Dispatches from the Chicago International Film Festival

This week and next, those of us in Chicago will be treated to the wonderful 45th Chicago International Film Festival. I’ve already seen a few films at the Festival this year and I thought I’d report back to the blog about them. And since the festival asks attendees to rate the films they see on a 1-5 scale, I figured I’d include my own ratings in with these short reviews. Here’s the first...



Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Inferno (Serge Bromberg/Ruxandra Medrea, France)

As we have learned from movies like Hearts of Darkness, The Burden of Dream, and American Movie, documentaries about filmmakers’ monomaniacal drive to realize their cinematic vision can be equally (or even more) compelling than the film that is the documentary’s subject itself. This is, by necessity, the case with Bromberg and Medrea’s Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Inferno, since Clouzot was never able to complete Inferno. What remains of Clouzot’s grandly ambitious and quixotic failure comes to us now in this documentary’s valiant attempt to salvage and reconstruct Inferno’s 13 hours of preliminary footage and vividly beautiful experimental test reels.

Clouzot’s film-that-never-was was to use wildly hallucinatory kinetic art sequences to tell the story of a man’s jealous pursuit of his young blonde love. In this respect Inferno seems to have been conceived as something not unlike Hitchcock’s Vertigo, though Clouzot’s daring avant-garde experimentations in evoking the pangs of overwhelming obsession make Jimmy Stuart’s own brief Technicolor descent into frenzied desire look positively tame. Even in its fragmentary state, what is left of Inferno is a visual candy shop and dazzling to see.

Ultimately, like Inferno, this documentary is about obsession--in this case it is Clouzot’s driving compulsion to pursue cinematic expression to its boldest and most novel potential.

5 out of 5


-Heath Iverson