Instead, the film gave its maker a breakdown and a heart attack. The director of this new documentary — part history, part restoration, all fascinating — is Serge Bromberg, who got hooked when he was stuck in a stalled elevator with a woman who turned out to be Clouzot’s widow. She led him to 85 cans of film, remnants of a movie that might have changed the cinema.
That sounds like hyperbole until you see the test footage shot by Clouzot and his crew. “Inferno’’ was to tell the story of Marcel (Serge Reggiani), a newly married man consumed with pathological jealousy toward his wife, Odette (Romy Schneider). While the “real-life’’ scenes were filmed in black and white, Clouzot shot Marcel’s inner fantasies in hothouse Technicolor and subjected them to tonal filters, prismatic lenses, swirling lighting schemes — an entire gamut of visual distortions that owed much to then-new movements like Op Art and kinetic art. Even the soundtrack was manipulated via editing and psycho-acoustic music techniques to reflect the hero’s fraying mental state.
The results are like nothing you’ve seen before: Clouzot seemed to be reinventing the medium itself. During pre-production, a group of Hollywood studio executives turned up, looked at the tests, and gave the director unlimited financial backing, and that freedom may have ultimately seized his creative clutch. When the time came to actually shoot “Inferno,’’ Clouzot overloaded the production with three separate camera teams and obsessively reshot the same scenes over and over until Reggiani quit and the crew mutinied.
