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outrageous thrillers between 1964 and 1967 seemed merely to confirm that he was no auteur but simply a director for hire. Yet his period in the wilderness served to develop his technical skill and his grasp of genres, and led directly to his mature style in the Hélène cycle of 1968-71. None the less, the intellectual press in France, and in particular Cahiers du cinéma, treated even this flowering of Chabrol’s talent with
Claude Chabrol's films break down the dubious critical barrier between art cinema and popular cinema. Rejecting the avant-garde and the experimental, Chabrol chooses to work within the confines of established genres. He has in fact filmed farce, melodrama, fantasy, war films, spy films and glossy literary adaptations. Chabrol has excellent new-wave credentials and is in some ways a representative figure for this innovative film movement in French cinema. For the small budget of 32 million old francs, he was able to shoot Le Beau Serge over nine weeks in the winter of 1957/8 and film it in what was essentially his home village. Chabrol has known periods of great success (the launching of the new wave in 1958, the superb Hélène cycle of the late 1960s, including his most famous film Le Boucher for his return to form in the 1990s). He also has had periods of inactivity and failure. His depiction of the middle classes usually concentrates on the family. Le Cri du hibou begins as Masques ends, with a framed image from which the camera slowly tracks back to reveal the presence of a spectator. Given that in Chabrol's cinema women are often lacking in financial or social power, there are limits to the ways in which they can either define themselves or escape their situation. This is spelled out most clearly in Les Bonnes Femmes, where the potential escape routes are sex, marriage into the bourgeoisie, a career, romance or death.
and the ‘pompidolien’ bourgeoisie, 2 the perennial popularity of the thriller, the tension between television and cinema, the decline of Marxism. Chabrol has known periods of great success (the launching of the new wave in 1958, the superb Hélène cycle of the late 1960s – including his most famous film Le Boucher – his return to form in the 1990s), and also periods of inactivity and failure (a year in the early 1960s
Chabrol’s depiction of the middle classes usually concentrates on the family. The rituals of the bourgeois household, above all those of the dinner table, are the focus for his dissection of manners and morals in A double tour (1959), La Muette (1965), La Femme infidèle (1968) and Que la bête meur e (1969). If the Hélène cycle as a whole tends to balance satire with idealisation, La Muette
Parisian student returning to his provincial roots. The clash of personalities between François (Jean-Claude Brialy), the convalescent student returning from Paris, and his old friend Serge (Gérard Blain), a local boy who has stayed in the village, stuck in the rut of poverty and alcoholism, also heralds the power struggles between the Charles and Paul characters that were to appear in Les Cousins and again in the Hélène cycle
seems that Chabrol chooses more and more to base his films on stories of women because he shares the traditional (male) view that they are more enigmatic than men. But aside from the Hélène cycle – in which Stéphane Audran as Hélène is a personification (half satirical, half idealised) of the bourgeoisie – Chabrol does not use his female characters to represent abstracts or to symbolise absolutes; they remain socially and
political with the personal, but that does not prevent their actions – like those of the Papin sisters – from being represented or interpreted as class war. In contrast with the bourgeois families of La Muette, Les Noces rouges and Folies bourgeoises, the Lelièvres are not subjected to ridicule by means of farce. Nor are they subjected to the half-idealised, half-satirical perspective of the Hélène cycle
much of the sixties Chabrol had to work on formula thrillers, and his subsequent work is dependent on the Hitchcockian models of voyeurism, tight plotting and suspense, commercial generic elements which were absent from Les bonnes femmes . The ‘Hélène cycle’ of the late sixties, featuring Chabrol’s wife Stéphane Audran, included in 1969 his most famous film Le Boucher (see chapter 2 ). For the next
semi-autobiographical Antoine Doinel cycle captures the wayward character played by Jean-Pierre Léaud at five stages in life, from his troubled adolescence in Les 400 coups (1959) to his postdivorce malaise in the wistful L’Amour en fuite (1978); such was also the case of Chabrol, who at the turn of the 1970s brought actress (and spouse) Stéphane Audran to the screen in the four-part ‘Hélène cycle’ on changing sexual