Who is he?
French filmmaker, actor, producer and screenwriter who directed over 50 feature films and numerous television series between his debut in 1958 and his death in 2010. Like other prominent French New Wave filmmakers, Chabrol too was a critic for the celebrated film magazine Cahiers du Cinema before he started making pictures. His second movie, The Cousins , fetched him the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival in 1959.
What are his films about?
Themes
The influence of Alfred Hitchcock on Chabrol has been well noted. But equally formative are the films of Fritz Lang, with whom Chabrol shares an obsession in the thriller genre. Chabrol’s most celebrated films are set in suburban zones or countryside, typically in a bourgeois milieu, whose security and complacency goes for a toss with the sudden occurrence of a crime. As in Lang’s movies, characters, usually financially and socially secure, go into an inexplicable spiral of self-destruction, which translates to a spontaneous relinquishing of their middle-class status.
Style
Chabrol’s early films, with their location shooting, handheld camera work, sensual editing and improvised performances, are fine examples of the cinéma vérité style of filmmaking that was being mastered in France in the late 1950s. His later work tends more towards a studio style of filmmaking, with its classical approach to staging, acting and editing. Muted colour palettes, slow pan shots and zooms, a cool and distanced attitude to thrill-building and a penchant for objects as crucial narrative elements are a few of the most salient features of Chabrol’s work.
Why is he of interest?
Chabrol has been characterised as the most mainstream of the French New Wave filmmakers, given that his films engage with established film genres and offer familiar pleasures to the audience, albeit in a stylised and personally-inflected form. It is perhaps this life-long faith in cinema as a popular medium — a faith that some of his more acclaimed peers had forgone — that sets him apart.
Where to discover him?
This Man Must Die (1969) centres on a widower who sets out to avenge the death of his son in a hit-and-run case. Chabrol’s slow-burning film starts out as a portrait of the complicated, relentless and seemingly futile ways people seek to find meaning to their loss before problematising the idea of revenge itself, in which the very person the protagonist seeks to destroy offers a possibility to start his life anew.
