Claude Chabrol

[HitchcockScholar]

Claude Chabrol died this morning.

IMHO,LE BEAU SERGE was his masterpiece.His book on Alfred Hitchcock too.

[moonfleet]

Oh, it's an awful news !!

[Sgt Sunshine]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-11275980

Very sad news....he also had a small part in the new Serge Gainsbourg biopic...

[moonfleet]

Bernadette Lafont et Jean Poiret in Inspecteur Lavardin











J.C Brialy in Inspecteur Lavardin

[wellendcanons]

A great film director. He will be very sadly missed in the world of film.



R.I.P. Claude Chabrol.



wec

[Nick Dando]

From the Guardian



http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2010/...abrol-obituary



Claude Chabrol obituary

Prolific French film director whose works had murder at their heart



Ronald Bergan

Sunday 12 September 2010 14.00 BST



The film director Claude Chabrol, who has died aged 80, created the first ripple of the French new wave with his first feature, Le Beau Serge (1958). Unlike some of his other critic colleagues on the influential journal Cahiers du Cinéma, who also became film-makers, Chabrol was perfectly happy in the mainstream. Along with Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, Eric Rohmer and Jacques Rivette, he paid serious attention to Hollywood studio contract directors who retained their artistic personalities through good and bad films, thus formulating what came to be known as the "auteur theory".



In 1957, he and Rohmer wrote a short book on Alfred Hitchcock, whom they saw as a Catholic moralist. Hitchcock's black humour and fascination with guilt pervades the majority of Chabrol's films, most of which have murder at their heart. However, although Chabrol's thematic allegiance to Hitchcock remained intact, his stylistic mastery came close to matching the magnificently bleak geometry of Fritz Lang, another mentor.



The prolific Chabrol – he made more than 60 films over 50 years – rang endless changes on the theme of infidelity leading to murder. His dissections of bourgeois marriage were spiced up by the presence of Stéphane Audran, his wife from 1964 to 1980, who played adulterous and/or betrayed wives in almost all of their films together, making it one of the most captivating husband-wife teams in all cinema. After their divorce, Chabrol explained: "My rapport with Stéphane as an actress is more agreeable now than when we were married. When you spend your days and nights with your wife and then you look through the camera and see her again, it's just too much."



Marriage, in Chabrol's films, must be defended by betrayed bourgeois spouses at any cost. But whatever is seething beneath the surface – guilt, jealousy or crime – the niceties of life must continue. In his ironic black comedies, large meals at home or in a restaurant are orchestrated into the action. For example, the two meals in La Femme Infidèle (The Unfaithful Wife, 1968), pointedly show the shift in the couple's relationship and the child's awareness of it. "The only love that can really exist in the bourgeois family is the love of parents for their children," Chabrol said. "I'm not against marriage or the family, only the bourgeois family." Here he resembled Luis Buñuel, although Buñuel attacked the bourgeoisie from without with a machete; Chabrol attacked them from within with a dinner fork. He uses his "evil eye", like the voyeuristic writer in L'Oeil du Malin (The Third Lover, 1962) who secretly photographs a wife (Audran) with her lover, thus exposing the sham of what appeared to be a happy marriage.



It amused Chabrol to present himself as a bon viveur, who makes films mocking his own way of life. It is significant that in the omnibus film Paris Vu Par… (Six in Paris, 1964), Chabrol's episode takes place in the upmarket 16th arrondissement with Chabrol himself playing the self-satisfied père de famille.



Born in Paris into a comfortable middle-class family, he spent his adolescence during the German occupation at the family home in the village of Sardent in the Limousin region of central France. (Chabrol returned there to make Le Beau Serge, in which he depicted it as grey and unattractive.) The period always interested him, as evidenced by his documentary L'Oeil de Vichy (The Eye of Vichy, 1993), which consisted largely of newsreels made between 1940 and 1944 by the Vichy government. Chabrol's aim was to show how people could be brainwashed by images.



His parents, both of whom were in the resistance, disapproved of his early interest in films and encouraged him to study medicine and law at the Sorbonne in Paris. However, after marrying the heiress Agnès Goute in 1952 (they divorced 12 years later), he gave up his studies and spent his days watching movies at ciné clubs, where he met Truffaut, Godard, Rivette and Rohmer, who got him to join them on Cahiers du Cinéma. In 1957, an inheritance from his wife enabled him to finance his debut feature and also provide impetus to the French new wave by producing the first features by Rohmer, Rivette and Philippe de Broca as well as being technical adviser on Godard's À Bout de Souffle (Breathless, 1960).



