also featured at Cannes, Toronto, Vancouver, and the London Film Festival. To open in France November 11, 2009