Une peinture morale: Intertextuality in Clouzot’s Les Diaboliques

Abstract

Film critics and scholars never tire of comparing the work of Henri-Georges Clouzot with that of Alfred Hitchcock. Despite the tenacity of the comparison, critics rarely discuss the two directors' attitudes toward literary texts. Both adapted some of their best-known films from contemporary popular fiction, with an insouciance about fidelity to the original source material. Hitchcock, furthermore, made it a matter of principle to avoid adapting canonized works of literature. his interviews with Francois Truffaut, he said that he would never make a film of Crime and Punishment, because the novel is someone else's achievement. He goes on, though, to offer a less self-regarding reason, invoking the autonomy of the literary work of art: In Dostoyevsky's novel, there are many, many words and all of them have a function (Hitchcock 71-72). Clouzot's approach to adaptation does not presuppose such a rigid hierarchy of literary texts. He based Manon (1949) on the novel by Abbe Prevost, setting the film in France during the Liberation era and in Palestine before partition. Not only did Clouzot alter the story's setting, he also transformed Prevost's proto-Romantic tale into a contemporary film noir. Manon was, however, one of Clouzot's less successful films, and afterward he chose not to follow the postwar fashion for making films inspired by well-known works of French literature. It would be a mistake, however, to conclude that Clouzot the filmmaker lost interest in literature, apart from malleable works of contemporary romans policiers. One of his best-known films, Les Diaboliques (1955), is based on the novel Celle qui n'etaient plus by the crime-fiction writing team of Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac. But the film shares its title with a collection of short stories by the nineteenth-century writer Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly, with whom Clouzot shared a taste for tales of human weakness and depravity. After the opening credits, the film quotes the preface Barbey d'Aurevilly wrote to his short stories: Une peinture est toujours assez morale quand elle est tragique et qu'elle donne l'horreur des choses qu'elle retrace. This prologue comes off as a rather pretentious introduction to a suspense thriller in which the crime and the motives are so familiar to moviegoers. It would seem more apposite to Clouzot's earlier film, Le Salaire de la peur (1953). With respect to Barbey d'Aurevilly's stories, Jacques Petit suggests that the preface represents the author's sincere understanding of his own work while also serving a more pragmatic purpose. Barbey d'Aurevilly's Les Diaboliques first appeared in the early years of the Third Republic, under President Patrice MacMahon's conservative regime of Ordre morale. The preface, and particularly the words quoted by Clouzot, might have been written in anticipation of the scandal and the prosecution that the salacious and violent stories were to provoke (Petit 247). Clouzot himself was no stranger to scandal and prosecution, having been put on trial during the epuration for his Occupation-era film, Le Corbeau (1942), and banned from making films for two years. However, he faced no threat of censure for Les Diaboliques. According to Susan Hayward, Clouzot chose to open Les Diaboliques with the quotation because he was obliged to pay homage to Barbey d'Aurevilly as a condition for using the title (14). That may be the case. However, the conjunction of a literary allusion with the metaphor of narrative film as a painting offers too many possibilities to set aside lightly. Clouzot was, of course, very familiar with the world of painting. After Les Diaboliques, his next film was an innovative documentary about his friend Pablo Picasso. Le Mystere Picasso (1956), the two artists state as one of their objectives to montrer les tableaux qui sont sous le tableau. Taking seriously Clouzot's description of Les Diaboliques as une peinture ... morale, this article probes and finds the paintings beneath the painting. …