If Jean-Luc Godard appeals to critics because of his extreme interest in politics and film theory, if Franois Truffaut appeals

to the popular audience because of his humanism and sentimentality, it is Claude Chabrolfilm critic, filmmaker, philosopherwhose work consistently offers the opportunity for the most balanced appeal. His partisans find especially notable the subtle tone of Chabrol's cinema: his films are apparently cold and objective portraits of profoundly psychological situations; and yet that coldness never approaches the kind of fashionable cynicism, say, of a Stanley Kubrick, but suggests, rather, something closer to the viewpoint of a god who, with compassion but without sentiment, observes the follies of his creations. Chabrol's work can perhaps best be seen as a cross between the unassuming and popular genre film and the pretentious and elitist art film: Chabrol's films tend to be thrillers with an incredibly selfconscious, self-assured stylethat is, pretentious melodrama, aware of its importance. For some, however, the hybrid character of Chabrol's work is itself a problem: indeed, just as elitist critics sometimes find Chabrol's subject matter beneath them, so too do popular audiences sometimes find Chabrol's style and incredibly slow pace alienating. Chabrol's films are filled with allusions and references to myth (as in La Rupture, which begins with an epigraph from Racine's Phaedra: "What an utter darkness suddenly surrounds me!"). The narratives of his films are developed through a sensuousness of decor, a gradual accumulation of psychological insight, an absolute mastery of camera movement, and the inclusion of objects and imagesbeautiful and evocative, like the river in Le Boucher or the lighthouse in Dirty Handswhich are imbued with symbolic intensity. Like Balzac, whom he admires, Chabrol attempts, within a popular form, to present a portrait of his society in microcosm. Chabrol began his career as a critic for Cahiers du Cinma. With Eric Rohmer, he wrote a groundbreaking book-length study of Alfred Hitchcock, and with his friends (Truffaut, Godard, Rohmer, Jacques Rivette, and others) he attempted to turn topsy-turvy the entire cinematic value system. That their theories of authorship remain today a basic (albeit modified and continuously examined) premise certainly indicates the success of their endeavor. Before long, Chabrol found himself functioning as financial consultant and producer for a variety of films inaugurating the directorial careers of his fellow critics who, like himself, were no longer content merely to theorize.

Chabrol's career can perhaps be divided into five semi-discrete periods: 1) the early personal films, beginning with Le Beau Serge in 1958 and continuing through Landru in 1962; 2) the commercial assignments, beginning with The Tiger Likes Fresh Blood in 1964 and continuing through The Road to Corinth in 1967; 3) the mature cycle of masterpieces, beginning with Les Biches in 1968 and continuing through Wedding in Bloodin 1973, almost all starring his wife Stphane Audran, and produced by Andr Gnovs; 4) the more diverse (and uneven) accumulations of films from 1974 to the mid1980s which have tended neither to garner automatic international release nor to feature Audran in a central role; and 5) the more recent films of higher quality, if sometimes uneven still, produced in the 1980s and 1990s by Marin Karmitz's company MK2 and including a new set of regular collaborators. If Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt, as analyzed by Chabrol and Rohmer, is constructed upon an exchange of guilt, Chabrol's first film, Le Beau Serge, modeled after it, is constructed upon an exchange of redemption. Chabrol followed Le Beau Serge, in which a city-dweller visits a country friend, with Les Cousins, in which a country-dweller visits a city friend. Most notably, Les Cousins offers Chabrol's first "Charles" and "Paul," the names Chabrol would continue to use throughout much of his careerCharles to represent the more serious bourgeois man, Paul the more hedonistic idfigure. A Double tour, Chabrol's first color film, is especially notable for its striking cinematography, its complex narrative structure, and the exuberance of its flamboyant style; it represents Chabrol's first studied attempt to examine and criticize the moral values of the bourgeoisie as well as to dissect the sociopsychological causes of the

Stphane Audran, Chabrol and Jacqueline Sassard filming Les Biches .

