A founding member of the French New Wave, Claude Chabrol began, like his contemporaries Truffaut, Godard, and Rohmer, as a critic for Cahiers du Cinema; unlike his more rigorously intellectual colleagues, however, he embraced genre filmmaking, specifically suspense films (“I love murder,” he said). Chabrol's career as a critic peaked with the 1957 publication (with Rohmer) of a pioneering study of Alfred Hitchcock; he turned to filmmaking a year later, beginning a cinematic career that could arguably be described as a continuing study-and continuation-of Hitchcock.
Like Hitchcock, Chabrol is the consummate craftsman; his films flow with the ease and assurance of someone who understands the power of cinema to manipulate emotion, while simultaneously embracing-and winking at-such power. “I am a farceur,” he once admitted. “You have to avoid taking yourself too seriously.” Unlike Hitchcock, though, Chabrol hits harder, with a steely condemnation of bourgeois values and a weighty moral resonance in his tales of infidelity, suspense, and murder. In a use of genre similar to his other great influence, Fritz Lang, “the stories he chooses become the frameworks for clear-eyed subtle explorations of guilt, innocence, and accountability,” wrote Stephen Holden in the New York Times.
Chabrol passed away in September, aged eighty, having made over sixty films. We present a generous sampling of his work, in conjunction with some of Hitchcock's finest; two “masters of suspense,” together at last.