Henri-Georges Clouzot's Inferno

When reading up on Henri-Georges Clouzot,I was always intrigued to hear about a documentary about an unfinished film of Clouzot's. Looking on Amazon UK at the most recent Arrow releases,I was thrilled to find they had recently put the doc out,which led to me stepping into the inferno.

View on the doc:

Complimenting the doc with 2 hours of extra interviews, Arrow deliver a splendid Blu-Ray transfer,with the raw original footage shown looking sharp,and the subtitles being well-paced and easy to read. Gaining access to the archive material from Henri-Georges Clouzot's (HGC) widow, directors Serge Bromberg & Ruxandra Medrea make glimpses at what could have been the star attraction, with HGC's experimentation to give the dream sequences of the husband a colourful surreal appearance, and a still ground-breaking use of multi-tracking to manipulate the soundtrack. Interviewing surviving crew members and re-enacting un-filmed scenes with future The Artist star Bérénice Bejo, the directors do not shy away from HGC very rough treatment of the cast,and the frustrations from the crew over HGC's being unable to express a clear vision over what the finished production should look like,leading to Inferno being left in the inferno of unfinished (could have been) classics.

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.

I'm a great admirer of Serge Bromberg. He is a man who will share and communicate his love for movies. But he is first and foremost a film collector, so he has too much respect for shelved and forgotten material, which I reckon is good to explain you how some rare silent newsreel is interesting, or to teach younger generations the importance of Meliès in pushing cinema beyond the mundane recording of live action.

Any movie buff will admire the work of Clouzot, so the pitfall was too much respect for a doomed project. There is very little insight about the unfinished movie. The answer comes late in the documentary, by that time we would have guessed by ourselves with all the clues, with all the experimentation and all the images and talk isolating Clouzot from the production reality. Sure Clouzot badly needed some kind of associate, be it a producer and/or a writer. In short, as a creative mind with lots of responsibilities he needed a sparing partner for his ideas. Someone who would stay focused and help sober Clouzot after an experimental binge. But everybody respected Clouzot as a genius, or feared him, and they didn't feel they could understand him, let alone speak up to him.

Now this is the main point with L'Enfer, and should have been the heart of the documentary. Instead we have a flat chronological montage of a prologue + prep + shoot. Such an approach would be OK for a 25min. runtime, but it's way overblown to 90min. Sure there were plenty rushes, fascinating images. The real homage would have been to tell a story with these images, inventing a context, not scholarly laying out the facts. At least the book Romy dans l'Enfer is much better since it chooses one approach, the one that stands out in all the presumably exhausting experimental work of Clouzot.

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.

Presuming that you have not yet seen it, here is a description.

Henri-Georges was a remarkable filmmaker. Though contemporary with those normally tagged new wave, he was interested not in ideas but the effectiveness of cinema. His special talent was internal perturbations of reality. After a long period of silence, he embarked on his most ambitious project: a film about a jealous man, showing his torture through practically achieved cinematic effects.

He got a huge budget from Hollywood and lavished it on the film, not on sets, costumes, actors. Much was shot, and then the thing unraveled, largely because of the filmmaker's own obsessions. Production halted.

Later, in 2009, this film was made about the making of the previous one, weaving the movie and the making of the movie together. The format is superficially simple: we have seated interviews with people who were involved, while relevant footage runs behind them. We see much of that footage without the original sound, though some slight, small effects have been added. Most of the footage are strange optical experiments. Some is the action in "reality." We also, separately, have two contemporary actors reading the lines from the shooting script so at least we know the story such as it is.

The result is remarkable. As collaborators, one after the other, testify to the growing madness of Clouzot, or apparent madness. Or perhaps genius. It is effective as a documentary, perhaps unique in its form. It merges fiction and non-fiction, story on story, folded so that it matters. The main actor walks off, the filmmaker has a heart attack, the lake on which filming occurs literally disappears. Trains come. Anxieties mount as loves and the obsession to create clash.

We wonder about projects started but unseen from Welles, Hopper, Kurosawa. Like unimagined dreams we might reach, they perhaps have more power without us encountering them. Frankly, I never heard of this failed project before. I am grateful to have encountered it now, in this way.

Unfortunately, you may find the optical effects strange, dated. They all are "real" in the sense of being generated according to physical laws and properties. These days, we normally denote the unreal by effects done virtually and supposedly unconstrained by reality. So the shock is reverse: the film we are examining (in black and white) is the fiction, while the madness within that film (in color) is real.

"You have to see the madness through," is the last line of this. Clouzot could not. Let's hope you, dear reader, do.

Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.