violence which inevitably erupts as the social and family structures prove inadequate. Perhaps the most wholly successful film of this period is the infrequently screened L'il du malin, which presents the most typical Chabrol situation: a triangle consisting of a bourgeois married coupleHlne and her stolid husbandand the outsider whose involvement with the couple ultimately leads to violence and tragedy. Here can be found Chabrol's first "Hlne," the recurring beautiful and slightly aloof woman, generally played by Stphane Audran. When these and other personal films failed to ignite the box office, despite often positive critical responses, Chabrol embarked on a series of primarily commercial assignments (such as Marie-Chantal contre le Docteur Kha), during which his career went into a considerable critical eclipse. Today, however, even these fairly inconsequential films seem to reflect a fetching style and some typically quirky Chabrolian concerns. Chabrol's breakthrough occurred in 1968 with the release of Les Biches, an elegant thriller in which an outsider, Paul, disrupts the lesbian relationship between two women. All of Chabrol's films in this period are slow psychological thrillers which tend basically to represent variations upon the same theme: an outsider affecting a central relationship until violence results. In La Femme infidle, one of Chabrol's most self-assured films, the marriage of Hlne and Charles is disrupted when Charles kills Hlne's lover. In the Jansenism Que la bte meure, Charles tracks down the unremittingly evil hit-and-run killer of his young son, and while doing so disrupts the relationship between the killer, Paul, and his sister-in-law Hlne. In Le Boucher, the butcher Popaul, who is perhaps a homicidal killer, attempts a relationship with a cool and frigid schoolteacher, Hlne, who has displaced her sexual energies onto her teaching of her young pupils, particularly onto one who is conspicuously given the name Charles.

Chabrol (seated) and cast while filming La Rupture. Standing left to right: producer Andr Gnovs, Annie Cordy, Mario David, Jean-Pierre Cassel, Stphane Audran, Michel Duchaussoy and Jean Carmet. .

In the extravagantly expressive La Rupture, the outsider Paul attempts a plot against Hlne in order to secure a better divorce settlement, desired by the rich parents of her husband Charles, who has turned to drug addiction to escape his repressive bourgeois existence. In Juste avant la nuit, it is Charles who has taken a lover, and Charles's wife Hlne who must ultimately resort to an act of calculated violence in order to keep the bourgeois surface intact. In the detective variation Ten Days' Wonder, the relationship between Charles and Hlne is disrupted by the intervention of a character named Tho (Theos, representing God), whose false image must be unmasked by the outsider Paul. And in Wedding in Blood, based on factual material, it is the wife and her lover who team together to plot against her husband. Jean Renoir said that all great directors make the same film over and over; perhaps no one has taken this dictum as seriously as Chabrol; indeed, all these films represent a kind of formal geometry as Charles, Hlne, and Paul play out their fated roles in a universe strongly influenced by Fritz Lang, the structures of their bourgeois existence unable to contain their previously repressed passions. Noteworthy too is the consistency of collaboration on these films: usually with Stphane Audran, Michel Bouquet, and Jean Yanne as

performers; Jean Rabier as cinematographer; Paul Ggauff as coscriptwriter; Andr Gnovs as producer; Guy Littaye as art director; Pierre Jansen as composer; Jacques Gaillard as editor; Guy Chichignoud on sound. In the late 1970s and 1980s, Chabrol has increasingly explored different kinds of financing, making television films as well as international co-productions. Some of these interesting films seem quite unusual from what he has attempted before, perhaps the most surprising being Le Cheval d'orgueil, an ethnographic drama chronicling the simplicity and terrible harshness of peasant life in Brittany prior to World War I with a straightforwardness and lack of sentimentality which is often riveting. Indeed, the film seems so different from much of Chabrol's work that it forces a kind of reevaluation of his career, making him seem less an emulator of Hitchcock and more an emulator of Balzac, attempting to create his own Comdie humaine in a panoramic account of the society about him. Meanwhile, without his regular collaborators, most notably Stphane Audran, Chabrol has had to establish a new "team"now including his son, Matthieu Chabrol, as composer replacing the superior Pierre Jansen. Although the series of films directed for producer Marin Karmitz seems laudable and superior to Chabrol's non-Karmitz films of the 1980s and 1990s, with three exceptions they do not match the unity or quality of Chabrol's earlier masterpieces. One of the exceptions is Une Affaire des femmes, starring Isabelle Huppert (who had previously starred in Violette Nozire). The story of an abortionist who ends up the last female guillotined in France (by the Vichy government), Une Affaire des femmes, unlike the majority of Chabrol's recent films, received international distribution as well as a variety of awards and critical recognition. Chabrol's achievement here is extraordinary: offering a complex three-dimensional portrait of a woman who is not really very likeable,Une Affaire des femmes turns out, by its end, to be the most fair, progressive, passionate film ever made about abortion, dissecting the sexual politics of the "crime" without ever resorting to polemics; and Chabrol's unswerving gaze becomes the regard of an all-knowing God. Madame Bovary, again with Huppert, is perhaps one notch below in quality: but is it surprising that Chabrol turns Madame Bovary into one of his tragic bourgeois love triangles, only this time with the protagonist named Emma, rather than Hlne?

