CLAUDE CHABROL, the celebrated French film director and a founding father of the Nouvelle Vague movement, has died aged 80.
Christophe Girard, the deputy mayor of Paris, announced the filmmaker's death this morning, saying: "[Chabrol] was a colossal French director: free-minded, impertinent, political and loquacious. Thank you, Claude Chabrol, thank you for the cinema." A compatriot of greats such as François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard, Chabrol rose to acclaim in the late 1950s after the release of Le Beau Serge, which was widely considered to have triggered the New Wave of innovative French cinema.
He went on to become one of Europe's most prolific directors, turning out more than 80 films for the cinema and television. In the late 1960s and 1970s, he established himself as a master of the psychologically explosive suspense thriller with works such as The Butcherand The Unfaithful Wife. The existence of these tense dramas depended largely on a strict set of social codes, a strong sense of order and a buttoned-up bourgeois society within which the idea of crime is unthinkable.
From 1978 onwards, Chabrol's collaborations with the young actor Isabelle Huppert proved hugely successful, with both gaining critical acclaim for films including Violette Noziere, about a young murderess; Story of Women, about a Vichy-era abortionist; and Madame Bovary, an adaptation of Gustave Flaubert's novel of adultery and bourgeois oppression in 19th-century Normandy.
Spurred on by an apparently insatiable love of film-making, Chabrol kept going until the end, with a murder mystery film, Bellamy, appearing in French cinemas last year.
A playful and approachable character in his appearances before the media, he was down to earth about his achievements, admitting in retrospect that some of his efforts had fallen flat.
"It is not necessary that each of my films is considered perfect. But I would like my work as a whole to give a very specific idea of my own vision of things." ( Guardianservice)