Photo: Jeanloup Sieff, 1959.
Claude Chabrol died today:
“Mr. Chabrol was a young film critic working for the magazine Les Cahiers du Cinema alongside François Truffaut, Jacques Rivette, Eric Rohmer and Jean-Luc Godard when a family inheritance allowed him to form his own production company. In 1956, he produced and wrote the screenplay for the short film “Le Coup de Berger,” which was directed by Mr. Rivette, then used his own money to finance “Le Beau Serge” (1957).
“Le Beau Serge” and a subsequent Chabrol film, “Les Cousins” (1958), are often cited as the opening volley of the French New Wave.
Le Beau Serge” (“Handsome Serge”) is an acerbic study of a smug Parisian, François (Jean-Claude Brialy), who returns to the provincial village of his youth and attempts to rescue his former best friend, Serge (Gérard Blain), from a seemingly pointless, working-class existence. The film established the piercing antibourgeois themes that would shape much of the rest of Mr. Chabrol’s career. It also demonstrated, to a professionally closed and aesthetically conservative French film industry, that an outsider could break into the system and make a commercially successful, critically acclaimed film.
This lesson was not lost on his Cahiers colleagues. Mr. Truffaut followed Mr. Chabrol’s example with “The 400 Blows”(1959) and Mr. Godard with “Breathless” (1960), both of which became internationally successful and established La Nouvelle Vague (The New Wave) as a phenomenon.”
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