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| Henri-Georges Clouzot (1907-1977) |
Pablo Picasso : You want it done right no ?
H.-G. Clouzot : No I want you to finish on time you fxxk !
-From Henri-Georges Clouzot's 'The Mystery of Picasso'
If there is one person Alfred Hitchcock, the 'Master of Suspense', has to be afraid of, that person must be the director Henri-Georges Clouzot, widely known as 'The French Hitchcock'.
You may not have ever heard of Clouzot's name before, yet you are more likely to have heard of his 2 most iconic films. The first one is 'The Wages of Fear', which is likely to be my favorite European film of all time, and the second one is 'Les Diaboliques'. Both films have been remade and inspired countless other films. Due to his health and bad fortune, Clouzot may not have been capable of making as many as films as Hitchcock, yet Clouzot's most wonderful films have good reasons to make Hitchcock envious. Strongly aware of the dark side of humanity, Clouzot has no reservations to expose the darkest nature of the human condition, and the bleakness of his films has reached a point that many of Hitchcock’s films have no way to come close. We can say many of Hitchcock’s characters are perverse – they have mental problems that will lead them to the evil deeds, and their motivations can often be explained away through a psychoanalytical perspective. Clouzot’s characters are far more realistic, and to put it simply, these characters are just plain nasty.
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| Wife and Mistress - the double in 'Les Diaboliques'. 'The Double' is a plot device evident in many of Hitchcock's and Clouzot's films. |
If two persons are having a meal at a table, and a hidden bomb under the table explodes, then this is known as ‘scary’. The whole point is to instill a shock factor that will scare the hell out of you. But imagine if the bomb doesn’t explode – a ticking bomb – then you are literally waiting for the bomb to inevitably go off, it is called ‘suspense’.
To me, suspense is all about withholding and anticipation. You are disillusioned by the suspension of events, and a successful suspenseful plot will be able to strain your patience, captivate your attention and thus truly thrill you.
Suspense seems to have become a lost art nowadays. It can be attributed to the shorter attention span of the audience - movie viewers can’t just wait, they want reverse-angle shots and fast cuts. Frankly, it is not difficult at all to generate ‘horror’, you don’t have to be a filmmaker to scare the hell out of others. Yet generating suspense requires techniques and strategies. So how did the Master of Suspense do that?
Hitchcock employed a famous plot device, known as a ‘MacGuffin’, to generate suspense. A ‘MacGuffin’ is a plot device which is used solely to move the plot forward, to capture the audience’s attention. It is a sort of a ‘beacon’ to guide the audience, through time, towards the end of a Hitchcock film, but it does not contribute to the solution of the mystery. Put it simply, it is a ‘question’ in the film that never has a definite answer. The sole purpose of the ‘MacGuffin’ is to generate a suspenseful atmosphere for the audience, to lead the audience to the ultimate explosion of the bomb. Take ‘Rear Window’ as an example. James Stewart’s character has been spying on his neighbour’s activity, and he suspected one of his neighbours have committed a murder plot. The details of the murder itself are never shown in the film, it was the MacGuffin. We identify with Stewart’s character and we know his intuition is right, and the suspense is the anticipitaion that the neighbour will eventually come to attack Stewart, we just don’t know when it will be the time. That’s true – psychological manipulations are often used to craft a great film!
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| Clouzot and Picasso. |
How about the ‘French Hitchcock’? It is quite crucial to realize that, while both masters have a deep understanding of the mechanics of suspense, their treatments are not all the same. Clouzot, unlike Hitchcock, has been derided by the young ‘French New Wave’ critics as ‘old-fashioned’. Whether it is a fair statement is another story, yet can we call all those voters who have voted for ‘The Wages of Fear’ and ‘Les Diaboliques’ at IMDB website old blcokheads too (both films are on the TOP 250)?! Clouzot did not use ‘fancy’ plot techniques such as non-linear narratives or streams of consciousness, he adopted a rather classical style, with the conventional narrative, continuity editing, and realistic settings. Yet it is the story of Clouzot’s film that has substances and insights. Clouzot’s film has a stronger sense of realism than many of Hitchcock’s film, and the audience can quite easily identify with the characters. The characters are people we will likely to encounter in real life, and many of them, to be frank, can be rather negative and nasty! Indeed, everyone’s mental condition is normal in an ‘absurd’ film like The Wages of Fear (as I will convince you soon), it is just everyone has their dark sides to deal with. Clouzot’s style is stark and unsentimental, he just wants to tell you the awful and unsavory truths of the human condition.
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| Jean Cocteau and H. G. Clouzot. |
Clouzot and Hitchcock also have differing background philosophies. Many of Hitchcock’s film can be interpreted in a psychoanalytical / psychological viewpoint, and the reasons behind the evil character’s deeds are likely related to psychological defects, just like the classic Freudian explanations. Clouzot, rather like Jean-Pierre Melville, based his work more on Existentialism (the most obvious being ‘The Wages of Fear’). Although Clouzot seems to many like a ‘Yosemite Sam’ type character, he did have a circle of famous friends – Jean Cocteau, Jean-Paul Sartre and Pablo Picasso, to name a few. He has taken influences from these artists and put his own life views into his work. His universe is indifferent, and the characters are amoral - they just wanna survive...
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| Fragmented identity in 'Le Corbeau'. |
Clouzot also shows his mastery of mise-en-scene in many of his films, and these have been inspiring. Many of his films are about people doing immoral things, stabbing backs from the behind. His first film, ‘Le Corbeau’ (The Raven), was about a blackmailing spree in a community. The film is based on ‘falseness’. Every character has their mask to put on, to hide their true nature and intentions at behind. Adopting the style of Film Noir, Clouzot used stunning composition and mise-en-scene to expose the paranoia of these characters. A woman staring into a shattered mirror, that represented a fragmentation of identity. Or, did she even know what her true nature was, in the first place? This uncertainty enhances the paranoia, when everyone could just as likely to be the hunted one. Another stunning composition in the film was that when a character saw a shadow moving towards him, having no idea whether that guy could be trusted as a friend. In the same frame, a contrasting light and dark components were present, and tightened the compositional tension of the theme.
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| The disappearance of the body, the vaporization of the truth. |
In Les Diaboliques, water serves as a nice mise-en-scene for the film. The 2 most revealing scenes were related to water – the swimming pool and the bath. Water may symbolize fluidity, flexibility and vitality, yet in Clouzot’s film, the muddy water represented threat and a displacement of truth. When the swimming pool was drained, the body was gone, and the truth has vaporized. When the husband ‘came back to life’ at the bathtub, what emerged was the triumph of evil. How about the ‘passage of death’? The corridor that led to the death of Vera Clouzot’s character was the tool of suspense. It was the suspenseful trail for the audience to reach the ultimate twist-ending.
With his memorable plots and suspenseful scenarios, Clouzot is more than capable of holding you on the edge! And if ‘Suspense Film’ has a name, it has to be ‘The Wages of Fear’!
Next: The Wages of Fear
by Ed Law
5/9/2015
Film Analysis - 54
