Henri-Georges Clouzot

Henri-Georges Clouzot
Author: Christopher Lloyd
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Total Pages: 204
Release: 2007-07-15
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780719070143

Despite his controversial reputation and international notoriety as a filmmaker, no full-length study of Clouzot has ever been published in English. This book offers a significant revaluation of Clouzot's achievement, situating his career in the wider context of French cinema and society, and providing detailed and clear analysis of his major films (Le Corbeau, Quai des Orfèvres, Le Salaire de la peur, Les Diaboliques, Le Mystère Picasso).

She Who Was No More

She Who Was No More
Author: Pierre Boileau
Publisher: Pushkin Press
Total Pages: 161
Release: 2015-09-15
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1782271406

A murdered spouse returns from the dead in this classic thriller. Every Saturday evening, travelling salesman Ferdinand Ravinel returns to his wife, Mireille, who waits patiently for him at home. But Ferdinand has another lover, Lucienne, an ambitious doctor, and together the adulterers have devised a murderous plan. Drugging Mireille, the pair drown her in a bathtub, but in the morning, before the "accidental" death can be discovered, the corpse is gone-so begins the unraveling of Ferdinand's plot, and his sanity... This classic of French noir fiction was adapted for the screen by Henri-Georges Clouzot as Les Diaboliques ( The Devils), starring Simone Signoret and Véra Clouzot, the film which in turn inspired Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho. A second movie version, Diabolique, followed in 1996, starring Sharon Stone. Boileau-Narcejac is the nom-de-plume of Pierre Boileau (1906-89) and Thomas Narcejac (1908-98), one of France's most successful writing duos. Boileau and Narcejac both individually received the prestigious Prix du roman d'aventures before beginning a partnership that spanned four decades, from the Fifties to the Eighties, and produced more than fifty thrillers. Their works inspired numerous films, including Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo and Henri-Georges Clouzot's Les Diaboliques, based on their 1952 debut novel She Who Was No More.

Les Diaboliques (Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1955)

Les Diaboliques (Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1955)
Author: Susan Hayward
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Total Pages: 134
Release: 2005
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 9780252073304

Les Diaboliques (The Fiends) was a top grossing film in 1955. Clouzot shrouded his film in mystery, beseeching his audience not to give away the ending. He also radically changed the original story of Boileau and Narcejeac's novel (Celle qui n'etait plus), heterosexualising the original lesbian plot. His film demonstrates how to imply, rather than show, horror, keeping the spectator in a state of continued suspense, only releasing us in the few final frames. Fifty years later, Les Diaboliques still intrigues perhaps due to its excessive ambiguities and numerous plot twists that make it a film noir to end all films noirs, and not least the great performance of Simone Signoret. In this enjoyable and challenging film stuy Susan Hayward, leading writer on French cinema, sets Les Diaboliques against the political culture of its time and demonstrates the importance of Clouzot as a master of the thriller genre. She gives an illuminating in-depth textual analysis of the film and presents a comparison with its US remake which, juxtaposed with the original film book, highlights the great staying power of Clouzot's version, still a popular film with international audiences half a century after its premiere. Book jacket.

Art in the Cinema

Art in the Cinema
Author: Steven Jacobs
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 257
Release: 2020-10-15
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1350160318

In the 1940s and 1950s, hundreds of art documentaries were produced, many of them being highly personal, poetic, reflexive and experimental films that offer a thrilling cinematic experience. With the exception of Alain Resnais's Van Gogh (1948), Henri-Georges Clouzot's Le Mystère Picasso (1956) and a few others, most of them have received only scant scholarly attention. This book aims to rectify this situation by discussing the most lyrical, experimental and influential post-war art documentaries, connecting them to contemporaneous museological developments and Euro-American cultural and political relationships. With contributors with expertise across art history and film studies, Art in the Cinema draws attention to film projects by André Bazin, Ilya Bolotowsky, Paul Haesaerts, Carlo Ragghianti, John Read, Dudley Shaw Aston, Henri Storck and Willard Van Dyke among others.

Henri-Georges Clouzot

Henri-Georges Clouzot
Author: Christopher Lloyd
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Total Pages: 204
Release: 2013-07-19
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1847796192

Despite his controversial reputation and international notoriety as a film-maker, no full-length study of Clouzot has ever been published in English. This book offers a significant revaluation of Clouzot’s achievement, situating his career in the wider context of French cinema and society, and providing detailed and clear analysis of his major films (Le Corbeau, Quai des Orfèvres, Le Salaire de la peur, Les Diaboliques, Le Mystère Picasso). Clouzot’s films combine meticulous technical control with sardonic social commentary and the ability to engage and entertain a broad public. Although his films are characterised by an all-controlling perfectionism, allied to documentary veracity and a disturbing bleakness of vision, Clouzot is well aware that his is an art of illusion. His fondness for anatomising social pretence, the deception, violence and cruelty practised by individuals and institutions, drew him repeatedly to the thriller as a convenient and compelling model for plots and characters, but his source texts and the usual conventions of the genre receive distinctly unconventional treatment.

