L'Enfer d'Henri-Georges Clouzot (Henri-George Clouzot's Inferno) poster & wallpaper

Berenice Bejo, Catherine Allégret, Jacques Gamblin

Inflamed by the success of 8½, the French veteran set out in 1964 to outdo Fellini’s mod subjective experimentation. The ensuing aborted production, L’enfer, was a tale of deforming jealousy that seem...( read more  read more... )ed to crystallize the director’s gloating worldview of suspicion, cruelty, madness, and contaminated relationships. It was also, alas, a laundry list of behind-the-scenes calamities: too much money, not enough discipline, schedules capsized by ballooning avant-garde effects, a bullied leading man (Serge Regianni) walking off the set, and the filmmaker’s own physical collapse. Obsession is the theme, not so much the protagonist’s for his young, possibly adulterous wife (Romy Schneider) as Clouzot’s for the looser, mid-1960s cinematic liberties which allowed him to literally project his mania onto the skin of a tantalizing actress. The footage was locked away for decades. Clouzot’s widow, Inès de Gonzalez, has turned the project’s surviving material—185 cans of camera negative—over to archivist Serge Bromberg, co-director (with Ruxandra Medrea) of the documentary L’enfer d’Henri-Georges Clouzot.

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Directed by: Ruxandra Medrea, Serge Bromberg

Release Date: October 4, 2009

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  • her69eyes
    October 28, 2009
    her69eyes
    In the 1950's, Henri-Georges Clouzot was affectionately known as "the French Hitchcock" - a name given after his wildly successful pair of thrillers, "The Wages of Fear" and "Diabolique". At the top of his game and now with the means to work completely on his own terms, Clouzot s...( read more)et out, in 1963, to film his most ambitious work to date - a startling visual orgy about a man driven mad with jealousy.

    "L'Enfer", or "Inferno", as it was dubbed, was an infamously lost film. The film, Clouzot's twelfth, was a project of such maddening ambition that in the course of the production he lost his lead actor and even suffered a heart attack. Along with his bombshell Austrian star, Romy Schneider, Clouzot set out to reinvent cinema.

    One of the directors of this new documentary, Serge Bromberg, recalls spending two hours in a broken elevator with Henri-Georges Clouzot's widow. Studied in film restoration, Bromberg learned of the the 185 cans of lost footage from Clouzot's uncompleted masterwork. In these reels are bizarre sections of test footage, highly experimental works that play with light, make up, and color to an extraordinarily surrealistic effect.

    The footage is so spectacular, in fact, that the rest of the film suffers by comparison. Rarely has an actress looked so beautiful as Clouzot's presentation of Schneider - covered in glitter and even green paint, she's the ultimate seductress in these bizarre effect tests. Watch her, with her lips blue, gyrating her body in such a way that a Slinky works it's way from her collarbone to her pelvis.

    Although there are a few surviving members of the crew, "Henri-Georges Clouzot's Inferno" suffers by not having even more access to those close to Clouzot at the time - the lead actors, namely. Many of the interviewees reveal some interesting anecdotes about the production, but one could only wonder what the film would've been had these interviews been completed decades prior. What would Schneider say about Clouzot? Or Reggianni?

    "Henri-Georges Clouzot's Inferno" is an accessible portrait of a director driven mad by his own ego and ambition. Although the film feels a bit incomplete due to the lack of major interview subjects from the original production, the lost footage alone makes "Inferno" a delight to behold.

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