Le Beau Serge, a rather schematic Christian metaphor of salvation, ending with a death and a birth, won the best director award at the Locarno film festival and proved that it was possible for young directors to make their own films outside the studio system. His personal style emerged in his second film, Les Cousins (1959), with the same two young male leads as Le Beau Serge (Gérard Blain and Jean-Claude Brialy). It was a riveting and perverse study of decadent Parisian student life, the first of his many films in which Chabrol presents an opposition between a Dionysian character (often called Paul or Popaul), and an Apollonian one (often called Charles), the defender of the status quo.



Although Chabrol identified himself more with the latter, he was obviously attracted by the Paul characters: psychopathic serial killers such as the outwardly benign butcher Popaul (Jean Yanne) in Le Boucher (The Butcher, 1970), the mild hatter (Michel Serrault) in Les Fantômes du Chapelier (The Hatter's Ghost, 1982), Landru (Bluebeard, 1962) and the motorcyclist who brings love and death in Les Bonnes Femmes (1960).



The Charles-Paul dichotomy was echoed in the relationship between Chabrol and Paul Gégauff, the scriptwriter of more than a dozen of the director's films from Les Cousins onwards. Chabrol was fascinated and repelled by his friend, as demonstrated in Une Partie de Plaisir (A Piece of Pleasure, 1975), in which Gégauff plays a monstrous husband forcibly subjecting his wife (played by his real ex-wife) to his will.



Unlike Chabrol, who claimed to be a Marxist – "It's visceral. I'm on the left because I'm not on the right. It's that simple" – Gégauff was a man of the right, but they shared a taste for the comedy of ill manners. Paul (Brialy) in Les Cousins, wearing a Nazi cap, sadistically wakes up his Jewish friend by shining a torch into his eyes and shouting obscenities in German. Jean-Paul Belmondo disrupts a conventional household in À Double Tour (Web of Passion, 1959) by playing inane practical jokes and completely disregarding table manners. Brialy's way of attacking the middle-classes in Les Godelureaux (Wise Guys, 1960) is by throwing stink bombs at an art exhibition and popping a paper bag at a Beethoven concert. "I'm a farceur. You have to avoid taking oneself too seriously," Chabrol once admitted.



His early masterpiece Les Bonnes Femmes, about four shopgirls who long to escape their monotonous existence, offered a gallery of grotesques and macabre and farcical humour, but also poetry and tenderness. The mixture of compassion for the girls and contempt for their dreams in this biting comedy created an ironic structure that disturbed the majority of critics when it first appeared. Chabrol's Jekyll and Hyde characters (including his own, hovering between the bourgois and the anti-bourgeois), and his uneven output, continued to disturb critics.



It is easier to come to terms with the consistency of Rohmer's moral tales, Truffaut's efforts to win friends, and Godard's to influence people than Chabrol's ambiguity. But his is a perfectly legible oeuvre. Its stylistic and thematic unity has been achieved by the same team – cinematographer Jean Rabier (1960-1991), editor Jacques Gaillard (1958-1975), composers Pierre Jansen (1960-1982) and the director's son Matthieu (1982 onwards), writers Gégauff and Odile Barski (1978-2009), and a faithful company of players supporting Audran and subsequently Isabelle Huppert. Huppert began in the title role in Violette Nozière (1977), in which she played Audran's promiscuous homicidal teenage daughter.



After the hostile reception to Les Bonnes Femmes, Chabrol was forced to make a series of potboilers until he was given the chance to direct Les Biches (The Does, 1968), a cool, callous and witty ménage Ã* trois tale, which put him firmly back on the "art cinema" circuit. This led to the Hélène cycle, in which Audran as Hélène played a wife; adulterous in La Femme Infidèle and Les Noces Rouges (Wedding in Blood, 1973), put upon in La Rupture (1970) and betrayed in Juste Avant La Nuit (Just Before Nightfall, 1971). In the final scene of the latter, Charles, the unfaithful husband (Michel Bouquet), uses the word "juste" 17 times in different ways. Chabrol the moralist recognises the beast in all of us and that justice has more than one interpretation.



This was analysed in an equally masterful manner in Que La Bête Meure (The Beast Must Die, 1969) and Le Boucher, both featuring Yanne as, respectively, a nouveau-riche lout who kills a child in a hit-and-run accident, and an emotionally disturbed man who pays court to an equally lonely and repressed schoolmistress (Audran). On the surface a thriller in the Hitchcock mode, like many Chabrol films, Le Boucher is a subtle, compassionate study of sexual frustration.



