SIFF Review: Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Inferno or A New Pictorial Universe

A White Tank Top Movie Review

I like works of art on a grand scale and artists that put everything into achieving greatness.  Thus, I sympathize with those ambitious works that will never be completed.

In literature I mourn Scott Fitzgerald’s incomplete The Love of the Last Tycoon. In film though, there’s a nice trend of documentaries on abandoned movies, like Terry Gilliam’s Lost in La Mancha (about his failed attempt to make a Don Quixote picture). And now SIFF offers Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Inferno, about the director’s attempt to create “a new pictorial universe.”

Film archivist and director of this documentary, Serge Bromberg, lucked into the 185 film canisters (representing over 13 hours of lost Inferno footage) because he was once stuck in an elevator with Clouzot’s widow. Auteur of tight 1950s thrillers like The Wages of Fear and Diabolique, Clouzot was, by 1963, anxious to stretch himself artistically after seeing Fellini’s 8½.  He claimed he wanted no New Wave improvisation (“I improvise on paper”) but it’s hard to believe the films of Godard, Demy and Truffaut didn’t titillate him just a little bit.

Clouzot had the advantage of studio backing and was able to get white-hot 26-year-old Romy Schneider to star in Inferno, a tale of a man driven to jealous madness by his wife. This doesn’t seem too far from Clouzot’s normal narrative interests, except this time he wanted to reinvent cinematic language.

The director spent the months before principal shooting doing experiments in headache-inducing camera manipulation and sonic warping to distort dialogue, samples of which we get to experience at length. There are kaleidoscopic testing shots of Schneider in a bikini (or less), joined by her costar Serge Reggiani (described by one interviewee as having “a head like a carved chestnut”), who’s somewhat less appealing in a sweaty white tank top. 

By the time the director got to scenic Colombe D’or to begin photography, he had three units working simultaneously. Not content with the top-flight crew he already had, Clouzot pulled out of mothballs the redundant cinematographer who did The Passion of Joan of Arc, a silent film shot 35 years prior to Inferno. 

An insomniac, Clouzot pressed the bewildered crew beyond their endurance. One participant remembers climbing out of bathroom windows to avoid Clouzot in the hotel lobby where he would wait each morning. The survivors all seem to agree that it was the American producers’ fault — they gave the film an unlimited budget and Inferno was irredeemably “Hollywoodized.”

Read more after the jump.

At first, the audacity of Clouzot’s vision is overwhelming. He puts glass and wire filters over the camera to suggest rain, wind or heat waves. He does things as ridiculous as painting the actors’ skin green with blue lipstick so that when he produces a negative image of the color film, water will appear red and the people will look “normal.”  He creates shots of crowds triple-layered together so the protagonists look like ghosts moving through mirrors. He gets an unbelievable shot of Reggiani running (the actor grumbled  about the exertion) on the road in the extreme background behind Schneider waterskiing in the foreground — the complexity is staggering. And he completely presupposes the famed character-merging shots of Ingmar Bergman’s Persona.

Now, anyone who embraces voyeurism as much as I do on White Tank Top (whether gushing over Megan Fox in Transformers or Kim Novak in Vertigo) should tread carefully here, but, if the footage in this documentary is any indication, Clouzot went straight past voyeurism and into exploitation with Inferno. The audience had to laugh at the shot of Schneider operating a Slinky with her chest, torso and thighs or the gratuitous scenes of men (and women) aimlessly groping her breasts. Of course, all that material probably wouldn’t have made the final cut of Inferno but borderline misogyny predominates the footage we see in the documentary.

It’s fitting then that Clouzot had the heart attack that ended production while in a small boat where Schneider was kissing female costar Dany Carrel. Despite heaps of beautiful footage, there was no end in sight. Reggiani had left the film in disgust over the glacial pace of the shooting and the crew was furiously impatient. Bromberg leaves us with the impression that this curiosity would not have been finished under any circumstances.

It took me until the very end, just before the credits, to get lost in the Inferno that might have been. There’s a magnetic 30-second close up where Romy Schneider appears to sweat gold dust, with tricky white light spinning roulette wheels in her eyes.

If I were Clouzot, I might never stop watching either. 

What's on at SIFF tonight? A documentary about Jean-Michel Basquiat at 5:00pm (in Everett); Dear Limon Lima at 4:30pm at the Neptune; and the creepy but thrilling Mother Joan of the Angels at 7:00pm at SIFF Cinema; and, of course, several more, which you can read about online in the free 2010 SIFF Guide.