David D. Robbins Jr. | The Fade Out
“Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Inferno” by Serge Bromberg
Flicker Alley
“Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Inferno” is a quasi documentary about a film that sadly never existed. Director Henri-Georges Clouzot’s intent was to reshape French cinema like Arthur Rimbaud blasting off the hinges of French poetry. But a three-week shoot ended about 15 weeks early, with the lead actor walking off set near nervous breakdown, and Clouzot suffering a heart attack. In short, this is a documentary about that disaster. This is the story about the other side of genius, where the price is losing one’s mind and taking everything down with it. It’s a tale about having too much talent, too much freedom and too much funding.
The story behind “Inferno” is as simple in many ways as it is complex in others. Clouzot began shooting this film in 1964, encircled himself with the greatest cameramen in the world, and after the first test shots (a massive amount of mind-blowing film experimentation) was given an unlimited budget by the studio. The plot of the ‘film that never was’ is a basic one. Marcel Prieur (Serge Reggiani), a manager of a modest hotel in provincial France, becomes exceedingly jealous of everyone (men and women) in contact with his beautiful and carefree wife Odette, played by Austrian actress Romy Schneider. He believes she is having an affair with the hunky Martineau (Jean-Claude Bercq).
As basic as the plot is, the difficulty rests in the way Clouzot wanted to film the story. The daily shots in the movie were set in black and white, while the obsessive and jealous inner visions of Prieur would be in strangely maddening colors, full of distortions like reverse coloring and kaleidoscopic dizziness. The documentary is told smartly through movie clips, and interviews. It also uses two actors who read from the original script, to extrapolate from existing original scenes shot without sound.
But the most wonderful part of this investigation into a presumed-to-be lost film, is what was found in the film cans. The ‘obsessive’ scenes in “Inferno” were shot in an obscured fashion, to show Prieur’s state of mind. Prieur would envision his wife with another man, or other men turning their heads to get a glimpse of his wife’s body as she walked by them. But to show the level of his obsession, new film techniques were needed, giving a glimpse into the mind of Prieur. Some of the found film looks primitive compared to what can be done today, but there are other clips that are absolutely stunning. During Prieur’s ‘vision scenes’, his wife’s face is seen in close-up, staring at the camera through cascading water. Mens’ bodies are misshaped through manipulation. Heads look over-sized through a drinking glass. Odette’s face, seen through rows of string like venetian blinds, gives the impression that something is amiss. These effects are powerful in showing a warped mind as it plays with the idea of perceived infidelity like fingers rolling over a ball of clay until it crumbles under the compulsion. It’s difficult to distinguish between reality and fiction. His wife flirts in order to gain the favor of men, but she also appears sincere in her love for her husband. Is she really flirting though, or is it all in his mind? Is Prieur crazy and just how far will this self-inflicted torment take him?
“Inferno” might have become, in part, like Stanley Kubrick’s “Eyes Wide Shut” — where jealousy expands exponentially and sends the tormented one reeling. (Although, Kubrick’s film is very tame in this comparison.) It’s also part Alain Resnais’ “Last Year in Marienbad” with its auditory ingenuity and recital. The more crazed Prieur becomes, the more he repeats words and phrases in internal monologue, “I am not crazy. I am not a monster. I am not crazy.” Clozout hired some of the best sound technicians to distort Prieur’s internal voice, so that at times it speeds up as he becomes more unbalanced, and slows down into a sinister viscosity oozing of psycho-sexuality. At other times, his words overlap, creating a rhythm of psychosis. It’s madness shown in wild repetition.
Visually, the film is as disorienting as it gets. Schneider was asked to wear a plastic cover over her naked body in some scenes, even going over her head, to create all kinds of light effects. There are elaborate uses of designs, slight touches of German Expressionism, and camera zooming to create a disorienting collage of real world constructs mixed with pinwheels, mirrors, a multiplicity of eyes, and split images. In one scene, Prieur and Martineau are merged so that each is one half of the other. Some of the most beautiful effects begin with a touchstone leading Prieur into involuntary visions, like some twisted version of Marcel Proust’s “Remembrance of Things Past”. Prieur sees his wife’s friend, played by Dany Carrel, flirting with a man as her nipple slides out from underneath her bathing suit. It causes him to visualize his own wife in a boat being fondled and caressed by Martineau. A train roars by the hotel and sends Prieur into obsessive visions of his wife snaking her hips seductively while water-skiing with Martineau. In one of the scariest images, she falls into the lake, and the screen reverses color so the water becomes blood red.
It’s easy to see what happened with this film. The surviving images show a filmmaker exploring levels of creativity to the extreme. Former assistants and actors in the film talk about Clouzot’s own obsessive nature, his insomnia, and his severe demands on everyone around him. One cameraman says that Clouzot asked him to move in and out with his camera for effect so frequently he dubbed his own job as “coitus-zooming”. But it was the talent Clouzot showed in earlier successes with “Quai Des Orfevres”, the brilliant “The Wages of Fear” and “Diabolique”, that kept the crew intact amid the chaos. However, in the end, it wasn’t enough. Wild indulgence led to greater confusion and directionless experimentation. It left a number of the actors wondering if Clouzot knew what he was actually going to do with all the footage. There were days spent filming every angle of the hotel, and hours getting just the right look from Schneider’s thigh. Clouzot’s notes about the film show a man tormented by detail. Drawings and plans moved well beyond the traditional storyboard. He had the seconds sketched out, all the way down to Prieur’s words of madness, which resembled post-modern poetry on the page, scrawled with indentations to signal the volume level. Perhaps Clouzot knew Prieur’s madness all too well. This documentary does something extraordinary. It gives beautiful closure to what was thought to be a failure, revealing the diamonds left behind.
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