Claude Chabrol RIP

Claude Chabrol
Claude Chabrol, who died on September 12 aged 80, was one of that group of critics-turned-film-makers who revolutionised French cinema in the late Fifties and came to be known as the "new wave".

12 Sep 2010

Their careers developed in different directions, but they were united at the outset in rejecting the hidebound traditions of contemporary French films, with their formulaic, "well-made" scripts, and in calling for a new kind of cinema – realistic, and free of studio constraints and the shackles of the star system.

When Chabrol made his first film, Le Beau Serge, in 1958, using a small inheritance of his first wife's, he put these principles into practice, shooting it in black and white, on location in his home town of Sardent, with the then unknown players Gérard Blain and Jean-Claude Brialy.

The first feature film of the new wave, it was both a critical and commercial success, enabling Chabrol immediately to shoot a second, Les Cousins (1959), and to act as "godfather" to his friends, who were also eager to make their first films.

Chabrol used the profits from Le Beau Serge and Les Cousins to fund Eric Rohmer's Le Signe du Lion (1959) and Philippe de Broca's Les Jeux de l'Amour (1960) and Le Farceur (1961), and to help pay for Jacques Rivette's Paris Nous Appartient (1960). He also acted as "technical adviser" on Jean-Luc Godard's first feature, A Bout de Souffle (1959), but this was a token credit to enable Godard to piggyback into the cinema on Chabrol's shoulders; in practice, Godard was an innovator who needed no technical advice.

Squat, bespectacled and rotund, Chabrol played the joker in the pack, resembling nothing so much as a startled owl. It was an image that did not always redound to his advantage, casting doubt on his seriousness of purpose. He was a bon vivant and something of a gourmet, losing no opportunity in his films for a feast or a banquet. Wags said that they would not recognise a Chabrol film without, at the very least, a good domestic "blow-out".

Though in his work he pilloried the bourgeoisie – its foibles and petty cruelties – he was himself of this class and shared many of its values: property, wealth and domesticity. While two of his marriages failed, he retained a touching faith in the institution itself.

Born in Paris on June 24 1930, the son of a pharmacist, Claude Chabrol grew up at Sardent, 150 miles south of the capital, and always regarded himself more of a country boy than a Parisian. Indeed, his first two films were variants on the theme of the town mouse and the country mouse.

Movie-mad as a boy, he ran a film club from a barn at the age of 12, developing an early taste for thrillers and detective stories. To please his father, he studied Pharmacy at the Sorbonne and was expected to enter the family business. His military service was duly undertaken in the medical corps, where he reached the rank of sergeant.

When he was demobbed, however, he abandoned medicine and sought an independent career related to his first love, cinema. In 1955, aged 25, he landed what should have been a plum job as head of publicity for Twentieth Century-Fox in Paris. It did not work out. By their lights, Chabrol proved "the worst press officer they'd ever seen" and he was fired after a year, taking consolation from the fact that he was succeeded by a worse one, Jean-Luc Godard.

At this time he began to associate with film buffs at the Cinémathèque Française in the Avenue de Messina and at the Ciné-Club des Quartiers Latins, where they chewed the fat and argued over the finer points of film technique. The "gang", all of whom became film-makers in their own right, included Eric Rohmer, Jacques Rivette, Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut.

They were all of a similar mind and began to write regularly for the film magazine Cahiers du Cinéma, founded in 1950 by the critic and theorist André Bazin. Chabrol contributed pieces under his own name and as Charles Eitel and Jean-Yves Goute (the latter incorporating his wife's maiden name). Between them they developed a philosophy of cinema eventually labelled the politique des auteurs, arguing that no film should be judged in isolation but in the context of its director's previous work and of the conventions of its genre.

Impersonal French films of the time were dismissed in favour of what they regarded as the more individual ones of Roberto Rossellini, Carl Dreyer and Fritz Lang and of a whole slate of Hollywood film-makers hitherto barely taken seriously, such as Howard Hawks, Nicholas Ray and Otto Preminger.

Head of the pantheon in their eyes was Alfred Hitchcock, and in 1957 – with Eric Rohmer – Chabrol published a pioneering study that for the first time analysed Hitch's work in the context of his Catholic upbringing. Thrillers that had formerly been admired only as superior entertainments were reinterpreted in terms of such theological concepts as the transference of guilt. It was so persuasively argued that for many years this was regarded as the definitive work on Hitchcock, though never translated into English or updated to reflect the many films he made after 1957. Hitchcock remained a prime influence on Chabrol, many of whose films had themes and plots that could as easily have been filmed by him.

After the initial enthusiasm, Chabrol's critical standing went sharply into reverse, while that of his Cahiers colleagues continued to climb. Through the early and mid-Sixties, he seemed incapable of putting a foot right with critics or the public. Self-indulgent art-house fare such as A Double Tour (1959), Les Bonnes Femmes (1960) and Les Godelureaux (1961) was followed by palpably commercial potboilers with lip-smackingly lurid titles: The Tiger Likes Fresh Blood (1964), Marie-Chantal v Dr Kah and An Orchid for the Tiger (both 1965). These in turn were succeeded by awkward bilingual co-productions with Hollywood stars whose best years were behind them. In 1967, for example, Anthony Perkins appeared in Chabrol's The Champagne Murders and Jean Seberg in La Route de Corinthe, which was belatedly released outside France as Who's Got the Black Box?

