There's a third category - follies destroyed by their own ambition and compulsive production, and that's where we find Henri-Georges Clouzot's Inferno, shot but left unfinished in 1964. Not an epic but rather a psychological melodrama that endeavored to visualize derangement and madness by way of a vast array of visual tropes and effects, Clouzot's movie died in its cans and was completely forgotten until French distributor/producer Serge Bromberg became trapped in an elevator years ago with Clouzot's widow, who evoked this lost film and compelled Bromberg to find the archived celluloid and make a film out of and about it.
Which puts Bromberg's film, the one that got finished, in a closeted little subgenre of film - the post-mortem/reconstruction film, movies that coopt the footage from unfinished projects, and either tell the story of their demise as a straight documentary like Bromberg's, the BBC's The Epic that Never Was, Mika Kaurismaki's Tigrero, etc., or as a mutant hybrid passing itself off as a "normal" film like Andrzej Zulawski's On the Silver Globe or Orson Welles's Don Quixote. Bromberg's Inferno clearly needed to be made - Clouzot's production, financed by an enthusiastic Columbia Pictures with "no limit" to its budget, left behind a mountain of screen tests and location footage, some of it merely beautiful, much of it bizarrely, fancifully experimental. The film's story involved a middle-aged seaside hotel proprietor (Serge Reggiani) consumed with suspicions and jealousies surrounding his young wife, played by Romy Schneider in the full blossom of her youth. It was Clouzot's scheme to shoot the objective action in black-&-white but the husband's feverish point of view in eye-trouncing color, freely using all manner of mirrored images, optical illusions, fragmented lenses, kinetic sculptures, color reversals (forcing the actresses to wear blue lipstick much of the time), expressionistic lighting effects, and scads of stark, body-paint surrealism that more closely resembled the films of underground godling Kenneth Anger than any mainstream French film of the '60s.
But Bromberg's focus is not on the masterpiece that might've been - there's no indication that even the crew members, newly interviewed, were convinced then that it was ANYTHING but a debacle. The real story is about how Clouzot's obsessions destroyed his own dream. Famous for being meticulous and over-prepared (the New Wave directors critiqued him for his lack of spontaneity), Clouzot was by the '60s a giant in French cinema, and indeed La Corbeau (1943), Quai des Orfevres (1947), The Wages of Fear (1953) and Diabolique (1955) all remain must-see movies for anyone interested in the path of international cinema. But with Inferno Clouzot apparently went crazy, overpreparing every aspect of filming (every single shot and countershot required a test version of itself shot first), indulging in every visual trick he could dream up (or find in galleries of moving sculpture and Op Art), and demanding ceaseless takes and additional tests from his actors. The shoot went on for many weeks this way, with three camera crews on call at all times, with Clouzot in a permanent state of frustrated indecision and without the film itself getting anywhere. The crew began to defect, technicians would stay in separate houses as to avoid the insomniac director's late-night wake-up calls, and even veteran cameraman Claude Renoir would, according to master cinematographer William Lubchantsky, dash into the hotel bathroom on Sundays and crawl out the window rather than have Clouzot rope him into more scouting, more tests, more shooting.
In the end, it was the ailing Reggiani who got fed up and left; Clouzot pressed on shooting incidentals and effects shots while scouting for another star, but then he had a heart attack, and the film was closed down for good. What was left is many things, perhaps fragments of a masterpiece and certainly a catalogue of expressionistic '60s ideas intent on giving color and shape to subjective emotional states. But it's also something of a cataract of ardor for Schneider, or at least for her youthful, smiling beauty, which Clouzot shoots in enough crazy, worshipful contexts to fill three movies.
Of course, Bromberg's delivered a feast for movie geeks, a glimpse into Euro filmmaking's glam past, and into a slice of cinematic lore we were never meant to see in any form. Clouzot's film has survived in another form - 30 years after Clouzot's crash and burn, Claude Chabrol (perhaps the least spontaneity-dedicated New Waver) bought the screenplay and made it himself, sans psychedelic dream visuals, as a pleasant but unadventurous vehicle for Emmanuelle Beart and Francois Cluzet. We could wonder what if things had turned out differently, but sadly, in cinema as well as life, the gambler's dictum holds: what could have happened, did.
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by Michael Atkinson