The Belle Époque

The Belle Époque
Author: Dominique Kalifa
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 167
Release: 2021-07-06
Genre: History
ISBN: 0231554389

The years before the First World War have long been romanticized as a zenith of French culture—the “Belle Époque.” The era is seen as the height of a lost way of life that remains emblematic of what it means to be French. In a vast range of texts and images, it appears as a carefree time full of joie de vivre, fanfare and frills, artistic daring, and scientific innovation. The Moulin Rouge shared the stage with the Universal Exposition, Toulouse-Lautrec rubbed elbows with Marie Curie and La Belle Otero, and Fantômas invented automatic writing. This book traces the making—and the imagining—of the Belle Époque to reveal how and why it became a cultural myth. Dominique Kalifa lifts the veil on a period shrouded in nostalgia, explaining the century-long need to continuously reinvent and even sanctify this moment. He sifts through images handed down in memoirs and reminiscences, literature and film, art and history to explore the many facets of the era, including its worldwide reception. The Belle Époque was born in France, but it quickly went global as other countries adopted the concept to write their own histories. In shedding light on how the Belle Époque has been celebrated and reimagined, Kalifa also offers a nuanced meditation on time, history, and memory.

The Films in My Life

The Films in My Life
Author: François Truffaut
Publisher: Diversion Books
Total Pages: 452
Release: 2014-08-24
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1626813965

From a cinematic grand master, “one of the most readable books of movie criticism, and one of the most instructive” (American Film Institute). An icon. A rebel. A legend. The films of François Truffaut defined an exhilarating new form of cinema for moviegoers the world over. But before Truffaut became a great director, he was a critic who stood at the vanguard, pioneering an innovative way to view movies and to write about the cinematic arts. Now, for the first time in eBook, the legendary director shares his own words, as one of the most influential filmmakers of all time examines the art of movie-making through engaging and deeply personal reviews about the movies he loves. Truffaut writes extensively about his heroes, from Hitchcock to Welles, Chaplin to Renoir, Buñuel to Bergman, Clouzot to Cocteau, Capra to Hawks, Guitry to Fellini, sharing analysis and insight as to what made them film legends, and how their work led Truffaut and his fellow directors into classics like The 400 Blows, Jules and Jim, and the French New Wave movement. Articulate and candid, The Films in My Life is for everyone who has sat in a dark movie theater and dreamed. “Truffaut brings the same intelligence and grace to the printed page that he projects onto the screen. The Films in My Life provides a rare knowledgeable look at movies and moviemaking.” —Newsday

Sapphism on Screen

Sapphism on Screen
Author: Lucille Cairns
Publisher:
Total Pages: 223
Release: 2006
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 0748621652

This book sets out to investigate and theorise mediations of lesbian desire in a substantial corpus of films (spanning the period 1936-2002) by male and female directors working in France and also in French-speaking parts of Belgium, Canada, Switzerland and Africa. The corpus is unique in never before having been assembled, and represents a valuable tool not just for researchers but also for university teachers creating courses both on lesbianism in film and on sexuality in French cinema. A fair number of the 89 texts treated are mainstream films which have achieved high critical acclaim and/or high viewing figures: to cite just a few examples, Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Quai des orfèvres(1947), Louis Malle’s Milou en mai(1989), Claude Chabrol’s La Cérémonie(1995), André Téchiné’s Les Voleurs(1995), and François Ozon’s Huit femmes(2001). As such, they have contributed to hegemonic constructions of and debate on (female) homosexuality, in a century wherein sexed/ gendered identity, including sexual orientation, has become a preeminent factor in the constitution of subjectivity. While such constructions and debate have a French-language specificity, and have been produced in distinct socio-political and cultural contexts, this study also engages in analytical comparisons with relevant anglophone films and their own distinct discursive contexts.

An Army of Phantoms

An Army of Phantoms
Author: J. Hoberman
Publisher: The New Press
Total Pages: 471
Release: 2013-01-29
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1595587276

The film critic’s sweeping analysis of American cinema in the Cold War era is both “utterly compulsive reading [and] majestic” in its “breadth and rigor” (Film Comment). An Army of Phantoms is a major work of film history and cultural criticism by leading film critic J. Hoberman. Tracing the dynamic interplay between politics and popular culture, Hoberman offers “the most detailed year-by-year look at Hollywood during the first decade of the Cold War ever published, one that takes film analysis beyond the screen and sets it in its larger political context” (Los Angeles Review of Books). By “tell[ing] the story not just of what’s on the screen but of what played out behind it,” Hoberman demonstrates how the nation’s deep-seated fears and wishes were projected onto the big screen. In this far-reaching work of historical synthesis, Cecil B. DeMille rubs shoulders with Douglas MacArthur, atomic tests are shown on live TV, God talks on the radio, and Joe McCarthy is bracketed with Marilyn Monroe (The American Scholar). From cavalry Westerns to apocalyptic sci-fi flicks, and biblical spectaculars; from movies to media events, congressional hearings and political campaigns, An Army of Phantoms “remind[s] you what criticism is supposed to be: revelatory, reflective and as rapturous as the artwork itself” (Time Out New York). “An epic . . . alternately fevered and measured account of what might be called the primal scene of American cinema.” —Cineaste “There’s something majestic about the reach of Hoberman’s ambitions, the breadth and rigor of his research, and especially the curatorial vision brought to historical data.” —Film Comment