Henri Georges Clouzot was a French filmmaker who worked from the 1930’s through to the 1970’s. Amongst his body of work are such classics as The Wages of Fear (1953) and Les Diabolique (1955). He has rightfully been described as the French Alfred Hitchcock; on the strength of the films of his that I’ve seen I’d argue he is a stronger director than Hitchcock. Les Diabolique in particular being an intense and suspenseful thriller that keeps you guessing right up until the final minutes of the film and is notable for its extremely edgy portrayal of murder - especially given the time of production. But Clouzot’s style of filmmaking was not fashionable amongst his French peers, the New Wave arrived and with it a trend of improvisation, low budget and on-the-run cinema that demanded a freer process of filmmaking. Clouzot was of the old guard, a man who prided himself on his meticulous planning and testing before film production began; he responded to the New Wave’s criticism of him by asserting that he did indeed improvise - but all his improvisations were on paper. Clouzot was not a rigid director stuck making the same film over and over again; he was influenced by directors, just not those of the French New Wave. Instead it was Federico Fellini’s 8 ½ (1963) which had the biggest influence on him; Clouzot wanted to make his 8 ½, an experimental film which would change the way people looked at film forever - Inferno was to be that film. But Inferno was never completed and this documentary charts the reasons why. Director’s Serge Bromberg and Ruxandra Medrea have put together a fascinating film using the unexploited footage from Clouzot’s Inferno, not just the on set takes, but the extensive test footage which would normally not be available for the average viewer to see. Bromberg and Medrea intercut this footage with archive interviews, behind the scenes footage, modern actors performing sections of the script that were never completed and contemporary interviews with key members of the cast and crew. What emerges is a multi-layered documentary, which not only demonstrates the vast potential in what Clouzot was attempting, but also acts as a cautionary tale for all filmmakers. Bromberg and Medrea dig deep into what exactly caused the production to derail so completely; the conclusion they seem to rather naturally draw is something of a paradox - Clouzot lost control of the project because he had too much control and crucially - too much money. The film was financed by the American studio Colombia and after seeing the early test footage they granted Clouzot an unlimited budget, but Clouzot was not just the films’ writer and director, he was also the producer, he was the “the sole architect” as one member of the crew states during the documentary; what he direly needed was a producer, not just to take the weight off him but also to bounce ideas off and to keep him in check. It is a story of perfectionism gone mad as Clouzot subjected his actors to endless re-shoots when he should have been moving onto new scenes; he pushed his lead male actor, Serge Reggiani, too far and eventually pushed himself too far endangering his life in the process. It’s a fate that could have easily befallen many a filmmaker, Stanley Kubrick being one director who instantly springs to mind, Andre Tarkovsky being another. But from this documentary it appears that Inferno was a film doomed to failure, it’s not like there is one single event which, if changed, would reshape history so that the film would be completed, it was something fundamental about the productions ethos which condemned it and the responsibility for its failure rests squarely on Clouzot’s shoulders. What makes this cinematic catastrophe so tragic is the tantalising prospect of what could have been. The reels of test footage and the unedited rushes from the film are spectacular. Clouzot’s experimenting with colour grades, mixtures of colour and monochrome, colour inversions and disorientating camera movements are but the start. The test footage reveals a series of images using bizarre refractive filters, reversed footage, moving lights, disorientating experiments with shadows and focus and mesmerising split imagery.
