Henri-Georges Clouzot (review)

This comprehensive piece of work by Lloyd is the first full-length volume in English on Clouzot, managing to communicate the author's obvious appreciation of Clouzot's cinema, while at the same time addressing (and, to a certain extent, re-contextualizing) the major controversies – personal, aesthetic and ethical – that have dogged the director's oeuvre and reputation. All of Clouzot's films are discussed in depth, and Lloyd also provides a chapter devoted to the director's little-seen documentaries on Picasso and the conductor Herbert von Karajan. The first chapter, an overview of Clouzot's career, charts the slow rise, relatively brief glory and gradual decline of this 'repellent, bullying gnome' (an amusing paraphrase of Brigitte Bardot's rather less pithy character appraisal), whose cultural worth since his death (aged sixty-nine) in 1977 has become far more readily acknowledged than it was during his lifetime. Lloyd is, from the outset, at pains to draw attention to the apparent lack of justification of the various attacks launched on Clouzot's character, work and choices: even if many actors claimed he was abusive, numerous others remained loyal to him throughout; even if the post-Occupation purging committees found Clouzot's collaboration with a German-run film company reprehensible, there is no basis for the claim that Le Corbeau (1943) is actually a pro-fascist film. These refutations clear the way for Lloyd to pursue what he is clearly more interested in – the close description and analysis of the complex narrative intrigues of Clouzot's major films. Lloyd's lengthy discussions of Le Corbeau, Quai d'Orfèvres, Le Salaire de la peur and Les Diaboliques are meticulous in their detail, paying close attention to the questions of genre, historical context and the recurring theme of falseness and illusion. Lloyd is highly adept at teasing out the intricacies of plot detail and psychological inconsistency, often providing highly insightful comparisons between Clouzot's adaptations and the original novels so many of these films are based on. More energy could justifiably be devoted to the exploration of the numerous instances of social, racial and (especially) sexual ambiguity in Clouzot's cinema, mostly mentioned only in passing, as well as to the fascinating tensions between progressive and reactionary impulses that bubble through so many of the films. The reluctance on the author's part to tackle head-on the political implications of some of Clouzot's more ambivalent engagements with identity, relation and social category results in an occasionally apologetic tone that appears to avoid (fear of anachronism?) critical interrogation of the most disquieting and paradoxical of the films' representations. Lloyd's book is most important for the way that it forces the reader to reconsider the 'Nouvelle Vague' generation's dichotomizing claim to have invented a cinematic radicalism purporting to stand in clear opposition to the likes of Clouzot's allegedly stuffy 'tradition de qualité'. In Clouzot, Lloyd presents us not only with a film-maker whose (albeit flawed) later work boldly experimented with evolving modes of representation and sexuality, but whose indisputably 'classic' films were, in their way, revolutionary explosions of increasingly outmoded cinematic categories of moral coherence and psychological transparency.