Inferno

In L’enfer de Henri-Georges Clouzot (Inferno) film collector Serge Bromberg, director of the small yet authoritative French film archive Lobster Films, reconstructs with co-director Ruxandra Medrea the blighted production process of L’enfer, the film that was intended in 1964 to mark the return of the French director Henri-Georges Clouzot (Diabolique, Wages of Fear). Bromberg was given fifteen hours of material by Clouzot’s widow, including test shots of the possible leading actors Romy Schneider and Serge Reggiani.
L’enfer was intended to be a film about a newlywed couple in which the husband becomes pathologically jealous. Clouzot wanted to look deep into the mind of the mentally ill man. In order to achieve this, he spent months on tests with kinetic lighting effects and other experiments. It promised to become a fascinating and innovative film. However that’s not how it went. Reggiani quarrelled with Clouzot and left the set; Clouzot himself had a heart attack, after which the production was cancelled. A great loss for film history.

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