Happy Birthday, Claude Chabrol! Born today in 1930 as Claude Henri Jean Chabrol, this French film director was a member of the French New Wave group of filmmakers who first came to prominence at the end of the 1950s.
Chabrol was also one of the most prolific and widely respected of French film directors.
Like his colleagues and contemporaries, Chabrol was a critic for the influential French film magazine Cahiers du Cinéma before beginning his career as a filmmaker. His early features helped to establish the movement as a vital new force in cinema.
Chabrol's contemporaries included important figures of the Nouvelle Vague (or French New Wave), being French-Swiss film director, screenwriter and film critic Jean-Luc Godard, French film director, screenwriter, producer, actor, and film critic François Truffaut.
Others included French film director, film critic, journalist, novelist, screenwriter, and teacher. Éric Rohmer and French film director and film critic Jacques Rivette.
Chabrol's career began with the 1958 French black and white drama/world cinema film 'La Beau Serge' ('Handsome Serge').
It had been cited as the first product of the Nouvelle Vague film movement, and had. The film had also been inspired by Alfred Hitchcock's 1943 American black and white psychological thriller noir/mystery film 'Shadow of a Doubt'.
His thrillers became something of a trademark for Chabrol, with an approach characterized by a distanced objectivity.
This is especially apparent in his handful of notable films from the late 1960s and early 1970s.
These include the 1968 French-Italian Eastmancolor drama/erotic film 'Les Biches' ('The Does'), his 1969 French Eastmancolor crime thriller/drama film 'La Femme Infidèle' ('The Unfaithful Wife') and his 1970 French Eastmancolor thriller/psychological thriller film 'Le Boucher' ('The Butcher').
All of these features starred French film and television actress Stéphane Audran, who was his wife at the time.
Of the films mentioned above, Chabrol is best known for writing and directing 'Le Boucher', and is the first film of which he is best known.
Set in the quiet rural French village of Trémolat on the river Dordogne school headmistress Helene (Stéphane Audran) meets local butcher Paul Thomas (known as Popaul) (Jean Yanne) at a wedding.
Though the reserved Helene is still traumatized by the failure of a past relationship, Popaul's boyish charm draws her out of her shell.
However, shortly after their relationship begins, a string of murders surrounds the village. When Helene recognizes an item she had given Popaul near one of the crime scenes, she begins to suspect that he may be the murderer.
In the late 1970s, Chabrol cast Isabella Huppert as the lead in his 1978 French drama/crime film 'Violette Nozière'. The film also co-starred Audran.
In the 1980s, the second film of which Chabrol is best known for co-writing and directing is the 1988 French drama/romance film 'Une affaire de femmes' ('Story of Women').
When her loutish husband Paul (François Cluzet), away at a labor camp during World War II, Marie Latour (Isabelle Huppert), struggles to support her two children.
After helping a neighbor with an abortion, Marie realizes that she can improve her family's finances by assisting other women who are trying to terminate unwelcome pregnancies.
Paul returns home to find he has no place in his wife's new life -- so out of jealousy, after the war ends he reports her wartime activities to the authorities.
In the 1990s, on the strength of that effort in 'Violette Nozière', Chabrol and Huppert went on to do other features together.
This included the successful 1991 French romance/drama film 'Madame Bovary' and the 1995 French drama/ crime film 'La Cérémonie' ('The Ceremony', also known as 'A Judgement in Stone').
English film critic and author John Russell Taylor has stated that "there are few directors whose films are more difficult to explain or evoke on paper, if only because so much of the overall effect turns on Chabrol's sheer hedonistic relish for the medium...Some of his films become almost private jokes, made to amuse himself."
American film critic, author, publisher, and educator James Monaco has called Chabrol "the craftsman par excellence of the New Wave, and his variations upon a theme give us an understanding of the explicitness and precision of the language of the film that we don't get from the more varied experiments in genre of Truffaut or Godard."
According to Chabrol's personal life had had been married three times. Most notably, this was to his second wife Stéphane Audran. Upon marrying in 1964, they were divorced in 1980. Chabrol's three children survive him.
Sometimes characterized as a "mainstream" French New Wave director, Chabrol remained prolific and popular throughout his half-century career.
Sometimes characterized as a "mainstream" New Wave director, Chabrol remained prolific and popular throughout his half-century career.
Known as the ‘French Hitchcock’, Chabrol was the most prolific of the French New Wave directors, leaving behind a huge number of icily brilliant thrillers.
Chabrol had been active from 1956–2010.
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