Chabrol's need to constantly make films and his passion for American cinema led him into several misconceived ventures – including Madame Bovary with Huppert in 1991 – but he continued to build on an already major oeuvre. In some of her best films for the director, Huppert played an abortionist during the occupation in Une Affaire de Femmes (Story of Women, 1988), a dangerous, working-class hellion in the brilliantly unnerving La Cérémonie (1995), the bitter centre of Merci Pour le Chocolat (2000), one of Chabrol's tastiest morsels, and a tough investigative magistrate out to nail a corrupt president of a national corporation in L'Ivresse du Pouvoir (A Comedy of Power, 2006).



Chabrol's last two films, La Fille Coupée en Deux (A Girl Cut in Two, 2007) and Bellamy (2009), both mordant crime thrillers with a valedictory nod to Hitchcock, revealed him as spry as ever.



For a man who said "I love murder", Chabrol was one of the most benign and witty men one could ever meet. Behind the owlish glasses were eyes that were alternatively penetrating and twinkling. They twinkled most when he was recounting a humorous anecdote, usually accompanied by a hearty laugh.



He is survived by two sons from his first marriage, one son by his second, and a daughter by Aurore, his widow, whom he married in the 1980s.



• Claude Chabrol, film director, born 24 June 1930; died 12 September 2010

[Nick Dando]

From the BBC



http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-11275980



12 September 2010 Last updated at 16:18



French New Wave film-maker Claude Chabrol dies





One of France's best-known film directors, Claude Chabrol, has died at the age of 80.



Chabrol is best known for 1960s and 70s thrillers such as The Unfaithful Wife, The Butcher and This Man Must Die.



A member of the French New Wave movement, his contemporaries included Eric Rohmer and Jean-Luc Godard.



"With the death of Claude Chabrol, French cinema has lost one of its maestros," said French Prime Minister Francois Fillon in a statement.



French President Nicolas Sarkozy described Chabrol as a "great author and great film-maker".



Paris Mayor Bertrand Delanoe hailed Chabrol as "the inventor of inspired, rich and profoundly human movies".



Thierry Fremaux, who runs the Cannes Film Festival, told French radio station, France Info: "Claude Chabrol is part of our national patrimony - for his films and also for his personality."



Bourgeois repression

Chabrol made more than 50 films during his career.



Les Cousins won the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival in 1959. He returned last year to receive the Golden Camera award for lifetime achievement.



Two of Chabrol's films were nominated for Canne's Palme d'Or - the acclaimed Violette Noziere in 1978, based on the true story of a 19-year-old girl who was convicted of poisoning her father and attempting to kill her mother, and Poulet au Vinaigre in 1985.



The Academie Francaise awarded him the Rene Clair Prize in 2005.



His final film, Bellamy, starring Gerard Depardieu, was released in 2009.



A common theme running through many of Chabrol's films was the tension between bourgeois repression and the expression of violence often simmering beneath.



The BBC's Hugh Schofield, in Paris, says The Butcher - which focuses on a series of murders in a provincial French town - was typical of Chabrol's style.



"It was this style of film... that created the adjective 'Charbrolesque' and invited inevitable comparisons with his great hero, Alfred Hitchcock," he said.



But he added: "Chabrol was never as serious or as deliberately rebellious as his contemporaries."



Three marriages

Born in Paris in 1930, Chabrol was a pharmacology student at the University of Paris before deciding to embark on a career in film.



Toward the end of the 1970s, Chabrol began making television films and ventured into international collaborations.



French actress Isabelle Huppert appeared in several of Chabrol's films, including Violette Noziere and Une Affaire de Femmes in 1988, a movie about an abortionist who becomes the last woman to be guillotined in France. She also starred in 1991's Madame Bovary and the 1995 psychological thriller, La Ceremonie.



Chabrol's second wife, Stephane Audran, also starred in many of his films, including La Femme Infidele, Le Boucher and Juste Avant La Nuit, in 1970.



He married his third wife, Aurore Pajot, in 1983. He is survived by four children.

[moonfleet]

Claude Piéplu, Claude Chabrol, Michel Piccoli on the set de Les Noces Rouges

[Merton Park]

As a big fan of French films, Claude Chabrol was one of the greats, he will be sorely missed. RIP