Za Henri-Georgesa Clouzota, the thriller as a genre framework was the best context for considering a universe in which Eros either purifies or (in)directly leads to destruction, while Thanatos is the dominant sign under whose shadow the narrative unfolds. The director's attitude, an attitude he realizes with full consistency, is one of distrust, both towards the (extra)diegetic world and towards the heroes who inhabit it.
Distrust primarily means taking a distance, refusing to give in to the illusions of involvement: it is the methodological principle on which the author's analytical and epistemological structure rests. Therefore, in The crow (the Raven, 1943) Clouzot can observe with icy precision that there is not a single positive character in the film, that everyone is implicated and responsible, and that is why the fundamental operating mode of the director's work is defined here. mise-en-scènea: (d)enunciation.
Even earlier, in his debut L'Assassin habite... au 21 (The killer lives… at number 21, 1942), humor that is not devoid of a certain benevolence will quickly metamorphose into 'cruel' cynicism, into a merciless mockery of stupidity and baseness in people, into the mockery that remains behind every failure. Likewise, the more or less classic detective story with sympathetic protagonists will be replaced by a much more solid thriller structure, which in Clouzot turns into a privileged anthropological analysis where the human constitution is most thoroughly exposed to contemptuous description and, consequently, debunking.
The range of the director's oeuvre is strikingly evoked and Wharf Goldsmiths (1947): his least tense, that is, least 'dark' film is the one that is, in a formal sense, just BlackWhile the audience is occupied with the police investigation of the murder, Clouzot deals with the issues that essentially define his characters: jealousy and the desire for success in film that leads to pornography or prostitution.
A happy ending can only be experienced as such at the cost of ignoring all the numerous previous implications: the fact that it is revealed at the end that the disgusting perverted old man was killed by an irrelevant thief, in Wharf Goldsmiths will not erase the fact that all three protagonists either had the intention, or thought they had committed a crime, or consciously concealed it. If a fateful combination of circumstances legally and formally absolves the heroes of guilt, the director does not draw such a conclusion either.
U Devilish (Demons, 1954) distrust turns to disbelief in the climactic scenes, only to establish the banality of the plot that uses imaginative means. The film has a telling title Truth (The truth, 1960) - in which Brigitte Bardot gave one of her most memorable roles despite frequent arguments, or perhaps because of them, with her director - a testament to Clouzot's approach judgments i trials: through numerous flashbacks, an image is reconstructed that will disqualify, that is, make more complex, the adopted preconceptionsSouthe.
But what does this director's distrust refer to, where does it come from? What is it an expression of: a 'hurt' emotional response or a purified intellectual insight? Famous critic David Thomson said that Clouzot's 'cinematography is a total disappointment'. This claim, however, partially falsifies the author's 'sensibility' and the reach of his rhetoric: what could have 'enchanted' Clouzot before, what could have existed before that would have even minimally associated an acceptable past or some ideal assumption?
There is no idealized point that offered the possibility of balance or harmony. The director had no hope before, and certainly no hope at the end of the process: disappointment would imply that there was a certain nostalgia in the background, some reminder of what once was or could have been, and none of that is exactly what is missing in the auteur's films. Redemption is simply not even an option. Clouzot is not indignant, he is cynical director: he does not detect the discrepancy, the gap between actuality and potential, he states a fundamental failure that stands at the center of the human being.
That is why Clouzot is the exact opposite of sentimentality, because irony is the only feeling he tolerates. At the beginning Devilish the motto is: 'A picture is moral when it is tragic and conveys the horror of the things it describes'. Clouzot goes even further, since the tragic moment is suspended in order to emphasize the horror, as the key space in which the human essence is revealed. It is a procedure of far-reaching power: if one really wants to act, to be a consistent moralist, one must first and foremost be a misanthrope.
In that perspective, unfortunately never finished Hell (Hell) was conceived as a gradational conclusion, a landmark achievement that wanted to push the boundaries and represent paranoia in a new and radical way. Hell is, we can now conclude this retroactively from the preserved inspirational, experimental, somnambulistic recordings (both those of the externalization of the main protagonist's psychosis, and those 'purely' narrative), supposed to be Clouzot's masterpiece, a disturbing sublimation of a poetics when the director's anthropological cynicism was raised to hallucinatory proportions, since paranoia - the film followed the growing, uncontrollable, irrational jealousy of the hotel owner towards his younger wife - was used as an occasion for a distorting, distorting visualization: a paranoid point of view simultaneously as a modality (and morality) of psychological and external description of the world.
Clouzot's worldview demanded a culmination both in terms of semantic rounding and in terms of the crucial shifting of the theme to the form itself, to a style that no longer coldly observed things but itself became hysterical, deformed, so that the process of enunciation would be 'mimetically' precise, an index of displaced desires and longings.
Instead of the projected Hell, the final word in the author's oeuvre became, however, The Prisoner (Captive, 1968). Given the director's obsessive monitoring of degradation within human interaction, it was inevitable that at some point sadomasochism would also come to inspire his imagery, to 'formalize' such an influence.
What, however, 'spoils' this picture, what introduces authorial and thematic disturbance and interruption, is that The Prisoner also a love film that revolves around an indistinguishable axis, the disproportion between the lovers in their fascinations and desires: the difference between Stan (Laurent Terzieff) and Jose (Elizabeth Wiener) is that in the intertwining of love and the sadistic agent as an erotic ritual, repulsion is placed on the 'wrong' member in this libidinal economy, culminating in a psychedelic dissolution at the end of the film.
But SM iconography also raises the question of Clouzot's 'involvement', the way in which Stan becomes his diegetic representation: is the director in The Prisoner 'discovered' his habitus or inclination - a callous voyeur who organizes an erotic spectacle, who controls the staging, who 'subdues' the characters, and most of all fears love, emotional excess that could 'tarnish' his vision, an ideally crafted shot?
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