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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.
’ (Yakir 1979 : 2). Chabrol has in fact filmed farce (Folies bourgeoises), melodrama (La Rupture), fantasy ( Alice ou la dernière fugue ) , war films ( La Ligne de démarcation, Une affaire de femmes), spy films (the Tigre series and La Route de Corinthe) and glossy literary adaptations (Quiet Days in Clichy, Madame Bovary). But the crime thriller is his usual choice of genre, because it allows him to engage the
By the mid-1960s Chabrol had, by his own admission, become the black sheep of the new wave: ‘j’étais la honte, la honte de la famille’ 1 (Biette et al. 1982 : 6). His contribution to the movement, both as producer and director, was eclipsed by the apparently tawdry spectacle of the commercial films that he made after Ophélia. The professionalism and expertise that he lavished on spy films and
: proposals by the dozen that remain buried in my bottom drawer. These proposals include films on my boyhood friends, the golden age of California, a film about my mother, a film about Kabbala in California, a film on Jewish pirates of the Caribbean, the hunt for the true cross of Jesus, and a British spy film. Most of them started from the idea that I had a great story. This is to me what documentary is about: you can tell wonderful stories 5 6 The documentary diaries 1 The author. about fascinating people and their adventures and escapades. And you are the go
an instalment-based, episodic storytelling structure. Indeed, the most spectacular expression of the form, the ‘super-spy’ film, shares certain qualities with the cinematic epic form as defined by Derek Elley in The epic film: myth and history , such as the ‘present[ation] of a national or religious identity in times of change’, and its focus on ‘the exploits of a single central character, surrounded by a broad substratum of secondary characters who react upon him morally’ ( 2014 : 12, 16). Elley argues that this shape, the epic's ‘pyramidal
successfully managing to combine art and commerce. Unlike Truffaut, Chabrol was not yet in this position, but he was to get there by spending the five years after Ophélia making genre films: the (admittedly macabre) period drama Landru (1963), the spy films Le Tigre aime la chair fraîche (1964) and Le Tigre se parfume à la dynamite (1965), the war film La Ligne de démarcation (1966) and so on. In these wilderness years, he
films. Genres parodied include science fiction (Flesh Gordon 1974; Mars Attacks! 1996), horror (Young Frankenstein 1974; Scary Movie 2000; Shaun of the Dead 2004), action films (Airplane! 1980; Hot Shots! 1991; Tropic Thunder 2008), crime (Murder by Death 1973; Loaded Weapon 1 1993; Hot Fuzz 2007) and spy films (Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery 1997; Johnny English
which she shows that Statham works across both fields with ease, demonstrates that in this day and age of mega-budgeted franchises he remains both part and parcel of individualism and collectiveness in equal measure. The second part of this collection then focuses on Statham’s genre output, including thoughts about his role within British filmic traditions such as the heist movie and the spy film, his
somewhat towards the latter half of George W. Bush’s presidency (which extended from January 2001 to January 2009). Signs of somewhat more equivocal elements began to surface in films like Jarhead (2005), Rendition (2007), The Hurt Locker (2008), The Messenger (2009), and Green Zone (2010). In these more recent war films, patriotic glorification of war is muted, at least compared with the earlier part of the contemporary Conglomerate Hollywood era. Nevertheless, several iconic spy films strongly linked with war themes, such as Zero Dark Thirty (2012) and Argo (2012
. These dramas of national security are therefore, more than anywhere else, addressed to the nation in the form of broadcasting’s general public. It should be noted that although there is a vein running throughout the book concerning intersections between UK and US dramas in terms of production, aesthetics and institutions, this is not a central focus of the book, nor are the relations between spy films and television dramas. Furthermore, whilst the main case study Introduction 11 analyses of Chapters 3 and 5, Tinker Tailor and A Very British Coup respectively, are