L’Enfer d’Henri-Georges Clouzot (2009) - film review

In 1964, the renowned French filmmaker Henri-Georges Clouzot began work on what could have been his greatest film.  Cast in the leading roles were two of the best known actors of their generation – Romy Schneider and Serge Reggiani.  But three weeks into the shoot, the film was abandoned.  Almost half a century later, the rushes of this three weeks’ work have been found and restored, offering a tantalising glimpse of what could so easily have been Clouzot’s masterpiece.  This documentary gives us a chance to see these remarkable images for the first time, along with an insightful account of the history of this lost film.

In one of the most eagerly awaited documentaries of recent years, Serge Bromberg and Ruxandra Medrea piece together one of the most remarkable stories in French cinema history, the story of Henri-George Clozot’s ill-fated lost masterpiece L’Enfer.  Until recently, very little was known about this film.  Those involved in its production were reluctant to talk about it; the footage that Clouzot recorded before the project was abandoned has never been seen and was indeed thought to have been destroyed.  What makes this all the more bizarre is that L’Enfer was to have been Clouzot’s greatest achievement, a film that could have radically altered the landscape of cinema.  Yet it was never completed and has been an enigma for over four decades.  Now, finally, L’Enfer has returned - not as the complete, innovatively crafted drama that Clouzot had envisaged, but as a fragmented marvel that provides a testament to the limits of the creative mind, an illustration of how badly wrong things can go when artistic indulgence is given free rein. 

Serge Bromberg has made a career of recovering and restoring missing classics through the production company he founded and runs, Lobster Films.  It was pure chance that led him to uncover the lost footage of L’Enfer, the most significant cinematic discovery of the past few decades.   Bromberg’s story began  in an almost surreal vein, when he found himself trapped in a lift for two hours with Clouzot’s widow Inès.  The latter had refused to cooperate with Bromberg in his quest to find the missing footage of L’Enfer but later relented, seeing the lift incident as divine intervention (perhaps the work of Clouzot’s ghost).  Bromberg’s search led him to France’s national film archive, the CNC (le centre national du cinéma et de l’image animée), which, to his incredulity, was in possession of all 185 reels of film that Clouzot shot for L’Enfer – 15 hours of footage that included all of the camera negatives in virtually pristine condition.  This material had previously been held by the insurance company which recompensed Columbia Films (the film’s main backer) after the project was abandoned in 1964.  Bromberg and his team were amazed not only by the quantity of footage that Clouzot had amassed but by its quality.  These 185 reels contained some of the most remarkable images ever committed to celluloid, images that were quite unlike anything that had ever been seen in a film by the mid-1960s.  The fact that the sound recordings were missing did not diminish the significance of this find.

The recovered film stock for L’Enfer can be divided into two categories.  First, there is location footage which was shot on and around a lake in the Massif Central region of France in July 1964.  This consists of conventional black-and-white footage, depicting everyday normality, and stark colour sequences, portraying the main protagonist’s distorted imaginary world.  The most daring of these is a sequence that was to have been colour-reversed, so that the rich blue of the lake became blood red; this necessitated that all of the actors involved be made-up and dressed so that when the colour was reversed they would appear as they would in real-life.  Far more radical and mind-blowing is the set of test shots which Clouzot and his team made prior to the location shoot.  These employed experimental techniques that incorporated kinetic art and audio effects inspired by musique concrète in an attempt to convey the inner world of the protagonist on his descent into insanity.  It is not known how, or indeed if, Clouzot intended to incorporate these test shots into his final film, but as a piece of art in their own right they have considerable merit and they may conceivably have inspired a whole new approach to filmmaking had they seen the light of day.    

The plot of L’Enfer could not be more anodyne.  A middle-aged man, Marcel Prieur, runs a hotel in a rural area of France with his much younger wife Odette.   What begins as a harmonious idyll soon becomes a living nightmare as Marcel starts to imagine that his wife is having a series of illicit affairs with other men and women.  Driven insanely jealous, Marcel ultimately decides to kill his wife.  The film begins with Marcel having apparently murdered Odette with a razor blade; we then see the events that led up to this tragic outcome in flashback, through the confused prism of Marcel’s deranged mind.  Although the story is childishly simple, Clouzot conceived the most elaborate and ambitious way in which to tell it, not in the conventional objective linear fashion, but as a subjective experience.  The spectator would be an active participant in the drama, believing that he was Marcel, vicariously sharing his feelings and seeing the world through his eyes.  What Clouzot was striving for was the ultimate in reality cinema – not passive viewing but genuine participatory involvement.

