L’Enfer, Henri-Georges Clouzot

World famous for his classic nail-biters The Wages of Fear (1953) and Diabolique (1955), Clouzot was France’s most successful genre filmmaker when he decided to enter the modernism sweepstakes, going up against Resnais, Antonioni, and the nouvelle vague—as well as his acknowledged rival Alfred Hitchcock—with an ultra-subjective psychological thriller predicated on a middle-aged man’s paranoid suspicions concerning his young wife (Romy Schneider, unforgettable in blue lipstick). Shooting the same scenes over and over, Clouzot was unable to finish his would-be magnum opus; as these characters disintegrated, so did their creator.