Documentary is arguably an editors medium and Janice Jones has done a remarkable job cutting the numerous strands of footage together to form this duel narrative, at one point in the film we see Reggiani staring into the camera in a jealous rage with an obsessive glint in his eye and it feels like we’re actually looking at Clouzot rather than Reggiani, the character and the director’s personas become merged and inseparable in our minds. Clouzot’s film and Bromberg and Medrea’s documentary may deliberately share similar narrative structures and central characters, but they also share similar flaws; we never really dig deep enough into the psyche of either Clouzot or the husband character to truly understand where their obsessions comes from (of course as Clouzot’s film was abandoned we may give him the benefit of the doubt, for the completed film might have boasted more substance than what is presented here). Clouzot didn’t have a producer to keep him in check, but there are plenty of directors who’ve also acted as producer simultaneously and managed to bring their film in on time and within the budget; Clouzot had previously produced The Wages of Fear, but with a co-producer, this time he was completely on his own. So why was he unable to maintain control? What was it in his working process that so desperately needed to be kept in check? We may never know (beyond somewhat vague speculations of exhaustion prompted by Clouzot’s famed insomnia). But the ambiguity might be what makes this case study so fascinating for filmmakers - if it can happen to Clouzot it can happen to anybody. Ultimately Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Inferno isn’t asking why - it is demonstrating how… whether this directorial choice is a flaw or not is up to the individual audience member to decide. Would Bromberg and Medrea been better served speculating as to the cause rather than focusing entirely on the effect? Or when all is said and done - is the mystery more compelling? M.Dawson |
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DVD special features are often filled (or perhaps the correct word is “littered”) with ‘Making of’ documentaries, these frequently self-congratulatory gigabyte fillers are present to help sell the film in question, something to list on the back of the DVD to help convince the viewing public to part with their hard earned cash for the disc in question. That viewers are watching these so-called “insights” into the film making process less and less is indicative of the general low quality and lack of depth found within most of these featurettes. Stars patting directors on the back and talking about how “visionary” they are, or directors patting stars on the back and discussing said actors “professionalism”. This sort of uninspired pap is usually just a thinly disguised marketing tool and barely scrapes the surface of the arduous task that is making a film. Quite often the only ‘Making of’ special features worth a damn accompany older films that were first released before DVD technology was available, these retrospectives are often more informative because the participants no longer have anything at stake in the production. it’s no good an actor exposing what a complete “hack” the director was, or indeed the director slating his leading actor as a “raving prima dona” if the success of the film is yet to be determined. If the film was not made decades ago, then there is little in the way of candid interviewee responses. Every now and then there is a ‘Making of’ which sheds some genuine light on it’s subject. A good ‘Making of’ documentary will examine in greater detail what occurred on and off set, a great ‘Making of’ documentary will be an excellent film in its own right. Fax Bahr, George Hickenlooper and Eleanor Coppola’s Heart of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse (1991) is widely considered one of the greatest ‘behind the scenes’ documentaries ever made, cataloguing the turbulent events surrounding the production of Apocalypse Now (1979); Werner Herzog’s My Best Fiend (1999) is a truly marvellous and illuminating portrait of Herzog’s relationship with Klaus Kinski across key films in their respective careers. These films stand by themselves as excellent examples of cinema without the viewer ever having to watch the films they examine. Amongst these rarities has to be Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Inferno (2009), but unlike Heart of Darkness or My Best Fiend, Inferno is about a film that was never completed and from the content of this documentary might very well rank amongst the best films never made. 
Inferno is a story of jealously and obsession, as a husband (Reggiani) starts to suspect his wife (Romy Schneider) of cheating on him with both men and women at a holiday resort. Clouzot’s central premise was to use distorted imagery to present his protagonist’s perspective. we witness the way jealously distorts his view of his spouse through the visual distortions presented on screen, these were to be contrasted with everyone else’s rather steady and ordinary perspectives which would be shot in a more conventional fashion. Whilst Inferno doesn’t seem to have anything as audacious as 8 ½’s narrative structure, it does have a rather nifty and unique conceit at its heart: by switching between reality and the husbands perceived reality, Clouzot could play with audience reception in a way that few directors had attempted to do before - had he pulled it off the resultant film might have been a Clouzot masterpiece. But the film is not entirely lost; Claude Chabrol directed a version of the script in 1994, Chabrol seemingly a natural successor to the project after Clouzot. Chabrol is another director who has frequently been described as the “The French Hitchcock” (trust the French to have two of them.) But arguably more important than Chabrol’s version is Bromberg and Medrea’s documentary, which in many ways can be viewed as a re-telling of the very film it’s exploring. Bromberg and Medrea structure the film not only in the order of the production but also, at the same time, in the order of the film Clouzot was attempting to make. Thus we see an unmistakable parallel between Clouzot, the documentary’s protagonist, and the husband in his failed film; both of whom are torn apart by different forms of obsession - Clouzot’s need for perfection and the husband’s fears that his wife is being unfaithful.
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