Dora the image-maker, and Henri-Georges Clouzot's Quai des orfèvres

Abstract

Clouzot's 1947 film Quai des orfèvres marked the director's return to filmmaking after the condemnation of his infamous 1943 film Le Corbeau. In many ways, Quai des orfèvres can be seen as a continuation of Clouzot's career as it was defined and shaped by his Occupation films made for Continental Films. Like Le Dernier des six (1941) for which he wrote the screenplay, and L'Assassin habite au 21 (1942), his first film as director, Quai des orfèvres is an adaptation of a mystery novel by Stanislas-André Steeman. In the two Occupation films, Clouzot's adaptation included the creation of a female character, Mila Malou (played by Suzy Delair), nowhere present in the novels, and in more general terms, Clouzot was known—controversially, insofar as Steeman was concerned—as a director who regarded his literary sources as schematic and manipulable. In Quai des orfèvres, Clouzot again creates a female character in his adaptation of Steeman: Dora, the lesbian photographer, who functions as a figure of the very process of image-making, with attendant questions of desire and female agency. Seen through the figure of Dora, Quai des orfèvres can be considered a significant transitional film in Clouzot's career, marking as it does the preoccupation with sexual marginality central in his films of the 1950s (such as Les Diaboliques and Salaire de la peur). More importantly, I read the figure of the lesbian image-maker as a representation of many of the anxieties of authorship, adaptation, and gender politics significant in 1950s French cinema.