Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Inferno
The stylish documentary recounts the doomed 1964 film, the production of which ended three weeks after it began, its out-of-his-depth director having suffered a heart attack.
Films sometimes fall to pieces during production, and HenriGeorges Clouzot’s Inferno (aka L’enfer d’HenriGeorges Clouzot) details just such a derailment, telling the story of how the director’s pet project, Inferno
(or L’enfer, which literally translates as “hell”) ground to a halt after a few weeks of shooting, in 1964.
It’s an accomplished, stylish documentary that makes use of the original Inferno footage, supplementing it with staged readings by actors. The crew talk about the events leading up to the film’s failure as if they occurred yesterday.
Clouzot, who died in 1977, was a critically acclaimed director, best known internationally for directing the Hitchcocklike psychological thriller Les Diaboliques in 1955. He had been criticised by the French New Wave when they rose to prominence in the late 1950s, accusing him of being hidebound and oldfashioned.
Inferno was intended to mark Clouzot’s return to the scene with something strikingly modern. The story, which was mainly filmed on and around a big lake, is about a psychotically jealous man driven mad because he thinks his provocative wife is having a series of affairs.
Clouzot looked to the art world to give the film a contemporary look, drawing on OpArt – which capitalises on the eye’s potential to create optical illusions – for the specialeffects sequences used to express the madness of his protagonist. The footage of these scenes looks highly sophisticated considering there were no computerised effects available – although they led to some of the film’s many problems, as Clouzot did not understand the technical process and argued with his technicians.
Other scenes use bright colours and lighting effects to show the characters’ distorted point of view, referencing the psychedelic wave that was taking shape in popular culture.
Films often fail due to lack of funding but that was not the case with Inferno; the film’s backers were so impressed with Clouzot’s pitch, they had taken the unusual step of giving him an unlimited budget. Interviewees conclude that the problems were entirely of Clouzot’s making, noting that he often seemed at a loss about what to do, and would stand beside the camera staring blankly into space rather than making directorial decisions.
The biggest problem was that Clouzot – who was known for his nasty treatment of actors and actresses – harassed Serge
Reggiani so much that the leading man walked out of the film, saying that he would rather risk a lawsuit than continue to be insulted by Clouzot. Continuing without a leading man, Clouzot had a heart attack three weeks into the shoot, and the insurance companies pulled the plug on the film.
The script of Inferno did finally see the light of day in a 1994 adaptation by Claude Chabrol, L’enfer. Chabrol’s disturbing version is everything that Clouzot could have wished for.
HenriGeorges Clouzot’s Inferno will be screened on Saturday at Broadway Cinematheque, in Yau Ma Tei, as part of the Hong Kong French Film Festival.