The Wages of Fear: The Films of Henri-Georges Clouzot

Filmmakers — especially French ones, and especially those working before the 50s — are often overly romanticized amongst cinephiles. We love a great film, but we really love the underlying legends and myths of the artist and the creative process, struggling and screaming and clawing to get each film made, centralized on a whirligig of backstabbing, betrayal, and romance. Failed projects, lusty affairs, bouts with depression, creative absences, controversial ideologies, and tragic deaths: it’s the stuff that makes the singular genius of the director all the more untouchable; all the more storied. Enter, then, Henri-Georges Clouzot, the ‘French Hitchcock’ – perhaps the most improbable canonized auteur of them all.

The TIFF Bell Lightbox in Toronto won’t be spotlighting him with an ‘art’ exhibition ala Fellini’s photo show last summer, but they will be giving his modestly sized filmography a run-through from mid-October to November 29. Unpretentiously titled The Wages of Fear: The Films of Henri-Georges Clouzot, there are plenty of ‘must-sees’ in the form of masterpieces like Diabolique (November 17, 22), The Wages of Fear (October 19), and Le Corbeau (November 1) – the rights to the former having been snatched up before Alfred Hitchcock could successfully acquire them in order to make his own adaptation; the latter resulting in a two-year ban from filmmaking for M. Clouzot, as ordered by the Nazis.

Then, there’s Le Mystère Picasso (October 25), which Godard cited as “the only interesting film Clouzot made…one in which he lived something” (quite a long way off from his trophying “the cinema Nicholas Ray,” who just so happens to be the subject of TIFF’s other blockbuster Fall retrospective). Or his final film, La Prisonnière (November 10), made while he was in very poor health, and which perhaps only exists so he could utilize some of the dazzling, analog special effects that he had planned to employ in his studio-sabotaged jealousy thriller, L’Enfer, itself only living on as a making-of documentary (November 29).

Violent, misanthropic, suspenseful, and frequently nihilistic – Clouzot’s filmography is a stand-in relief for the complex life he led behind the camera. An affair with actress Suzy Delair (star of two of his earlier features, The Murderer Lives at Number 21 and Quai des Orfèvres) gave way to a marriage with Véra Gibson-Amado, star of his Wages of Fear, Diabolique, and Les Espions (November 24). Naturally, she died unexpectedly of a heart attack during the filming of La Vérité (November 15), damning Clouzot, justifiably, into a deep depression, prompting him to move away to a Tahitian resort until he got sick of it and moved back to France in 1960. He would make only one more film before dying in 1977 (apparently while listening to Hector Berlioz’s ‘The Damnation of Faust, Op. 24’). Equally deserving of a contextualizing exhibition as Tim Burton and the upcoming Grace Kelly dress display (and not to mention…her Oscar), the storybook melodrama of Clouzot’s private life is nonetheless felt in the operatic films themselves. They’re overwhelmingly sufficient.