Serge Bromberg - interview

Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Inferno was meant to be one of the biggest releases of its year. The script, by Clouzot himself, told the hallucinatory story of a hotel manager (Serge Reggiani) who goes mad with jealousy when he suspects his wife (Romy Schneider) of infidelity. Working with what was said to be the largest French production budget of 1964, Clouzot (The Wages of Fear, Diabolique) wanted to create something that had never been seen before. But the production, apparently already mired in obsessive noodling, came to a halt after Clouzot had a heart attack. He survived and went on to make one more feature, but Inferno was never completed.

Decades later, film preservationist Serge Bromberg found himself trapped for two hours in an elevator with Clouzot’s widow—and after talking through the wait, she gave him permission to reconstruct Inferno’s fragments. The resulting collage film—codirected with Ruxanda Medrea—isn’t a continuity editing of Inferno (only half of the movie was shot) as much as it is an attempt to sort through the shards of what remains. Bromberg and Medrea’s movie combines footage, staged reenactments and interviews with various members of the production. At the 2009 Toronto International Film Festival, Bromberg explained his approach, even suggesting an idea that no viewer could escape—that these scraps, which otherwise would have been destroyed, may be more remarkable than Clouzot’s completed film might have been.

In terms of both the footage and your approach to it, I was surprised—the film never attempts to lay out a point-by-point history of what went wrong.
There’s much more that’s not in the film than things that are in the film. I’m a film restorer, I’m a film historian, I’m a film searcher, but I’m most of all someone who’s trying to revive the audience. I’m doing shows with piano and silent films. I’m hosting television shows. So I have an audience-oriented approach to filmmaking. Finding a film without having the people watching it means nothing. So I deliberately decided to put on the side certain facts that were not relevant to my conception.… In 1964, there was no explanation of what was going on. People did not understand what Clouzot was doing. That’s exactly the feeling I want people to have.

You focus on Clouzot’s process and technique, explaining in great detail what he was trying to do with sound and image. Is that because of your background as a preservationist?
No, that’s because my aim was to put people in my situation.… I’m a film technician, but there are so many things I do not explain. So many things even that are wrongly explained in the film by the witnesses—for example, [since-deceased cinematographer William] Lubtchansky explains something that he remembered, but that’s not what’s in the work.

You’ve said it took you five minutes to locate where the forgotten canisters were.
Absolutely. Easy. Les Archives Française du Film… It’s a department of the national center of cinematography. They had them, but they were under escrow because Clouzot had sold his rights for 28 years, starting the day of the first public presentation of the completed film. Because there was no such thing, the rights were not considered sold. The insurance company owned the material, Clouzot owned the intellectual-property rights on the script, and in the end they never could find a way of working together…. After ten years of litigation, the lab, LTC, decided to sell the films to the archives.… For a reason I don’t know, they decided to junk all the sound and only keep the image negatives, so what we had was only image. All the sounds you listened to yesterday are reconstructions, except for that little reel that you see in the middle of the film that was found with the sound engineer.

Did you use all of the footage you found?
We used all of the footage we could. There’s some footage that is useless. There’s a lot of artsy footage—like the special effects and things that, after a while…but everything we could use, yes.

How many hours did you have to work with?
Fourteen and a half hours. It’s a sampling. [Clouzot] was [said] to have filmed the lips of Romy Schneider for about a week. Having a camera on her lips. Just her lips for one week. Lips and lips and lips and lips—what do you do with lips? So we would use ten seconds of lips and remove one hour. It is screen tests. But you know, most of the film is reconstructed with those screen tests.

It’s tempting to speculate about how the finished film would have played. On some level, the story seems like Freudian nonsense. It looks fantastic, but would it have worked as a drama?
I’m not sure. What I write in the press kit is my feeling that Clouzot had succeeded…. Just the fact of filming and being free with research and trying to invent a new way of doing cinema was a success in itself. If he had come to the final stage of editing, he would have cut everything down to the right length. [The result] may have come out of fashion or may not have been that successful.

You use the last scene of your film—that amazing bit with Romy Schneider and the Slinky—as your trailer. That’s a gutsy move.
What is a gutsy move is to say, “I’ll be on the level of that film legend.” That’s gutsy. Because I was terrified. This is really one of the biggest history-of-film catastrophes. There has been a film by Welles called It’s All True, there has been a film called I, Claudius—there have been many films made about unfinished films.

I was just going to ask about Welles’s unfinished Don Quixote. Welles collaborator Jess Franco put together a version of the film a few years after Welles’s death and was criticized for his choices. Did you have that in mind?
Yes. This is our film—L’Enfer d’Henri-Georges Clouzot is my film. It’s a view, it’s a creation about what I think happened. It’s a drama.… I’m not saying I edited the film just as Clouzot would have edited it. It’s entirely new.… The music is absolutely new. We’ve completely redesigned the sound.… That’s why I don’t like to see it as a documentary. I would rather see it as a fiction film with interviews. Because in the end, more than half an hour is drama.… In the end all you can do is impressionism.

Inferno opens Friday at the Siskel.

• More Film articles