Henri-Georges Clouzot's Inferno (Saturday, June 18, 2010) (79)

Henri-Georges Clouzot's Inferno is a fascinating French documentary that opens simply enough with a voice-over by co-director Serge Bromberg explaining how this work came to be. He says he got stuck in an elevator one day with a woman who was the widow of the great French filmmaker Henri-Georges Clouzot. During their hours trapped in one of those tiny elevators in French apartments, she told him about the reels and reels of footage her long-deceased husband had shot for a film that was never released. This charming, intimate and unconventional approach pervades the film, showing us how this film was being made and how it ultimately fell apart mid-way though.

By 1964, Clouzot was one of the greatest filmmakers in the rich traditional of French cinema and was heading into the winter of his career. He became obsessed with his next project, a film called L'Enfer ("Hell" or "Inferno"), about a young couple where the wife is outwardly sexual and flirtatious with both men and women and the husband goes crazy as he thinks he wife is cheating on him. The central creative point of the film is that Clouzot wanted to show the man's inner turmoil and growing madness in a vivid way onscreen by using optical tricks and visual distortions, not to mention bizarre music that would give the same impression.

In order to do this, Clouzot spent many months working with photographers and artists shooting op-art pieces as well as visual and sound distortions trying to capture insanity for an audience. He worked tirelessly with costume designers and the actors to shoot tests and experiments all in the hopes of perfecting what were new techniques in visual communication.

At one point he decided that the film, which was shot in black and white, would have segments of color when the man started going mad. To heighten the drama of these scenes, he would invert the colors, so blue water would become red. In order to do this, he would have to make up the actors in blue and gray clothes and makeup so they would look naturally pink and lifelike in the inverse. As a result, much of the color footage we see has a ghostly gray palette.

This documentary is mostly a compilation of these screen tests and amazingly beautiful experimental material as well as interviews with Clouzot's technical collaborators (photographers, sound mixers, assistants, visual artists, electrical engineers, not to mention actors and friends).

One element that doesn't work as well and feels a bit unnecessary is that Bromberg and co-director Ruxandra Medrea use modern-day actors reading the film's script and acting out the story as a way to tell us what is happening in the narrative of the Inferno. I get what they are doing here and why they do it (it's nice to know the general outline of the story as we watch it), but it's a bit confusing and seems to be beside the point of the documentary. I think these segments could have been left out without any damage being done to the end product.

Clouzot was not a New Waver - he was from a time before that movement, from a golden age of French cinema with Jean Renoir and Jean Cocteau. But this film would have shown (and the footage we see does show) how he was aware of what the "younger generation" was doing in Paris at the time and how he was pushing the envelope of of traditional filmmaking to answer these cutting-edge newcomers. His response is utterly non-New Wave (and his process was so traditional he sometimes couldn't communicate with younger tech people on set) and at the same time totally fresh and innovative. Th footage we see reminds me of the last act (the trippy light show) of Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (made four years later).

Ultimately Clouzot got lost in his own obsessive-compulsive spiral - effectively being driven mad by a film about a man being driven mad. I think the two directors of this film also run a bit off-track in the madness of the footage and rather lose track of the totality of the piece. The third act here is a bit sloppy as we see the Clouzot film is falling apart. We never totally see what happens and what ultimately runs the project into the ground.

There is unquestionably some amazing visual footage here, but I would have preferred a bit more structure to the documentary. That could have taken a very good work and made it great. Then again, the exact same could be said for the Clouzot film itself.

Stars: 3 of 4