On the Heights of Despair
By Aimée

For his collaboration with the Continental during the Occupation when he made Le Corbeau (1943), Henri-Georges Clouzot was barred from filmmaking for four years. After the sanctions were lifted, Clouzot returned with a dazzling piece of comedie humaine: Quai des Orfèvres (1947). The film features an ambitious chanteuse Jenny and her hapless pianist-accompanist husband Maurice who find themselves involved in the murder of a lecherous admirer of Jenny’s. Eventually, a minor character Paolo is found guilty of the crime. After Maurice is released from prison to return home, the couple celebrates a happy Christmas together. If one takes Quai des Orfèvres at face value, the film can be read as a conventional Christmas tale with an unsurprising ending. However, a closer look at the film’s characterization and aesthetic choices suggests otherwise. The multi-layered, self-reflective film essentially resists the sentimental optimism that its Hollywood counterparts persist to promote and calls into question the fetishism of glamour and style. Clouzot further directs the spectator’s gaze onto a disenchanting world of desires and despair, and places the cinematic apparatus that produces the desires under examination.

The film presents the spectator with a study of man and women, of their desires and despair. The arriviste torch singer Jenny is constructed as the center of desires. The first time the spectator encounters Jenny is through Maurice’s surveillant yet lustful gaze. In a point of view shot, the viewer discovers Jenny sitting confidently on the table with her legs half-covered by a luxurious fur coat while she is practicing her Belle époque-reviving risqué songs on the side of a flirtatious music producer. Maurice desires Jenny but is often overshadowed by her other more resourceful admirers. Imbued with jealousy and despair, Maurice eventually resorts to his murderous impulse. In the following shots bridged by Jenny’s alluring delivery of the voluptuous song “Avec son tra-la-la”, the viewer soon discovers another admirer Dora, who is smoking and fixatedly gazes at Jenny. It later becomes explicit that Dora has feelings for Jenny but her love is without hope and will never be requited. In the subsequent shot from Dora’s point of view, the viewer finds Jenny practicing the song in a three-way mirror and stares at the fragmented, multiplied images of herself, as if she desires her own images. The accumulation of desires finally reaches its peak as Jenny performs on the stage, exciting her audience with bubbly lines and apt body dynamics. Jenny actively seeks others’ gazes and derives pleasure in being looked at, for she believes her sexual energy and desirability will help her secure fame and money. But eventually her desire for becoming a movie star is unrealized. In one way or another, Jenny, Maurice, and Dora all become involved in the murder of Brignon because of their desires for something, whether it is love, sex, fame, or capital. Clouzot’s camera articulates the play of desires. As the film progresses, the desires create immense troubles for his characters.

It may seem that Clouzot is recycling the most widely used tropes and unimaginatively uses cinematic devices that belong to the inventory of classical Hollywood cinema from the early-to-mid century. However, while sharing some basis in narrative and aesthetics, Quai des Orfèvres differs from its Hollywood counterparts at a fundamental level for its subversive practice that aims to negate pleasure and casts ridicule on the fetishism itself. Such subversion is evidenced by Clouzot’s malicious choice of casting Simone Renant as a lesbian in plaid knit sweater, thick wool trousers, and other airtight unattractive plain clothes – a character that resists fetishistic gazes. Apart from two close-up shots that glamorize Renant’s face, Clouzot’s camera does not give the spectator access to fetishizing the body of the “highly elegant, blond and pink apparition, who at the time was regarded as the most beautiful actress in Paris” . Moreover, Renant with her eye-catching blondness and dress in American style functions as a stand-in for Hollywood fetish stars. However, by denying access to her body and glamor, Clouzot inverts her role and uses her images precisely to resist “the very objectification she appears to embody.” Another example is Jenny’s photograph that Dora takes for an American magazine. In the well-lit room where everything radiates glamour, Jenny fakes to cover her chest with her hand and strikes a mawkish lover-girl pose when Dora presses the shutter. The saccharine image is more idiotic than attractive. By framing Jenny, the supposedly most attractive and alluring female in the film, in an unattractive manner, Clouzot pokes fun at the fetishism of style.

In the same scene, Clouzot further raises awareness of existence of the invisible cinematic apparatus that projects glamour and desire on the screen. The scene begins with a disorienting shot in washed-out whiteness. The light bulb on the upper left corner of the screen becomes discernable as Dora wields her lighting equipment to another direction away from the camera. These images are reminiscent of cinematographic projection and the experience of watching a movie, as traditionally the viewers would be sitting in a dark theatre and watching optically constructed images on the screen by virtue of a shaft of light from the projector. As the camera pans to track Dora as she approaches Jenny, Clouzot deliberates shows the several small pieces of lighting equipment positioned around Jenny. Evidently, the few small pieces of light equipment essentially are not capable of producing the abundant lighting that illuminates Jenny’s face and body. In a semi-revealing-of-device manner, Clouzot directs the attention of the viewer to the technology and the very process of mechanical production of images. With Jenny’s sickly-sweet photograph dietetically produced and overly sweet sentimentality spreads over the screen, it seems that the camera suggests to the viewer that the other glamorous images produced through the history of cinema are ultimately illusionary.

