A view of Henri-Georges Clouzot's filmography cannot be complete with at least acknowledging his lost, partially shot film, Inferno. Production began in the summer of 1964 and fell apart in about a month. Incomplete and unable to find funds to continue, Clouzot abandoned the film, eventually adopting some of his ideas into Woman in Chains, his final feature film. The story of the disruption of the film remained something of a mystery to the more casual of film goers until 2009 with the release of this documentary by Serge Bromberg. Part re-creation, part rediscovery, and part behind the scenes documentary, it's a fascinating look at a filmmaker gone, potentially, as mad as his main character.
After the relative success of La Verite and the murk that was the changing French film industry brought on by the rising French New Wave, Henri-Georges Clouzot decided to embark on his most experimental film based on his large, 300-page script titled L'enfer. The story of a middle-aged man, Marcel (Serge Reggiani), who married a younger woman, Odette (Romy Schneider), and the hell he goes through as he suspects her of infidelities in their vacation in the small town French town they honeymoon. The driver of the film, in Clouzot's mind, was the experimentation he could bring to the film's subjective point of view from Marcel as he sees what may or may not be happening. The parts of the film that were unquestionably in objective reality would be filmed in black and white, and the films tainted by Marcel's point of view would be in color.
The documentary lays out Clouzot's working process, explicitly called out as one of his great strengths on his previous films. There are some contrasts with the French New Wave filmmakers who prioritized improvisation over planning, one of the main reasons that they rejected Clouzot (though they loved Hitchcock who did the same thing...whatever) as representative of the old way of doing things. Clouzot would retort with the idea that his improvisation happened on paper. He would plan to such a degree that he could focus purely on the actors on set, having meticulously pre-planned camera angles, lenses, and framing before they ever showed up to set.
Where Clouzot broke from his previous method of work, though, was the experimentation. He spent several months with his core crew of cameramen and sound technicians just trying things out, whatever distortions and effects they could come up with wholly in the camera. This experimentation was free-flowing and seemingly never ending, helped not at all by Columbia executives seeing the tests and throwing money at Clouzot to continue. The central experiment we get a look at is a color sequence on a lake where Clouzot planned on having the water turn red but everything else in camera to retain their original colors. This could only be done chemically at the time through inversion of colors, so everything from makeup to costumes had to be replicated in the opposite color. Unfortunately, we only ever see tests of the effect and never what might have been the final product, but it does sound like a great idea.
And that was ultimately Clouzot's downfall. He preplanned everything minutely, but he got lost in the experimentation. That seems to have infected his entire way of doing things, and he spent days reshooting the same scenes over and over again. He was reportedly always an exacting director with his actors, demanding many takes to get exactly what he wanted (like Kubrick would later be known for), but he seems to have lost the plot during the production of Inferno. He had the idea of using three crews that he was responsible for, but if he spends all day with the first crew redoing the same stuff he did last week, he's just burning not only money on things he already has in the can but on two other crews who are just sitting around, waiting to be told what to do.
As the cinematographer, William Lubtchansky, says in his interview, Clouzot was always a workaholic, and even an insomniac, and would expect everyone to work at any time he demanded, day or night (this was why he rented a house several miles from the main production offices in the small town's hotel, to avoid that), but Clouzot strained himself until he had a heart attack on set. That was ultimately what shut the production down. In retrospect, Lubtchansky concludes, Clouzot needed a producer to direct his energies, to keep him on schedule and to stop the experimentation.
Inferno is going to be one of those mysterious what-ifs in film, and I think it might have been compelling even if Clouzot hadn't been reigned in and managed to somehow finish production on his own terms. It might have been a complete mess, but it might have also been an interesting complete mess. Claude Chabrol did make a film from Clouzot's script in the 90s, which I'll have to check out at some point, which combined with this documentary is the closest we'll ever get to seeing the final product Clouzot had in mind.
