Claude Chabrol dead at 80

One of the founders of the New Wave movement in French film of the late 1950s and early 1960s, Claude Chabrol, has died. he was eighty.
After working for the French film magazine Cahiers Du Cinema, Chabrol joined his fellow critics – including François Truffaut, Jean Luc Godard and Eric Rohmer – in making films.
As the French New Wave, the group shunned the Hollywood system and employed more liberated techniques of film-making, exploring more political and social themes.
In a prolific career, Chabrol authored more than sixty films, from Le Beau Serge in 1958 to Bellamy, which was released in France last year.
The middle years of his career saw him make a number of psychological thrillers, such as Le Boucher, Merci Pour Le Chocolat and La Cérémonie, which gave him a reputation of being a French Hitchcock.
The French President Nicolas Sarkozy described Chabrol as “a great author and a great film-maker,” and compared him to the nineteenth century novelist Honore de Balzac, who was seen as an inspiration for the New Wave film-makers.

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