. Also impressiveand perhaps Chabrol's last masterpieceis the 1995 film La Crmonie, again with Huppert. Released several years after the fall of the Soviet Union and its Eastern European satellites, La Crmonie (which was based on the thriller A Judgement in Stone written by Ruth Rendell) was characterized by its director as "the last Marxist film" and presents a polite, likable, stylish, bourgeois French family who is ultimately dispatched by the help. That those who are supposed to provide service should instead gradually institute chaos and revolution within a well-appointed home redolent of privilege and manners, creates an atmosphere of slowly sustaining tension and violent inevitability; that " la crmonie" is also the French term for the ritual of the guillotine makes Chabrol's sly ideological point all the clearer. Notably, La Crmonie was moderately successful in the United States (unusual for Chabrol), winning significant box office as well as the best foreign film citation from the National Society of Film Critics. The success of Une Affaire des femmes, Madame Bovary, and La Crmonie, as well as the earlier Violette Nozire (all four starring Isabelle Huppert), may indicate that Chabrol's filmscold as an inherent result of the

director's personality and formal interestsmay absolutely require an extraordinary, expressive female presence in order to contribute a human, empathic dimensionelse they seem slow, tedious exercises. Clearly, Stphane Audran's contributions to Chabrol's earlier masterpiecesboth as fellow artist and musemay have been seriously underestimated. More typical of Chabrol's recent career are films like Les Fantmes du Chapelier, Poulet au vinaigre, Inspecteur Lavardin, Masques, Le cri du hibou, and Rien ne va plus, which, though worthy of note, by no means measure up to Chabrol's greatest and therefore disappoint. What becomes indisputably clear is that Chabrol is one of the most uneven great directors; and without a producer like Andr Gnovs and forceful, talented collaborators on Chabrol's wavelength, Chabrol can sometimes make bad or very odd movies. The 1976 Folies bourgeoises, for instance, is all but unwatchable, and whileDocteur M and Betty may have interesting concepts, one is a dreary reinterpretation of Fritz Lang, and the other a lifeless adaptation of a Simenon novel, containing a wooden performance by Marie Trintignant. L'enfer (directed in 1994) is certainly better, if still minor a smoldering tale of growing jealousy based on the unproduced script of a master director with a somewhat kindred soul, HenriGeorges Clouzot. Nevertheless, the true cinephile loves Chabrol despite his failuresbecause in the midst of his overprodigious output, he can change gears and make a fascinating documentary, such as his 1993 L'il de Vichy (which compiles French film propaganda in service of the Nazi cause), or can surprise everyone with a major, narrative film of startling ideas and unity, such as his 1995 La Crmonie, suddenly again at the very top of his form, a New Wave exemplar for filmmakers everywhere. One hopes for at least one more definitive Claude Chabrol masterpiece.
'I love murder' ... Claude Chabrol at the Place des Vosges, Paris. Photograph: Peter Lennon The film director Claude Chabrol, who has died aged 80, created the first ripple of the French new wave with his first feature, Le Beau Serge (1958). Unlike some of his other critic colleagues on the influential journal Cahiers du Cinma, who also became filmmakers, Chabrol was perfectly happy in the mainstream. Along with Jean-Luc Godard, Franois Truffaut, Eric Rohmer and Jacques Rivette, he paid serious attention to Hollywood studio contract directors who retained their artistic personalities through good and bad films, thus formulating what came to be known as the "auteur theory". In 1957, he and Rohmer wrote a short book on Alfred Hitchcock, whom they saw as a Catholic moralist. Hitchcock's black humour and fascination with guilt pervades the majority of Chabrol's films, most of which have murder at their heart. However, although Chabrol's thematic allegiance to Hitchcock remained intact, his stylistic mastery came close to matching the magnificently bleak geometry of Fritz Lang, another mentor.