To ensure that the film had box office appeal, Clouzot hired two big name actors, Romy Schneider, aged 26, and Serge Reggiani, aged 42.  Schneider was by this time a major star in France and Germany, having found fame at an early age for her portrayal of the young Elisabeth of Austria in the Sissi series of films.  On the brink of lasting international stardom, the young actress was determined to rid herself forever of the nice girl image that Sissi had given her; L’Enfer would have radically altered how the public perceived her, no longer the innocent classical heroine, but now the sensual mature woman who could ignite a man’s passions and lure him to his doom.  Serge Reggiani would also have benefited from the film’s success if it had been completed.  At the time, his career was on the skids and the leading role in an international hit movie would have provided a welcome boost to his career.  Alas, it was not to be.  

Through firsthand accounts from those involved in its making, Bromberg’s documentary makes it clear just why L’Enfer was doomed to fail.  If it had been made as Clouzot had originally intended, as a fairly modest production shot in a similar manner to his previous films, L’Enfer would have been an easy ride for everyone.  What derailed the project was the decision by some well-meaning executives from Columbia Films to give the director a blank cheque after seeing a few test sequences.  Columbia had employed the same foolhardy strategy the previous year, offering unlimited resources to Stanley Kubrick to make Dr Strangelove – a gamble that paid off handsomely.  Unfortunately, Clouzot lacked Kubrick’s discipline and the money he was showered in was squandered.  For his three-week location shoot, he assembled three camera teams, comprising a hundred technicians and three renowned cinematographers (Armand Thirard, Claude Renoir and Andréas Winding).  The intention was that this would make the shooting schedule more efficient.  In fact, it made no difference since Clouzot insisted on overseeing the preparation work for each shot, leaving the other two crews idle as he did so.

The boon of limitless resources very quickly proved to be the kiss of death and the film’s title (Hell in English) became all too appropriate.  Clouzot would shoot scenes over and over again, striving for perfection, perhaps not quite knowing what he was looking for.  And yet his freedom was entirely illusory.  Clouzot had just three weeks to complete his location shooting, after which the lake which was central to the story was to be drained as part of a hydro-electric project.  With time running out and very little being achieved, relations between the director and his cast and crew could only turn sour.

Clouzot had a reputation for being a hard taskmaster but as the location filming on L’Enfer slipped further and further behind schedule, his obsessive perfectionism became unbearable for those working with him. His principal actors were the ones who had to take the brunt of his temper.  In the end, Serge Reggiani became so upset by the incessant abuse he received that he walked off the set, claiming to be too ill to continue the shoot.  Romy Schneider would end up screaming at Clouzot and became utterly bewildered by what he was trying to achieve.   Reggiani was to have been replaced by Jean-Louis Trintignant, but before any of Trintignant’s scenes could be shot Clouzot suffered a heart attack – the final catastrophe which brought the production to a definitive halt.  Although Clouzot recovered and went on to make a few more films, work on L’Enfer was abandoned.  The wonder project that became a nightmare for all concerned was over.  All footage was seized by the insurance company and the film that could have redefined cinema in a massive way was lost, buried in an unmarked grave.

Clouzot’s film may have failed spectacularly, but Bromberg and Medrea’s documentary and partial reconstruction will ensure that it will not be forgotten.  L’Enfer d’Henri-Georges Clouzot is a beguiling film that provides a fascinating insight into the creative process, not unlike Clouzot’s own Le Mystère Picasso (1956).  It shows how creative endeavour can go wrong, how an artist can lose his way in the labyrinth that comes from having too much freedom and too little sense of direction.  Clouzot may not have given us a completed film but he left us with some extraordinary images, including some riveting shots of Romy Schneider at her most devastatingly sensual.  The latter are quite possibly the most captivating images ever taken of this actress, luxuriating in her charm, beauty and mystique.  L’Enfer could have been a film that revolutionised the art of cinema in the 1960s, a film that could have exposed as feeble pretentious posturing the efforts of Clouzot’s New Wave rivals.  Instead, it was a doomed exercise in artistic self-indulgence, the Titanic of French cinema.   Watching the fractured remnants of this film, the words of Shelley seem strangely fitting.  Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair...

© James Travers 2010

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