The composition of the shot where Dora stands by her lighting equipment also resonates with the opening scene, in which lights burst through the window of a smoky, dark cell from the upper left corner, spawning a sense of hopelessness and entrapment. The prison images not only function diegetically to create a dank atmosphere for the forthcoming crime and to foreshadow the fate of the murderer. Furthermore, invoking Plato’s allegory of the cave, the static images of dark cell become a metaphor for the film. As Jean-Louis Baudry maintains, “Plato’s prisoner is the victim of an illusion reality…h(huán)e is the prey of an impression, of an impression of reality”. In this sense, a credulous spectator is the prisoner. Fascinated by the glamorous images, he or she embraces the romance between Jenny and Maurice and the engrossing policier in its totality. Quai des Orfèvres itself is producing an impression of reality, a mysterious dark underground world readily to be consumed by the viewer. However, Clouzot's self-conscious camera is also creating counter-images that bring the apparatus capable of fabricating such an impression reality to the forefront, to visualize the invisible and remind the spectator of the images’ illusionary nature. In another place, self-reflectively, Clouzot has a police officer shout out “not in the river!” in surprise as Maurice tells the policemen his gun, which is considered as the gun Maurice uses that kills Brignon, is at home. Referring to the common trope, it is as if Clouzot almost intended to have someone shout out that this was only a movie.

As one scrutinizes the film, it is also not difficult to discern the two-faced, complex nature of the town and its inhabitants: the modern, independent lesbian Dora takes naked photographs of young women to make money, and her sweater with her name inscribed begs for attention; the meek husband Maurice is actually a man of great passion, capable of executing a passion crime; the sardonic, world-weary investigator Antoine nevertheless harbors kindness for others and cares deeply for the adopted mulatto kid; the romance between Jenney and Maurice, while may be genuine, is often only manifested by their fulsome protestations of their love. Here, Clouzot offers a meticulously three-dimensional and almost Balzacian study of men and women, and invites the viewer to celebrate the diversity of humankind while acknowledging its dark yearnings, unsatisfied desires, and despair. Clouzot is not an ascetic, but he does not grant the spectator access to consuming the sentimental optimism and hope without a grain of despair and dissatisfaction. In the original novel, the wife is the murderer. Clouzot re-worked the ending. In the film, Paolo miraculously enters the narrative to exempts Jenny and Maurice from prison time. However, the view still needs to see Maurice commit suicide while the Christmas bell ringing merrily and to see the graphic images of his blood flowing through cracks of prison wall in order to get to the happy ending.

Works Cited
Baudry, Jean-L., “The Apparatus: Metapsychological Approaches to the Impression of Reality in Cinema,” In Film Theory and Criticism, edited by L. Braudy and M. Cohen, 690-707. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.
Bianchi, Pietro and Mignani, Rigo. “Henri-Georges Clouzot,” Yale French Studies 17 (1956), 21-26.
Mayne, Judith. “Dora the image-maker, and Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Quai des Orfèvres,” Studies in French Cinema 4 (2004), 41-52.

時間：2008年9月23日18：30
地點：cinematheque quebecoise魁北克電影館
事件：olivier barrot主持觀影會

今晚兩大賣點：
1，能親睹這部法國經(jīng)典“國片”的35mm膠片版；
2，法國著名電視書評人和影史家olivier barrot在正片放映前的60分鐘現(xiàn)場講評。

故又是全場爆滿。

barrot不多談電影本身的內(nèi)容，反而從影片誕生時期的大氣候著眼-
二戰(zhàn)后2-3年間，法國國內(nèi)物資極度貧乏；
第三次世界大戰(zhàn)的可能性？
冷戰(zhàn)開場；
法國大量引進好萊塢電影制作；
……
再談HG克魯佐如何在對原作記憶模糊的情況下將其改編為劇本等等。

結(jié)束語來自片中警探安東萬那句著名的“我這樣的家伙對女人是沒機會的！”（Vous êtes un type dans mon genre, vous n'avez pas de chance avec les femmes !）

   對我個人來說，它是一部別開生面的犯罪電影。影片在絕大多數(shù)時間里，居然是處在一種歡樂，幽默的氣氛之中。（這種氣氛與影片的黑色主基調(diào)其實是格格不入的，這讓作為觀眾的我覺得導(dǎo)演似乎有些“敘事混亂”了）。
  有趣的是，導(dǎo)演Henri-Georges Clouzot自己說他是以記錄片的手法拍攝了這部電影，可能在他看來這個世界的本色就是混亂的，不可理喻的，但是我們卻應(yīng)該以積極，快樂的心態(tài)來面對這一切。（但其中也應(yīng)該有另一方面原因，那就是照顧到影片的娛樂性與商業(yè)性）。
  直到影片臨到結(jié)束之前，氣氛才陡然變得緊張與嚴(yán)肅起來。(以男主人公試圖自殺的情節(jié)開始時為分水嶺）
  導(dǎo)演最終告訴我們，女主角居然不是殺人兇手，真正的殺人其實是一個黑幫份子。
  一個主流化的，大團圓的結(jié)局？！
  但請注意，事實并沒有這么簡單，警長揭發(fā)出謀殺案真正兇手的主要動因是因為他喜歡那名女同性戀者，而并不是為了所謂的公平與正義。
  典型的法國式的黑色與曖昧！