Date/Time
Date(s) - 26/10/2019
5:30 pm - 7:30 pm
Location
Alliance Française de Trivandrum
Categories
‘L’Enfer d’Henri-Georges Clouzot’ Year -2009, Duration-85.2 mins, Directed by Serge Bromberg, Ruxandra
Film historian Serge Bromberg tells the riveting story of one of cinema history’s great “lost” movies: L’Enfer by Henri-Georges Clouzot, the demanding and exacting master who made classics such as The Wages of Fear and the great Vichy parable Le Corbeau. In the 1960s, stung by mockery from the new wave youngsters that his conventional dramas were old hat, Clouzot embarked on a wildly experimental work, a Hitchcockian, proto-Kubrickian extravaganza which led him into a creative menopausal breakdown.
The story of a married man’s paranoid jealous obsession with his wife’s supposed affairs was going to be represented through wacky op art techniques and daring innovations with colour and form. Filming was halted for months while the Master brooded on images. Tempers frayed, the cast were agonised and eventually the director collapsed with a coronary. Bromberg examines this lost footage and his assemblage is perhaps more fascinating than the completed work would have been. A must-see.
