Chabrol, Claude (1930-2010), was a French movie director, producer, scriptwriter, and film critic. His 1958 motion picture Le Beau Serge (Handsome Serge) is considered the first film of the Nouvelle Vague (New Wave) movement in the French cinema. The New Wave was an experimental approach that stressed a freer, more personal style of filmmaking among directors. See Motion picture (The New Wave in France) .
Chabrol was born in Paris on June 24, 1930. He was educated at the School of Political Science at the University of Paris. Chabrol entered the movie industry in the early 1950’s as a film critic and reviewer, notably for the influential magazine Cahiers du Cinema from 1953 to 1957. In 1955, he joined the Paris office of the United States movie company Twentieth Century Fox as a public relations officer. He left after a year and, with a fellow critic, Eric Rohmer, wrote Hitchcock (1957), a biography of the movie director Alfred Hitchcock.
Chabrol used money from a legacy to set up his own movie production company and made his first film, Le Beau Serge. This movie is a bleak study of French youth set in a French village. It was followed by Les Cousins (The Cousins, 1959), about a tragic romantic triangle involving three students in Paris. His third movie, A Double Tour (Double Twist, 1960), was the first of several commercially and critically successful murder thrillers.
A string of box-office failures forced Chabrol into producing mediocre spy movies. However, he got back into his stride with Les Biches (The Does, also known as Bad Girls and The Girlfriends,1968), a film dealing with lesbianism and murder, which was an international success. Other critical successes included Le Scandale (The Champagne Murders, 1967), La femme infidele (The Unfaithful Wife, 1968), Que la bete meure (This Man Must Die, 1969), and Le Boucher (The Butcher, 1970).
Chabrol’s later movies include Violette Noziere (1978), Une Affaire de femmes (Story of Women, 1988), Madame Bovary (1991), La Cérémonie (1995), and A Girl Cut in Two (2007). Chabrol died on Sept. 12, 2010.
