Clouzot's Inferno

Monday night I went to see Henri-Georges Clouzot's Inferno in the ICA.
Looking for things to do in London can be such a confusing, over-whelming and risky (there is so much crap around) task.
But when I looked at the little information about this movie somehow it lured me.

The film is a kind of documentary-reconstruction of the filming process of the unfinished movie "Inferno".

"Is a film about a film that was never made"  Richard Pena, Film society of Lincoln Centre

Inferno is the story of a man suffering paranoid jealousy over his newly married wife.
Clouzot experimented for a long period on hallucinatory effects in order to transmit the delirium happening in the main character's mind.




At the start of the film in an interview with Clouzot, he talks about his almost sickening interest in representing the different mental illnesses by visual effects and making the audience to feel them.
He says, "you can transmit ten different mental illnesses via visual effects, but you can only tell one in two hours"
He believed that in order to transmit and make the audience feel the specific illness, as a creator he needed to find the visual triggers in everyone's latent illnesses.
That is why he spends such an incredible amount of time and energy investigating and experimenting with ways of expressing those emotions in a cinematic way.
He managed to mix kinetic art and Op art in a cinematographic media, collaborating with visual artists such as Joel Stein and Yvaral, and gathering a creative team composed of the best cinema visual talents of the time.
During the 28 weeks of investigation the images he achieved were astonishing, enigmatic and highly effective when transmitting the paranoid jealousy of the main character.



Clouzot had a pre-production process so detailed that every frame from every shoot was thought and planned to the minimal detail. But it was during the production time when things started to go wrong.

It seems that all that organisation, material and ideas wasn’t enough for Clouzot.
The rest of the creative team thought that he got lost on the way to organize the material, to choose and select what it was need to be screened, and what was just part of the creative process and it was meant not to be part of this film.

Unluckily he had a heart attack so he couldn’t finalize the project. So no one could see what he wanted to do.

What I can take from this film and apply to my practice is:

To keep as one of the foremost priorities the attention to the detail and to the composition. How the effect fits on the moment and to pursuit to achieve the realisation of the concept.

The importance of the investigation and experimentation of new or old but appropriated visual languages and/or strategies according to the needs of the project.

And as the last and the obvious one, to keep a realistic approach to the overall elements of the project.