R.I.P Claude Chabrol

chabrol

Claude Chabrol dies

He was 80 years old

Le Beau Serge, Chabrol’s 1959 breakthrough film produced with his wife’s inheritance, is often cited as the first feature film of the New Wave. The film tackled existential themes including the isolation and absurdity of modern life and the middle-class obsession with appearances.
“We have too often the tendency to emphasize the tragic side of life, but I look at the funny side. I believe strongly in human nature,” Chabrol said in a 2005 interview.

Guardian UK Obit

The Master of free- floating anxiety

it is, like so many of his pictures, a thriller that — calmly, deliberately and with exquisite perversity — refuses to thrill. He prefers on the whole to unsettle, to disorient, to unnerve and to create the sort of apprehension that cannot finally be resolved. Although he has sometimes been thought of as a kind of Gallic Hitchcock, Mr. Chabrol isn’t exactly a master of suspense: the stimulation of unbearable, gut-clutching fear has never been a significant part of his repertory. He’s more like a master of free-floating anxiety.

He had a long productive career with unique vision and style, showing the provincial life and ordinary people.
I saw Le Beau Serge and Les Cousins in Tokyo, these two were introduction to C.C. Recently I saw ‘Bridesmaid” I like that film a lot.

First wife :Stéphane Audran

Of all the director-and-star couples in the history of cinema, there was none more prolific than Claude Chabrol and Stéphane Audran, who made 23 films together.

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    Isabelle Huppert (Violette, La Cérémonie, Story of women, Madame Bovary, Merci pour le Chocolat )

    We both (with Chabrol) agreed that it was about someone at once profoundly moving, completely disgusting and entirely pitiable”. This definition seems to fit many of the characters interpreted by Huppert from Violette, through Jeanne in La Cérémonie (A Judgement in Stone, 1995), to Mica in Merci pour le Chocolat (Nightcap, 2000), all of them directed by Chabrol.

  • “Nous vivons une époque où les pizzas arrivent plus vite que la police” – We live in an era where pizzas show up faster than the police

    “There is no new wave, only the sea.”

    “I am a Communist, certainly, but that doesn’t mean I have to make films about the wheat harvest.” (1971 interview with Roger Ebert)

    Update: Bellamy (trailer) will be released in USA, Oct 2010.