Claude Chabrol (1930–2010) was a founding member of the French New Wave, the group of filmmakers that revolutionized French filmmaking in the late 1950s and early 1960s. One of the most prolific directors of his generation, Chabrol averaged more than one film per year from 1958 until his death in 2010. Among his most influential films, Le Beau Serge, Les Cousins, and Les Bonnes Femmes established his central place within the New Wave canon. In contrast to other filmmakers of the New Wave such as Jean-Luc Godard and Eric Rohmer, Chabrol exhibited simultaneously a desire to create films as works of art and an impulse to produce work that would be commercially successful and accessible to a popular audience. The seventeen interviews in this volume, most of which have been translated into English for the first time, offer new insights into Chabrol’s remarkably wide-ranging filmography, providing a sense of his attitudes and ideas about a number of subjects. Chabrol shares anecdotes about his work with such actors as Isabelle Huppert, Gérard Depardieu, and Jean Yanne, and offers fresh perspectives on other directors including Jean-Luc Godard, Fritz Lang, and Alfred Hitchcock. His mistrust of conventional wisdom often leads him to make pronouncements intended as much to shock as to elucidate, and he frequently questions established ideas and normative attitudes toward moral, ethical, and social behaviors. Chabrol’s intelligence is far-reaching, moving freely between philosophy, politics, psychology, literature, and history, and his iconoclastic spirit, combined with his blend of sarcasm and self-deprecating humor, gives his interviews a tone that hovers between a high moral seriousness and a cynical sense of hilarity in the face of the world’s complexities.

A member of the French New Wave group of filmmakers who first came to prominence at the end of the 1950s, Claude Chabrol has received the least amount of critical and scholarly attention, although he was the more prolific and commercially successful of them all. Jacob Leigh fills this lacuna by focusing on the last nine feature films of Chabrol's career, exploring his imagery, camerawork, use of sound and music, and performances, revealing the stylistic characteristics of his films while identifying the fundamental thematic issues that lie at the heart of his career-length exploration of the relationship between individuals and societies. Key areas of focus includes Chabrol's careful depiction of upper-class settings in films such as La Cérémonie (1995), Merci pour le chocolat (2000) and La Fille coupée en deux (2007) and on what Robin Wood and Michael Walker call 'the beast in man' (1970), the quasi-sympathetic 'id-figures' of which Le Boucher's Popaul is the most celebrated. Chabrol's 'id-figures' inherit the traits of Shadow of a Doubt's Uncle Charlie, Rope's Brandon and Strangers on a Train's Bruno, all three of whom have characteristics of the Nietzsche-quoting psychopath familiar in crime fiction. Additionally, The Late Films of Claude Chabrol considers the influence on Chabrol of a range of significant writers, including Patrick Hamilton, Patricia Highsmith, Charlotte Armstrong and Ruth Rendell.

Examines how Cold War films depicted pertinent issues of American social class and gender

Opera can reveal something fundamental about a film, and film can do the same for an opera, argues Marcia J. Citron. Structured by the categories of Style, Subjectivity, and Desire, this volume advances our understanding of the aesthetics of the opera/film encounter. Case studies of a diverse array of important repertoire including mainstream film, opera-film, and postmodernist pastiche are presented. Citron uses Werner Wolf's theory of intermediality to probe the roles of opera and film when they combine. The book also refines and expands film-music functions, and details the impact of an opera's musical style on the meaning of a film. Drawing on cinematic traditions of Hollywood, France, and Britain, the study explores Coppola's Godfather trilogy, Jewison's Moonstruck, Nichols's Closer, Chabrol's La Cérémonie, Schlesinger's Sunday, Bloody Sunday, Boyd's Aria, and Ponnelle's opera-films.

Studies the unique achievements of Chabrol’s last fourteen years of filmmaking, during which he made nine remarkable films which combine a formally complex and highly self-conscious style with a thematic focus on the opacity of the relationship between human thought and action.

The French New Wave cinema is arguably the most fascinating of all film movements, famous for its exuberance, daring, and avant-garde techniques. A History of the French New Wave Cinema offers a fresh look at the social, economic, and aesthetic mechanisms that shaped French film in the 1950s, as well as detailed studies of the most important New Wave movies of the late 1950s and early 1960s. Richard Neupert first tracks the precursors to New Wave cinema, showing how they provided blueprints for those who would follow. He then demonstrates that it was a core group of critics-turned-directors from the magazine Cahiers du Cinéma—especially François Truffaut, Claude Chabrol, and Jean-Luc Godard—who really revealed that filmmaking was changing forever. Later, their cohorts Eric Rohmer, Jacques Rivette, Jacques Doniol-Valcroze, and Pierre Kast continued in their own unique ways to expand the range and depth of the New Wave. In an exciting new chapter, Neupert explores the subgroup of French film practice known as the Left Bank Group, which included directors such as Alain Resnais and Agnès Varda. With the addition of this new material and an updated conclusion, Neupert presents a comprehensive review of the stunning variety of movies to come out of this important era in filmmaking.