Henri-George Clouzot's Inferno

“The French Hitchcock” responsible for such nail-biting suspense classics as The Wages of Fear and Les Daiboliques, as well as the 60s sex symbol Romy Schneider. But there is enough here to intrigue a wider audience too: in the way that Clouzot’s planned thriller about psychological breakdown precipitated his own psychological breakdown; and in the amazing panoply of visual effects he devised in pre-production to express pathological jealousy in cinematic terms.

This never-before-seen footage of Hell, 1964, really deserves to be seen in a modern art gallery. Backed for the first and only time in his career with Hollywood studio money, and inspired by Fellini’s game-changer 8 1/2, Clouzot put together a team of top cinematographers (including Jean Renoir’s brother Claude) and op-art experimentalists he recruited from the art world, put them in a studio with Schneider for six months and told them to get on with it. He wanted to see this beautiful woman through the eyes of an insanely jealous husband. Strobe lighting, weird lens manipulations and colour filters all factor in a series of strange, sometimes sexually candid, sometimes disturbing avant-garde sketches, footage that might have been incorporated in a nightmare, or as delirious visions in the finished movie.

Clouzot saw L’Enfer as a way to plumb his own neuroses – he had recently remarried a much younger woman, and admitted in interviews that his jealousy gave him sleepless nights.

However, it seems like the project took on a far greater weight and ambition than the slim storyline could support. Clouzot found an ideal location, a hotel near a lake with a railroad running above it, but he had only a few weeks to shoot there before the lake was destined to be drained. He responded by setting up three camera crews so that he could shoot three times faster. That was the theory. In practice, he was such a perfectionist that he spent all his time with the first crew while the others twiddled their thumbs.

Even as he ran out of time, he seemed incapable of changing his ways – he filmed hours and hours of Romy Schneider water skiing in a bikini – and was so demanding on his actors that the male lead, Serge Reggiani, stormed off never to return.

It seems from the footage he did shoot that he was intent on pushing the boundaries of sexuality on screen at the time, and this too seems to have led him astray. Clouzot had a heart attack while shooting a sequence with Romy Schneider necking with another woman (another of the husband’s paranoid fantasies, perhaps).

The movie was abandoned then, never to be completed, although thirty years later Claude Chabrol resurrected the project and made his own version (also called L’Enfer) based on the same story, this time starring Emmanuelle Beart.

Serge Bromberg’s documentary is perhaps a little too discreet – he doesn’t probe Clouzot’s widow, as he might have – but it joins the likes of Lost in La Mancha as a fascinating glimpse of the ghost of a film, and those optical fx shots really are something else.