Sourcerer: Henri-Georges Clouzot - upcoming events

The films and the life of Henri-Georges Clouzot (1907-1977) share a history of critical controversy and polarisation. Clozuot’s early career was linked to the Vichy regime of wartime France; something that nearly him brought a prison term and kept him banned from filmmaking in the first postwar years. His final filmmaking years in the 1960s were enveloped by illness, scattered with unrealised projects and haunted by the farce of his abandoned film L’enfer. In between, a string of films through the 1950s brought commercial success and international acclaim. But by the late 1950s this success had antagonised a new generation of critic/filmmakers into a caustic critical counterattack that would eat into Clouzot’s French repute and his personal confidence.

For his young French Cahier du cinema magazine/ Nouvelle vague detractors, Clouzot’s main fault often seemed to be the arrogance of presuming to rival Alfred Hitchcock, one of their favourite Hollywood directors – as significant to them as any charge that he collaborated with fascism. But Hitchcock himself saw he had a European rival for mastery of the thriller genre. The two even fought for the rights over the same source novels, and Hitchcock’s Vertigo was to some degree a response to Clouzot’s success with Les Diaboliques.

In time, Clouzot’s body of work has transcended these career controversies. It’s now seen alongside the work of Jean-Pierre Melville and René Clément (and even as a precursor for Nouvelle vague directors like Claude Chabrol) in representing the best and grittiest of post-war French commercial cinema. Clouzot’s films are still central to the ongoing trans-Atlantic aesthetic and cultural dialogue between French cinema and Hollywood, via the two cinemas’ shared national genre of Film (or, for the French, 'Serie’) Noir.

But Film Noir is a tradition of realist cinema, of the street front, the underclass. Clouzot – much like Luis Bunuel with his Mexican films in the 1950s, such as Los Olvidados – inverted our usual sense of what gritty realistic cinematic detail was actually saying, taking realism to the point of the near surreal, via special effects of disorientation and subjectivity. Like Bunuel, he found a poetics in picaresque street detail; as in The Wages of Fear, with its Bunuelian eye for the dusty, grotesque Latin American squalor, or Quai des Orfèvres’s fascination with the leering gaze of Parisian pop culture. But Clouzot was especially micro-attentive to the dirt in the cracks of bourgeois or nouvelle-riche settings (again in common with Bunuel’s Mexican films, but with bigger budgets and more luxurious production schedules, so without Bunuel’s often deliberately shoddy production values). It’s the chicest décor, the fashionable habitat and an atmosphere of self-confidence and money where the director gets down and dirty in moral disgust, and towards which he had an obsessive eye for the stylings and composition of his set décor that nearly equalled Visconti – but to very opposite intent of charming or bedazzling his audience’s eye. Even art is a destroyer, not a redeemer. Clouzot’s documentary about Picasso is tinged with the knowledge that the works being made on camera were promptly destroyed after their creation.

But these are black cinematic skills. Accusations of Clouzot’s misanthropy and cynical distrust of redemptive humanism remain. For that, his films remain against the grain of popular cinema. Like Hitchcock, Clouzot began as craftsman of black and white expressionism and ended as a technical master of the machine of the film studio, using then-cutting-edge special effects to construct his set-pieces and eccentrically detailed mise en scene. The narrative drive for both filmmakers always seems guided by Catholic guilt and human foible. But whilst Clouzot’s filmmaking vision was often ironic, there is never any of the tongue-in-cheek that Hitchcock places into his late films. Rather than Hitchcock’s accidental criminals and victims of fate searching for (and eventually finding) some redemption, Clouzot’s men and women are always guilty. And he uses the thriller genre to reveal crimes and their social pathology, not to solve them. To admire his cinema, you need to accept this disgust and nihilism as a strength, and Clouzot as cinema’s laureate of man’s bad side.

This selection of imported 35mm prints includes Clouzot’s two international art house hits of the 1950s, The Wages of Fear and Les Diaboliques. It also samples his Serie noirs of the 1940s (Le Corbeau, Quai des Orfèvres), and explores the baroque excesses of his final colour filmmaking, including his documentary on Picasso and his almost abstract expressionist work on La Prisonnière and the unfinished L’enfer.

'... (he was) forever at odds with himself and the world around him’ (Brigitte Bardot)

'He has a consistent vision that is more jaundiced than any other in French cinema… Clouzot’s world disintegrates through mistrust, alienation and a wilful selfishness that is like an illness’ (David Thomson)

Presented with the support of the Embassy of France and l’Institut Français. Screening in collaboration with the Melbourne Cinémathèque

With thanks to: Emmanuelle Denavit-Feller (French Consul-General, Sydney); Philippe Milloux (Alliance Français, Australia), Michael Koller (The Melbourne Cinémathèque Inc); Matt Jones (University of North Carolina School of Arts Film Archive); MK2.

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