Henri-George Clouzot's Inferno

The story behind the failure of Henri-Georges Clouzot’s is bizarre, fascinating and shrouded in mystery. For decades, the raw material for the project was unavailable, partly because Clouzot’s widow didn’t trust anyone with it. She even showed film researcher Serge Bromberg the door – but fortunately the two of them then got stuck in an elevator together for two hours and Bromberg pleaded with her to do something special with the material. She agreed, and the result is this fascinating documentary about a bizarre, money-hemorrhaging, doomed film project. With , Clouzot wanted to take the audience into the mind of a madman, so he created a story about obsessive jealousy in which the viewer’s grip on reality gradually slips away as he is led through the fears and obsessions of the main character. But the project got completely out of hand, as Bromberg illustrates using interviews, new edits, innovative lighting and a psychedelic climax. It becomes clear that Clouzot’s own obsessions with the project grew to uncannily resemble the madness of his main character. Bromberg shows what Clouzot had in mind with the film, although in interviews the latter hinted that even he didn’t know exactly what went wrong during the ill-fated shoot in 1964.