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Arte will offer a new great cinema evening this Monday evening. At 8:55 p.m., the channel will offer Crowby Henri-Georges Clouzot, a drama released in the middle of the Second World War. Then, at 10:25 p.m., time for a paranoid thriller by Francis Ford Coppola : Secret conversation. These two acclaimed works are also visible for free in replay : The Raven for a week, and Secret conversation throughout the month of December.
Rewatch Inferno by Henri-Georges Clouzot
In 2017, while he was in the spotlight at the Cinémathèque française, via an exhibition on all of his work, First dedicated two files to the artist. The first is interested in the creation of Diabolicalhis thriller released in 1954, and it was published within the “mook” #1. The second looks back over his entire career, and it is within this long article that François Grelet details the history of Crow.
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“Rather than “mystery”, we should actually talk about misunderstanding. One of the most widespread and long-lasting took place at the very beginning of his career when the young Clouzot found himself at the head of the script department of the Continental ( the major cinema that the Nazis had set up in France during the Occupation, with the ambition of competing with Hollywood). from The Assassin lives at 21, a quick whodunit shot in just eighteen days The film is such a hit that the thinking heads at the Continental give it carte blanche for the sequel. It will be The Raven, an X-ray of a film. a small, local town turned upside down by a flood of anonymous letters. A film noir set in the middle of the busy countryside, but above all an object so devious and disillusioned that it achieves the feat of being at home. both reviled by Free France (which accuses him of seeing the country as a dumping ground for collaborators) and by the German occupiers (who find themselves stunned by his deleterious portrait of occupied France). The film is sold out but its stubborn refusal of any Manichaeism, at a time when it was necessary to choose one's side, foreshadows all the sulphurous mystique which will never cease to surround its author.
The most famous scene of Le Corbeau, the one where a light bulb begins an expressionist back and forth in front of the petrified face of Pierre Fresnay, states very clearly the entire vision of the world held by Clouzot: no white nor black, no good guys or bad guys, enlightenment only comes after experiencing darkness. At just 36 years old, the filmmaker delivers a note of intention from which he will never deviate. His perfect sense of nuance will be incredibly radical.
At the Liberation, Clouzot received a work ban which lasted four years. Le Corbeau is banned everywhere in the country (Belgium, which wanted to broadcast it on its territory, was reportedly warned by the French government that this choice would be considered an “unfriendly gesture”). It becomes a film symbol of a France which betrays (itself), while deep down the film only deals with the terrible feeling of guilt – that of Clouzot in the first place.
The filmmaker made a point of never dispelling this misunderstanding, filming in 1949, and in quick succession, Manon (a re-actualization of Manon Lescaut against the backdrop of the Liberation and the founding of Israel) and a sketch of the the anthology Back to Life, the concept of which was to pay a moving tribute to those wounded in war. The two films work on the same obsession, precisely the one which earned the Raven to be condemned four years earlier: in times of war, the executioners are also victims, and vice versa. Clouzot does not seek to rectify the situation or apologize for his defeated humanism. And in fact maintains rumors about questionable political inclinations which, added to the sometimes scandalous violence he showed with his actors and technical teams, undoubtedly explain the tweezers with which his posterity is manipulated.”
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