Counterpunch Weekend Edition July 19-21, 2013
The Films of Henri-George Clouzot
The French Hitchcock
by LOUIS PROYECT
After proposing an article on radical Swedish detective novels to Jeff
St. Clair, he responded positively and also mentioned parenthetically:
“Speaking of French noir, have you seen Quai des Orfevres?” I drew a
blank on the flick, but would have been just as lost if he had named the
director, one Henri-Georges Clouzot, a surname that evoked Peter Sellers
in a pratfall rather than film noir.
After a minute or two of Googling, a flood of associations welled up as
if triggered by Proust’s madeleine. I discovered that Clouzot was the
man behind “Wages of Fear”, one of my favorite movies. He also directed
“Les Diaboliques”, another 1950s classic that shows up from time to time
on TCM.
Since my memory is not as sharp as it used to be, I could not remember
if I had ever seen “Les Diaboliques”. But I do distinctly remember what
Laura, my high-school beatnik pal, had to say upon returning from New
York in 1960 to our unhip village. She had seen the film at one of New
York’s plentiful art houses of the time and told me that it was the
scariest movie ever. This was just before Hitchcock came out with
“Psycho”, a film that it was compared to largely on the basis of Simone
Signoret killing a semiconscious man in a bathtub with coldblooded
efficiency. As it turns out, Clouzot beat Hitchcock to the rights of the
novel it was based on by a nose.
A year later I was ensconced at Bard College surrounded by Galuois
smoking undergraduates who considered “Wages of Fear” to be the closest
thing in film to Albert Camus’s essay “The Myth of Sisyphus”. Like the
four men in Clouzot’s saga who transport TNT over a rocky mountainous
road to bomb a raging oil fire into submission, Sisyphus was a Greek god
who was condemned to push a huge boulder to the top of a mountain but
upon reaching the summit would always roll back down to the bottom
underneath the crushing weight of the rock. Camus wrote:
All Sisyphus’ silent joy is contained therein. His fate belongs to
him. His rock is a thing Likewise, the absurd man, when he contemplates
his torment, silences all the idols. In the universe suddenly restored
to its silence, the myriad wondering little voices of the earth rise up.
Unconscious, secret calls, invitations from all the faces, they are the
necessary reverse and price of victory. There is no sun without shadow,
and it is essential to know the night. The absurd man says yes and his
efforts will henceforth be unceasing. If there is a personal fate, there
is no higher destiny, or at least there is, but one which he concludes
is inevitable and despicable.
Having evolved from the existentialism of my freshman year to Marxism in
1967, an absurd but necessary faith, I am now struck by Camus’s
meditation on this myth of futility. One cannot help but feeling that
being an unrepentant Marxist in 2013 is tantamount to a Sisyphean
admission that “The absurd man says yes and his efforts will henceforth
be unceasing.”
full: http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/07/19/the-french-hitchcock/
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