Claude Chabrol, 1930–2010

Claude Chabrol’s 1958 film, Le Beau Serge, inaugurated the New Wave of French cinema. Chabrol not only broke from convention by depicting provincial youths rebelling against stifling middle-class mores, he proved it was possible to make high-quality, popular movies outside of France’s insular studio system by financing the film with a family inheritance.

Chabrol was a charter member of a group of famous movie obsessives, including François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, and Eric Rohmer, who wrote for the movie magazine Cahiers du Cinéma, said the London Daily Telegraph. Along with Rohmer, Chabrol “published a pioneering study that for the first time analyzed Alfred Hitchcock’s work in the context of his Catholic upbringing.” In Hitchcock’s world, they wrote, “salvation can only be obtained through the interplay of Fate (but isn’t it rather Providence?) and Free Will.” Like Hitchcock, Chabrol was a master of suspense, and his Le Boucher (The Butcher), a study of a woman’s fixation on a man who may be a serial killer, is widely considered one of the high points of 20th-century French filmmaking.

The son of a Parisian pharmacist, Chabrol was born into the same bourgeois milieu that he delighted in skewering. In films such as Les Biches (The Bad Girls) and Violette Nozière, he lifted “the facade of respectability to reveal the hypocrisy, violence, and loathing simmering just below the surface,” said the Associated Press. His narratives employed a classic style that won him directorial assignments from mainstream studios. Turning out more than one film a year, he produced more than 60 films and a handful of television productions in his lengthy career.

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A bon vivant, Chabrol “admitted choosing locations for his films partly for the quality of the local restaurants,” said the London Independent. And as much as he loved to mock the French bourgeoisie, he could also laugh at himself. Acknowledging that not all of his films lived up to the standards of his best work, he once told an interviewer, “Sometimes you are the pigeon; sometimes you are the statue.”