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French director Claude Chabrol dead

PARIS: French filmmaker Claude Chabrol, who helped start the New Wave movement in the 1950s and created some of the darkest portrayals on the silver screen, died on Sunday aged 80.

Born in Paris on June 24, 1930, Mr. Chabrol became famous for his sombre portrayals of French provincial bourgeois life. Along with Francois Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard, he was an icon of French New Wave cinema.

Mr. Chabrol authored dozens of films, from his first work, Le Beau Serge, made in 1958 and considered the first film of the New Wave, to his last film, Bellamy, released last year. As part of the New Wave movement, Mr. Chabrol joined a group of young directors, including Eric Rohmer and Jacques Rivette, who rejected classical Hollywood cinema. Their work was steeped in the political and social upheavals of the time, and experimented with new techniques in lighting, editing and narrative — anything that would break with conservative filmmaking practice.

“I knew there would be difficulties, and sometimes I went quite far, but in the end I'm fairly happy, because more than four-fifths of the films I made correspond more or less with what I wanted to do,” he told AFP in 2009. — AFP

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