Henri-Georges Clouzot: The Cinema of Disenchantment

January 12, 2012 - February 4, 2012

Tempered by the pessimism of war-torn France, director Henri-Georges Clouzot’s brand of hard-edged realism made for gripping genre films, often mysteries and thrillers, that contained within them a near-misanthropic vision of man. Yet his best-remembered works, the dread-inducing The Wages of Fear (1953) and Diabolique (1955), have a paradoxical sympathy for their characters, a sympathy based upon the recognition that when left to our own devices, we will helplessly choose the baser path.

Clouzot’s virtuosic way with suspense, often tinged with sardonic humor, earned him the title “French Hitchcock,” yet many of his finest criminal concoctions find greater affinity with French-coined film noir and its scenic foreboding, distracted cynicism, and dim view of human desire. Not even love gets a cautious embrace from this dry-eyed existentialist who seemed to think that la petite mort naturally leads to its grand conclusion and released a string of pearls, dangling amour fou before us with Manon (1949), La vérité (1960), and Woman in Chains (1968).

From his self-assured first feature, The Murderer Lives at Number 21 (1942), with its houseful of quirky suspects, through the ravenous Le corbeau (1943) and its contagion of accusation, to The Spies (1958), in which Cold War conflicts play out in a psychiatric ward, Clouzot has given us beautifully detailed and dispatched dramas that inspect the inky depths of society while lavishing us with the ironic pleasures of dread and disquiet. Don’t miss this chance to look in the darker corners of Clouzot’s career.

Steve Seid, Video Curator

Thursday, January 12, 2012
7:00 p.m. The Murderer Lives at Number 21
Henri-Georges Clouzot (France, 1942). Clouzot’s debut feature is a remarkably self-assured murder mystery starring the great French actor Pierre Fresnay as a debonair detective. Filmed during the Nazi Occupation of France. (84 mins)

Saturday, January 14, 2012
6:30 p.m. Quai des Orfèvres
Henri-Georges Clouzot (France, 1947). Set in the smoky halls of Paris’s midforties cabaret scene, this naughty noir follows the voluptuous Jenny Martineau (Suzy Delair, Clouzot’s paramour at the time), a chanteuse whose star is beginning to soar until a murder is committed. “Noir at its soul-destroying best” (Los Angeles Times). (110 mins)

Saturday, January 14, 2012
8:45 p.m. Le corbeau
Henri-Georges Clouzot (France, 1943). Classic film noir dealing with the effect on a small town of an outbreak of poison-pen letters. Within the thriller format, director Clouzot conducts a study of group psychology in a mood of all-embracing suspicion. (93 mins)

Wednesday, January 18, 2012
7:00 p.m. Manon
Henri-Georges Clouzot (France, 1949). Winner of the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, Manon tracks two lovers—a prostitute and a Resistance fighter—who flee the French backwaters for Paris. A scornful vision of postwar France as a moral quagmire, not the promised utopia. (90 mins)

Friday, January 20, 2012
9:00 p.m. Miquette and Her Mother
Miquette et sa mère). Clouzot sets aside his signature cynicism for this wistfully light comedy, based on a turn-of-the-century play. The delightful Danièle Delorme stars as a sheltered young woman with ambitions to become an actress, but who finds herself in a sou-less theater troupe. A bubbly “boulevard comedy.” (93 mins)

Saturday, January 21, 2012
8:10 p.m. The Wages of Fear
Henri-Georges Clouzot (France, 1953). Four desperate men are hired by a ruthless oil company to drive trucks filled with explosives across a mountainous South American country in one of the toughest noirs ever filmed. Yves Montand stars. “A white-knuckled introduction to the concept of action-movie existentialism” (Slant). (147 mins)

Friday, January 27, 2012
8:40 p.m. Diabolique
Henri-Georges Clouzot (France, 1955). Simone Signoret and Véra Clouzot star as two women who join together to off a callous schoolmaster, with some unnerving results, in Clouzot’s masterful thriller. Matches, and possibly surpasses, the best of Hitchock. “Satisfying, elegant, and nasty” (Guardian). (107 mins)

Sunday, January 29, 2012
6:30 p.m. The Spies
Henri-Georges Clouzot (France, 1958). A Cold War espionage thriller set in a dilapidated psychiatric clinic, with Peter Ustinov as a Lithuanian klepto and Sam Jaffe as a Shakespeare-spouting operative. Identities shift, loyalties lapse, and paranoia spirals out of control. (137 mins)

Thursday, February 2, 2012
7:00 p.m. La vérité
Henri-Georges Clouzot (France, 1960) Clouzot directed from the hip with this inquiring look at youth culture of early sixties Paris, well aided by the anything-but-bashful Brigitte Bardot, who stars as a sexually liberated Left Banker who seeks aimless amusements to delay the gloom of contemporary life. (130 mins)

Friday, February 3, 2012
8:50 p.m. Woman in Chains
Henri-Georges Clouzot (France, 1968). Clouzot’s final foray into features takes us into another tortured love triangle to explore voyeurism and, by extension, the very gaze that so draws us to cinema. The girlfriend of a kinetic artist is drawn into the circle of a gallery owner/S&M photographer, with some perversely kinky results. (105 mins)

Saturday, February 4, 2012
5:30 p.m. The Mystery of Picasso
Henri-Georges Clouzot (France, 1956). Winner of the Palme d'Or at Cannes, this colorful documentary glimpse of the seventy-five-year-old Picasso captures the fecund nature of his creative process, a spontaneous revelation of form in continual transformation. “One of the most exciting and joyful movies ever made” (Pauline Kael). (78 mins)

This series would not be possible without the support of the French Institute and the Cultural Services of the French Embassy. We wish to thank in particular Delphine Selles-Alvarez of the Cultural Services for her diligent attention, as well as Denis Bisson, Cultural Attaché, French Consulate, San Francisco. Special thanks to: Haden Guest and David Pendleton, Harvard Film Archive; Josh Siegel, Film Department, MoMA; and James Quandt, TIFF Cinematheque. Finally, we wish to acknowledge critic David Thomson whose Clouzot-related quote “the cinema of total disenchantment” was the inspiration for the series title.