Claude Chabrol, one of the prime movers of the French New Wave—and one of the most prolific directors in France—died on Sunday, September 12 in Paris, at the age of 80.
Dave Kehr’s obituary is at The New York Times here and David Hudson is collecting remembrances and essays at the Mubi Notebook. Catherine Grant has collected a wealth of resources at Film Studies for Free and you can revisit the essays and appreciations published during the 2009 Claude Chabrol Blogathon hosted by Flickhead.
Parallax View contributed a few pieces for the Blogathon, which we spotlight in remembrance of Chabrol. By way of introduction, I quote Richard T. Jameson’s essay:
Claude Chabrol was one of the “young Turk” critics-turned-filmmakers who constituted the New Wave of French cinema at the turn of the ’60s. At the time, he ran a distant third to the iconoclastic, theoretical Jean-Luc Godard and the warm-hearted, soaringly lyrical François Truffaut. But in the late ’60s, Chabrol emerged as a magisterially accomplished classicist, with an unbroken string of masterpieces that established him as one of the world’s finest directors. He has managed to remain commercially viable—indeed, awesomely prolific—over the ensuing decades, while pursuing his own distinctive, coolly detached vision of life and cinema.
Claude Chabrol – The Classicist by Richard T. Jameson
Claude Chabrol on DVD by Sean Axmaker
La Femme Infidele by Richard T. Jameson
And leave you with a short piece by Chabrol not on any compilation we know of: a commercial for Winston cigarettes directed as an American detective noir, in English, with a Bogie drawl and French subtitles. Salut, M. Chabrol!