Beauty in the cinema - Romy Schneider, cigarettes, swoon

Judging by these extraordinary images Henri-Georges Clouzot's L'Enfer had the potential to be a startling cinema masterpiece. Sadly it was not to be. The French director best known for his thrillers The Wages of Fear and Les Diabolioques abandoned the project in 1964.

The story is told in a documentary directed by Serge Bromberg and Ruxandra Medrea, Henri-George Clouzot’s Inferno, that appeared last year and screened at MIFF (unfortunately I missed it - if anyone has any details of an Australian DVD release, please let me know).

If the film's title sounds familiar, it's because in 1994 Claude Chabrol directed a rather earnest and forgettable version of the story based on Clouzot's script, with Emanuelle Beart in the Schneider role as a woman suffering due to the paranoid fantasies of her insanely jealous husband.

The Guardian picked up the trail one week ahead of its London release early last November. Extract:

"Clouzot is being brought to new audiences with a documentary about his doomed 1964 project concerning a jealous husband's mental collapse into paranoid fantasy. Called L'Enfer (Hell), the film became a real hell for the director and everyone on set...

"The test shots for Clouzot's L'Enfer that appear in the new documentary show that he envisaged using kinetic art in a way that parallels how Hitchcock had used Salvador Dalí's surrealist dream sequences almost 20 years earlier on Spellbound.

"Maybe, though, it was in making these test shots that Clouzot's ambition went beyond his capacity to realise a film. Film-maker Bernard Stora, then an intern on the film, worked on the tests. "I walked into something totally insane," he recalls. 'Clouzot had the best cameramen and the most seasoned technicians. It seemed clear from the beginning they didn't know what they were doing'.. "

Postscript (thanks to reader David for the link to this clip below)