socialmedian: Henri-George Clouzot's Inferno

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Henri-George Clouzot's Inferno | Film review

Source: guardian.co.uk Film

Nov 08, 2009

Summary

There's a peculiar fascination about ambitious unfinished works that listeners, viewers and readers are left to complete in their minds. In cinema there are a string of pictures left in tantalisingly fragmentary form due to illnesses, accidents or deaths, among them Eisenstein's Que Viva México! , Renoir's Une Partie de Campagne, Von Sternberg's I, Claudius, Welles's Don Quixote and Munk's The Passenger. To this number must be added L'Enfer, which Clouzot, the greatest French filmmaker to emerge in the 1940s, embarked on in 1964.

The 57-year-old director of Les Diaboliques and The Wages of Fear set out to challenge the arrogant new-wave arrivistes by making the ultimate auteurist film, a study of pathological jealousy using state-of-the-art aural and visual effects to convey states of mind. Columbia Studios gave him carte blanche, and Clouzot went ahead with Serge Regianni and Romy Schneider starring and three full camera crews. But he began acting like the crazy director in Fellini's 8½ (a picture he sought to emulate), lost all sense of urgency, drove Regian

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