Chabrol did himself no favours by seeming to relish this work. "In drivel like the Tiger series," he said, "I really wanted to get the full extent of the drivel. They were drivel so, OK, let's get into it up to our necks." Not surprisingly, questions began to be asked about him – whether he was simply a one-string-fiddle man who had happened to be in the right place at the right time with just enough money to shake up the addled French film industry of 1958 but without the staying power and originality of Truffaut and Godard. Was he, indeed, so very different from the older school of film makers he professed to despise?

It was a premature judgment. In 1968 Chabrol met the producer André Génovès, who gave him a free hand to make the film of his choice. He picked Les Biches, an intense psychological study of a three-way struggle for sexual domination between a bisexual woman, her protégée and the handsome architect who becomes the lover of both. More stylish and disciplined than anything Chabrol had made before, with a fat part for the actress Stéphane Audran, whom he had married in 1962, Les Biches restored his critical reputation and ushered in the most sustained creative phase of his career.

Between 1967 and 1973 he produced a stream of outstanding dramas, many starring his wife, in which he put the bourgeoisie under the microscope, exposing its prejudices and hypocrisies yet defending the strength of family ties. They included La Femme Infidèle and Que la Bête Meure (1969), La Rupture (1970), Just Before Nightfall (1971) and Les Noces Rouges (1973).

Best of all was Le Boucher (1970), about the love between a schoolteacher and the village butcher with a compulsion to murder young women. It had a depth and emotional commitment new in Chabrol's work, prompting Le Figaro, in a moment of unaccustomed hyperbole, to call it the best French film since the Liberation. Many of these films had a thriller structure reminiscent of Hitchcock and macabre touches that would not have been out of place in his work, such as the scene in Le Boucher when a murder is signalled by the victim's blood dripping from an overhanging rock into a schoolgirl's sandwich.

In general, Chabrol avoided what he called "big subjects", preferring little themes to which he could give the big treatment. When he departed from this principle, the results were usually unfortunate, as in Ten Days' Wonder (1972), an Ellery Queen story with Orson Welles and Anthony Perkins that he inflated into a study of comparative religion; and Nada (1974), an ill-considered foray into the field of politics and international terrorism. Of Ten Days' Wonder it was said that he let his belly rule his brain, accepting the assignment only because it could be shot in Alsace, where he was eager to sample the cuisine.

Chabrol never recaptured the consistency of his best years but remained a prolific director, making around 60 films in all. Occasional high spots stood out from the many pedestrian works he undertook merely to keep in practice, among which was a shoddy remake of Fritz Lang's Dr Mabuse called Dr M (1987). It was doubly disappointing in that Chabrol had named Lang, along with two other German directors, Ernst Lubitsch and FW Murnau, as one of the formative influences on his work. He was under no illusions about these films and cheerfully nominated one of them, The Twist (1976), with Ann-Margret and Bruce Dern, as the second-worst film ever made.

Some of his best work in later years was with the actress Isabelle Huppert, whom he first directed in Violette Nozière (1978), the story of a notorious murderess who poisoned her family. For Chabrol she also played the last woman to be guillotined in France (for carrying out abortions) in Une Affaire de Femmes (1988); the title role in a version of Madame Bovary (1991); and the village postmistress with a shady past in La Cérémonie (1995), an adaptation of a Ruth Rendell thriller.

Partially successful, too, was L'Enfer (1994), with Emmanuelle Béart, based on a 30-year-old script that the veteran film-maker Henri-Georges Clouzot had had to abandon when he suffered a heart attack in 1964.

Chabrol was also active in television, for which he made two Henry James short stories in 1973; four episodes of a series called Histoires Insolites in 1974; and, in 1993, an ambitious documentary about occupied France, The Eye of Vichy.

With the beginning of the new century, Chabrol seemed to regain his earlier form, making a number of films which were quite well-received. They included Merci pour le Chocolat (2000); The Bridesmaid (2004); and The Comedy of Power (2006). A Girl Cut in Two (2007) turned on a rich family's attempt to freeze out their son's widow. His last film was Bellamy (2009), with Gerard Depardieu.

He played cameo parts in numerous films, both his own and his friends', beginning with Jacques Rivette's short Le Coup du Berger (1956). His most fully-rounded role was as a parody of himself, opposite his wife, Stéphane Audran, in a 20-minute short, La Muette, that he contributed to the portmanteau picture Six in Paris (1966). They played gluttonous parents whose constant bickering leads to a sticky end when their small daughter plugs her ears against the din and subsequently fails to hear their cries for help.

Chabrol was married three times: to Agnès Goute, Colette Dacheville (the actress Stéphane Audran) and Aurore Pajot. He had four children.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/culture-obituaries/film-obituaries/7997567/Claude-Chabrol.html