The prolific Chabrol he made more than 60 films over 50 years rang endless changes on the theme of infidelity leading to murder. His dissections of bourgeois marriage were spiced up by the presence of Stphane Audran, his wife from 1964 to 1980, who played adulterous and/or betrayed wives in almost all of their films together, making it one of the most captivating husband-wife teams in all cinema. After their divorce, Chabrol explained: "My rapport with Stphane as an actress is more agreeable now than when we were married. When you spend your days and nights with your wife and then you look through the camera and see her again, it's just too much." Marriage, in Chabrol's films, must be defended by betrayed bourgeois spouses at any cost. But whatever is seething beneath the surface guilt, jealousy or crime the niceties of life must continue. In his ironic black comedies, large meals at home or in a restaurant are orchestrated into the action. For example, the two meals in La Femme Infidle (The Unfaithful Wife, 1968) pointedly show the shift in the couple's relationship and the child's awareness of it. "The only love that can really exist in the bourgeois family is the love of parents for their children," Chabrol said. "I'm not against marriage or the family, only the bourgeois family." Here he resembled Luis Buuel, although Buuel attacked the bourgeoisie from without with a machete; Chabrol attacked them from within with a dinner fork. He uses his "evil eye", like the voyeuristic writer in L'Oeil du Malin (The Third Lover, 1962) who secretly photographs a wife (Audran) with her lover, thus exposing the sham of what appeared to be a happy marriage.

Stphane Audran and Maurice Ronet in Chabrol's La Femme Infidle, 1969 Photograph: Photo12

It amused Chabrol to present himself as a bon vivant, who made films mocking his own way of life. It is significant that in the omnibus film Paris Vu Par (Six in Paris, 1964), Chabrol's episode takes place in the upmarket 16th arrondissement with Chabrol himself playing the self-satisfied pre de famille. Born in Paris into a comfortable middle-class family, he spent his adolescence during the German occupation at the family home in the village of Sardent in the Limousin region of central France. (Chabrol returned there to make Le Beau Serge, in which he depicted it as grey and unattractive.) The period always interested him, as evidenced by his documentary L'Oeil de Vichy (The Eye of Vichy, 1993), which consisted largely of newsreels made between 1940 and 1944 by the Vichy government. Chabrol's aim was to show how people could be brainwashed by images. His parents, both of whom were in the resistance, disapproved of his early interest in films and encouraged him to study medicine and law at the Sorbonne in Paris. However, after

marrying the heiress Agns Goute in 1952 (they divorced 12 years later), he gave up his studies and spent his days watching movies at cin-clubs, where he met Truffaut, Godard, Rivette and Rohmer, who got him to join them on Cahiers du Cinma. In 1957, an inheritance from his wife enabled him to finance his debut feature, and to provide impetus to the French new wave by producing the first features by Rohmer, Rivette and Philippe de Broca, as well as being technical adviser on Godard's Bout de Souffle (Breathless, 1960). Le Beau Serge, a rather schematic Christian metaphor of salvation, ending with a death and a birth, won the best director award at the Locarno film festival and proved it was possible for young directors to make their own films outside the studio system. His personal style emerged in his second film, Les Cousins (1959), with the same two young male leads as Le Beau Serge (Grard Blain and Jean-Claude Brialy). It was a riveting and perverse study of decadent Parisian student life, the first of his many films in which Chabrol presents an opposition between a Dionysian character (often called Paul or Popaul) and an Apollonian one (often called Charles), the defender of the status quo. Although Chabrol identified himself more with the latter, he was obviously attracted by the Paul characters: psychopathic serial killers such as the outwardly benign butcher Popaul (Jean Yanne) in Le Boucher (The Butcher, 1970), the mild hatter (Michel Serrault) in Les Fantmes du Chapelier (The Hatter's Ghost, 1982), Landru (Bluebeard, 1962) and the motorcyclist who brings love and death in Les Bonnes Femmes (1960). The Charles-Paul dichotomy was echoed in the relationship between Chabrol and Paul Ggauff, scriptwriter of more than a dozen of the director's films from Les Cousins onwards. Chabrol was fascinated and repelled by his friend, as demonstrated in Une Partie de Plaisir (A Piece of Pleasure, 1975), in which Ggauff plays a monstrous husband forcibly subjecting his wife (played by his real ex-wife) to his will. Unlike Chabrol, who claimed to be a Marxist "It's visceral. I'm on the left because I'm not on the right. It's that simple" Ggauff was a man of the right, but they shared a taste for the comedy of ill manners. Paul (Brialy) in Les Cousins, wearing a Nazi cap, sadistically wakes up his Jewish friend by shining a torch into his eyes and shouting obscenities in German. Jean-Paul Belmondo disrupts a conventional household in Double Tour (Web of Passion, 1959) by playing inane practical jokes and completely disregarding table manners. Brialy's way of attacking the middle-classes in Les Godelureaux (Wise Guys, 1960) is by throwing stink bombs at an art exhibition and popping a paper bag at a Beethoven concert. "I'm a farceur. You have to avoid taking oneself too seriously," Chabrol once admitted. His early masterpiece Les Bonnes Femmes, about four shopgirls who long to escape their monotonous existence, offered a gallery of grotesques and macabre and farcical humour, but also poetry and tenderness. The mixture of compassion for the girls and contempt for their dreams in this biting comedy created an ironic structure that disturbed the majority of critics when it first appeared. Chabrol's Jekyll and Hyde characters (including his own, hovering between the bourgeois and the anti-bourgeois), and his uneven output, continued to disturb critics. It is easier to come to terms with the consistency of Rohmer's moral tales, Truffaut's efforts to win friends, and Godard's to influence people than Chabrol's ambiguity. But his is a perfectly legible oeuvre. Its stylistic and thematic unity has been achieved by the same team cinematographer Jean Rabier (1960-91), editor Jacques Gaillard (1958-75), composers Pierre Jansen (1960-82) and the director's son Matthieu (1982 onwards), writers Ggauff (1958-76) and Odile Barski (1978-2009), and a faithful company of players supporting Audran and subsequently Isabelle Huppert. Huppert began in the title role in

