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  1. Culture
13 September 2010updated 27 Sep 2015 4:05am

Claude Chabrol, 1930-2010

An interview with one of the heroes of the New Wave.

By Jonathan Derbyshire

French director Claude Chabrol, one of the pioneers of the nouvelle vague in the 1950s, died yesterday. Tomorrow, our film critic Ryan Gilbey will devote his weekly blog post to a proper assessment of Chabrol’s career. In the meantime, here is a link to an interview Chabrol gave in 1995 to the French film magazine Positif. Here Chabrol is talking about how his film La Cérémonie, which stars Isabelle Huppert, marked a return to politics:

My last political film was Poulet au vinaigre. What I was interested in then was to show the provincial bourgeoisie as starkly as possible, not in too heavy a way, but so that that critique was definitely a feature of the film. Subsequently, I found no particularly stimulating social phenomena to observe. And it is only now, in the past two years, that I am beginning to reconsider. I had a conversation with a young hooligan which left me with a feeling that society was about to explode, or implode rather, because it’s not just a marginal phenomenon. So I decided to make something of this feeling, but not in too precise a documentary way. Just as well, because Mathieu Kassowitz’s La Haine (1995) makes the point much better than I could have done. Our films are related, in that they reflect the beginnings of this explosion. He sees it as an explosion. I see it as an implosion.

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