Claude Chabrol is one of the most significant filmmakers of post-war French cinema, with a career spanning more than 50 years and dozens of features. Yet despite his creative pedigree and playing a key role in the Nouvelle Vague, Chabrol is arguably underrated when considered alongside contemporaries like François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard and Eric Rohmer.
A likely contributing factor is that much of Chabrol’s best work was, in fact, made after the French New Wave had crested and crashed onto the shores of the international film scene.
From the late-60s to the late-70s, Chabrol enjoyed a remarkably productive period where he created a string of thrillers that simmer with tension and violence, barely suppressed beneath a surface of polite sensibility. Chabrol’s recurring target during this decade was French bourgeois society; its excesses, contradictions and moral ephemerality - each were subjected to the filmmaker’s unsparing wit and razor-sharp intelligence.
In a suitably playful and provocative twist, Stéphane Audran – Chabrol’s wife and frequent collaborator during this time – would often appear as a figurehead of Chabrol’s bourgeois satire. The actress would go on to perfect this character type in Luis Buñuel’s The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972).
This season features a handful of films from Chabrol’s creative heyday. His work in this period invited comparisons with great practitioners of the thriller like Alfred Hitchcock and Patricia Highsmith, and has influenced modern filmmakers such as Bong Joon Ho, Park Chan Wook and, most recently, Andrey Zvyagintsev. These films, however, thoroughly deserved to be experienced on their own terms, and – of course – on the big screen.
Claude Chabrol: Elements of Crime is presented thanks to support from BFI Southbank.
