Claude Chabrol

Given the subject matter of my last but one post I suppose that I could have headed this effort, "Second in a short series about death," which would have given it a certain filmic quality. Claude Chabrol's death this last week doesn't quite bring the curtain down on the most influential group of directors in European cinema history but it certainly has the fat lady going through her warm-up routine.

Of the magnificent seven: Resnais, Chabrol, Rohmer, Truffaut, Godard, Malle and Rivette, we are now down to three survivors, Alain Resnais, Jean-Luc Godard and Jacques Rivette. Whilst their output has diminished over recent years, and let's be honest here we are talking about men in their eighties and nineties, their influence remains. Nouvelle Vague, the name given to the style of films that emerged in France in the late fifties, had it's cinematic debut with Chabrol's Le Beau Serge.

Nouvelle Vague, or French New Wave cinema, had it's roots planted firmly in the Italian Neorealism of Rossellini and De Sica and it's influence would impact on the careers of Scorsese, De Palma, Coppola and Altman. This is the cinema that could best be summed up by the phrase, "what you see is what you get," overlapping (often improvised) dialogue, short scenes but it also embraced long single takes, ruminations on the absurdity of existence and very often the sense that those involved in the film didn't have a life beyond it, although this could also be turned on its head, for example if you watch Rohmer's Four Seasons only one of the four films (Winter) has what could be called a conventional ending, the other three, like life, are left to meander off beyond the confines of the ninety minute running time.

Chabrol produced one of the masterly works of sixties cinema when, in 1969, he directed his second wife and muse Stephane Audran in Le Boucher. Le Boucher nods firmly in the direction of Hitchcock with its subtle blend of murder and black comedy whilst at the same time retaining a sense of tension as the audience, like Audran's school teacher character, are left unclear which road the story will follow, are we right to suspect Popaul (Audran's character's husband) of the serial murders in the small town where they live or are we being sold a dummy? According to Alfred Hitchcock, Le Boucher was one of only two films he ever saw that he wished he had directed, and given that Chabrol (with Rohmer) had produced what is widely regarded as the best critical analysis of Hitchcock ever written he couldn't have asked for higher praise.

Chabrol wasn't a one film wonder though and his oeuvre covers some sixty films from Le Beau Serge in 1958 through to last years Bellamy, not a film about a frustrated Welsh footballer who continually sells his soul to the highest bidder, but the story of a detective (played by Gerard Depardieu) who discovers a man who has faked his own death.

Chabrol was also responsible for my favourite quote about critics, having been the subject of a number of what could be called personal rather than professional attacks he said, "sometimes you are the pigeon and sometimes you are the statue."