Henri-Georges Clouzot

Abstract

There are revealing events in the life of film director Henri-Georges Clouzot. Normally, in a serious study, the fact would be omitted that his father was a professional appraiser, but it is important to remember that Henri-Georges took a degree in political science, after having studied law; that he spent five years in a sanatorium; that he lived for eleven years in the Notre Dame quarter with the sexiest actress in the French movies, Suzy Delair, and that he was purged in 1944 as a collaborationist. He made a triumphant comeback with Quai des Orfevres, which won a prize in Venice in 1947. If we must avoid the Balzacian temptation that would see in his father's profession (paintings, furniture, books, every familiar thing offered for sale by public auction) a kind of predestination, a foreshadowing of the cruelties to be found in Le Corbeau and Manon, we have to accept the reminiscences of the sanatorium, of Suzy Delair and of the purge. After all, it all ties up: Clouzot's desire for effectual truth in politics; his love for a woman of the kind that might be described as a woman three times over; his illness; the opportunity to express himself, after years of sterile waiting, and his choosing to focus our attention on his country's misfortunes. In Clouzot's universe, stupidity, vanity, cruelty and lust easily conquer what is honest, humble, pure and good. Nature, meanwhilebright starts in an August sky, waves along the Mediterranean coast, herds, meadows, plowed fields-follows, with indifference, her own secret path. Beween the two great trends of French culture, Descartes and Pascal, Valery and Proust, Corneille and Racine, midday clarity or deep darkness, blind vital thrust or clear judgment, Clouzot had already chosen in his youth: over Descartes he favored Pascal, who taught le bon usage of the illnesses Clouzot knew so well. Not Corneille (a typical Resistance hero, addicted to rhetoric) is Clouzot's man, but Racine, who assuredly would have appreciated Cecile Aubry. Later, when he comes to direct films, he will turn aside from such French celebrities as the Cartesian Rene Clair and the Cornelian Renoir, and will adhere to those masters of introspection E. A. Dupont, the German Jew who gave us Variete, and Eric von Stroheim, the terrible Austrian of Wedding March. Clouzot was not abashed by sickness, the harbinger of physical death, or by the purge, symbol of social death. Having to choose between patriotic honor and the personal variety Clouzot, as the modem hero who has at least a nodding acquaintance with the relativism of ethics and of class morality, risked being considered