TORONTO DISPATCH: CLOUZOT LOST AND FOUND
by Sep 23, 2009One enters any major film festival with hopes of discovering a budding auteur, a new voice from some previously unheard-from . . .
Synopsis
A mysterious writer of poison-pen letters, known only as Le Corbeau (the Raven), plagues a French provincial town, unwittingly exposing the collective suspicion and rancor seething beneath the community’s calm surface. Made during the Nazi Occupation of France, Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Le Corbeau was attacked by the right-wing Vichy regime, the left-wing Resistance press, the Catholic Church, and was banned after the Liberation. But some—including Jean Cocteau and Jean-Paul Sartre—recognized the powerful subtext to Clouzot’s anti-informant, anti-Gestapo fable, and worked to rehabilitate Clouzot’s directorial reputation after the war. Le Corbeau brilliantly captures a spirit of paranoid pettiness and self-loathing turning an occupied French town into a twentieth-century Salem.
Cast
| Dr. Remy Germain | Pierre Fresnay |
| Denise Saillens | Ginette Leclerc |
| Laura Vorzet | Micheline Francey |
| Dr. Michel Vorzet | Pierre Larquey |
| Nurse Marie Corbin | Héléna Manson |
| Rolande Saillens | Liliane Maigné |
| School Director Saillens | Noël Roquevert |
| Mother | Sylvie |
Credits
| Director | Henri-Georges Clouzot |
| Director of photography | Nicholas Hayer |
| Production Design | André Andrejew |
| Screenplay | Louis Chavance |
| Adaptation and dialogue by | Henri-Georges Clouzot and Louis Chavance |
| Music | Tony Aubin |
Disc Features
- New digital transfer, with restored image and sound
- Video interview with Bertrand Tavernier, director of Coup de torchon
- Excerpts from The Story of French Cinema by Those Who Made It: Grand Illusions 1939 – 1942, a 1975 documentary featuring Henri-Georges Clouzot
- New essay by film scholar Alan Williams, author of Republic of Images: A History of French Filmmaking
- New and improved English subtitle translation
- Optimal image quality: RSDL dual-layer edition
From the Current
Le Corbeau
by Feb 16, 2004For most of its history, French cinema has undergone periodic upheavals characterized by massive changes in many areas—personnel, economics, typical film style and content, and so on. The German occupation resulted in perhaps the most striking of these points of rupture. In personnel, some men . . .
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