A obituary from blog.allmovie.com
Claude Chabrol, who passed away on September 12th in Paris, was a uniquely influential figure in French cinema across three generations — along with his older contemporary Eric Rohmer, who passed away earlier this year, he was closely associated with the French “New Wave” of the late 1950s and early 1960s, but exerted an impact on filmmaking (and not simply as a filmmaker) that far transcended national or stylistic boundaries. As a result of his close association with the thriller genre, Chabrol was often compared with English director Alfred Hitchcock, whom he had interviewed extensively (with Truffaut during the making of To Catch A Thief (1955); additionally, in the mid-1950s Chabrol and Rohmer co-authored a pioneering study of Hitchcock’s movies. The parallels were there, especially with Chabrol’s emphasis on the thriller genre, but he had an agenda somewhat different from Hitchcock’s, and occasionally moved out of the genre into other realms.
Chabrol’s first direct contact with cinema was as a young employee of the publicity department at 20th Century-Fox’s French division in the early 1950s, but he soon began establishing himself as a critic at Cahiers du Cinema in the middle of the decade where, alongside Rohmer, Truffaut et al, he designed the foundations of auteurist film theory. After authoring a screenplay for Jacques Rivette’s Le Coup du Berger (1956), he turned to filmmaking with Le Beau Serge (1957) — his first wife, Agnes Goute, was independently wealthy and their marriage allowed him to finance his own production. He followed that debut a year later with Les Cousins (1958), the first of his movies to star Stephane Audran (whom he would marry in 1964, following his divorce from Goute). Those two films have been frequently cited as the first manifestations of the French “New Wave,” which the world would discover in the next two years with Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (1959) and Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless (1960) — Chabrol served as technical advisor on the latter movie, which proved it could still play to sell-out audiences for weeks at a time a half-century later, with its anniversary re-release in 2010. But his influence as a theorist was woven through both movies, and much of what followed in the New Wave across the 1960s.
By that time, Chabrol was enjoying international renown himself, and often referred to as the “Gallic Hitchcock” for his thrillers. Whereas his friend and colleague Rohmer was almost too old, and literary-oriented to be associated in most filmgoers’ minds with the New Wave and such youthful figures as Truffaut and Godard, Chabrol was much more open to commercial projects than most of his colleagues and contemporaries — his admiration for Hollywood’s top professionals extended to the system in which they had made their careers, and so he was perfectly content to apply his talents to projects such as Landru (1963) (which owed a bit in spirit to Charles Chaplin’s Monsieur Verdoux), which co-starred Stephane Audran. His freely professed Communist sympathies (a political profile far more common in France, especially in members of Chabrol’s generation, than it would have been in America or even England) did not prevent him from availing himself of the rewards and exposure that could be achieved by playing the capitalist game — he simply brought that consciousness to many of his plots, which frequently focused on class differences and tensions, and played off of the limitations imposed by France’s postwar social order. His social consciousness was compared by turns to the work of de Balzac, while his sense of humor — often of the black variety — evoked references to Rabelais. In that regard, he was France’s own, but he was more than able to attract the attention of international audiences with as many as half of his movies.
Much like Hitchcock, Chabrol was expert at straddling the highly commercial and the personal in his projects, and he later proved equally adept at moving into television and exploring (and exploiting) the opportunities created by the small-screen, starting in the mid-1970s. Audran, who was married to Chabrol for 16 years, appeared in 25 of his movies, and across that time she became for him, in many ways, what Grace Kelly might have been for Hitchcock had she not retired from filmmaking. The year after his divorce from Audran, he married Aurore Pajot, who had been the script supervisor on his movies starting in 1968. Beginning with Violette (1977), it was Isabelle Huppert who quickly became Chabrol’s most important leading lady, starring in some of his biggest successes, including Madame Bovary (1991) and La Cérémonie (1995). He also aged gracefully into the realm of elder statesman, participating in such extra-curricular activities as serving as a member of the jury at the 2000 Venice Film Festival, while still doing feature films and television work into the new century — his 2008 collaboration with renowned actor Gerard Depardieu, in the police thriller entitled Bellamy, is scheduled for release in America on October 1 of this year. He also frequently appeared on-screen, and remained active as a writer as well into the new century — his credits in the latter capacity, separate from his own movies, include works such as Adrian Lyne’s Unfaithful (2002).
Chabrol’s 71 directorial credits, plus his work as a writer, speak to a career that was impossible to define (or confine) to any stylistic era or approach. He once explained a key part of his strategy of specializing in thrillers, as merely a vehicle for enticing audiences — the thriller was merely a convenient genre with which to pull audiences in, and assure them of something enjoyable, whatever else a movie presented. The latter might have been social criticism, satire, or outright comedy — he was equally adept in those fields, as well as the classics and the high-profile star vehicle.
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