Violette Nozire (1977), in which she played Audran's promiscuous homicidal teenage daughter. After the hostile reception to Les Bonnes Femmes, Chabrol was forced to make a series of potboilers until he was given the chance to direct Les Biches (The Does, 1968), a cool, callous and witty menage trois tale, which put him firmly back on the "art cinema" circuit. This led to the Hlne cycle, in which Audran as Hlne played a wife: adulterous in La Femme Infidle and Les Noces Rouges (Wedding in Blood, 1973), put upon in La Rupture (1970) and betrayed in Juste Avant la Nuit (Just Before Nightfall, 1971). In the final scene of the latter, Charles, the unfaithful husband (Michel Bouquet), uses the word "juste" 17 times in different ways. Chabrol the moralist recognises the beast in all of us and that justice has more than one interpretation. This was analysed in an equally masterful manner in Que La Bte Meure (The Beast Must Die, 1969) and Le Boucher, both featuring Yanne as, respectively, a nouveau-riche lout who kills a child in a hit-and-run accident, and an emotionally disturbed man who pays court to an equally lonely and repressed schoolmistress (Audran). On the surface a thriller in the Hitchcock mode, like many Chabrol films, Le Boucher is a subtle, compassionate study of sexual frustration. Chabrol's need to constantly make films and his passion for American cinema led him into several misconceived ventures including Madame Bovary with Huppert in 1991 but he continued to build on an already major oeuvre. In some of her best films for the director, Huppert played an abortionist during the occupation in Une Affaire de Femmes (Story of Women, 1988), a dangerous, working-class hellion in the brilliantly unnerving La Crmonie (1995), the bitter centre of Merci Pour le Chocolat (2000), one of Chabrol's tastiest morsels, and a tough investigative magistrate out to nail a corrupt president of a national corporation in L'Ivresse du Pouvoir (A Comedy of Power, 2006). Chabrol's last two films, La Fille Coupe en Deux (A Girl Cut in Two, 2007) and Bellamy (2009), both mordant crime thrillers with a valedictory nod to Hitchcock, showed him to be as spry as ever. For a man who said "I love murder", Chabrol was one of the most benign and witty men one could ever meet. Behind the owlish glasses were eyes that were alternatively penetrating and twinkling. They twinkled most when he was recounting a humorous anecdote, usually accompanied by a hearty laugh. He is survived by his third wife, Aurore, whom he married in the 1980s, and their daughter; by two sons from his first marriage; and by one son from his second marriage.