PARES | Spanish Archives

Identification

Type:

Person

Preferred form:

Chabrol, Claude (1930-2010)Other forms

Dates of existence/Biographical dates:

París (Isla de Francia, Francia) 1930-06-24 - París (Isla de Francia, Francia) 2010-09-12

History:

Claude Chabrol was a French film scriptwriter, director and producer, who belonged to the New Wave movement. Chabrol was a film buff since his childhood; with six years old he watched his first film and he became a regular at the film theatres. A few years later, he discovered his passion for Literature and Theatre, a fact reflected in his films through numerous references to the works of authors he was passionate about: Moliere, Homer, William Shakespeare or Gustave Flaubert.

His marriage with Agnès Marie-Madeleine Goute, and her high economic status, enabled him to focus on collaborating with various magazines writing about cinema. And so he started to write for the magazine Cahiers du Cinéma and his first article was a review about “Singin' in the Rain”. He made an edition of Cahiers du Cinéma with Éric Rohmer about the director Hitchcock with the intention of standing out his genius and originality. It was not until 1956 that he embarked on directing, when he founded the production company AJYM Films, in which many of the directors of the New Wave movement would make their first films, but that would be shut down in 1961.

The main characteristic of Chabrol’s films was the simple plots but complex characters, and he gave much importance to the narrative structure. To connect with the audience he used various resorts such as exchange glances and non-verbal language between actors, the use of panoramic shots, travelling, framing… His benchmarks concerning directors were Alfred Hitchcock, Fritz Lang and Ernst Lubitsch.

Among his most outstanding films we can find: “La Cérémonie” (1995), “This Man Must Die” (1969), “The Butcher” (1970) and “Story of Women” (1988).