Actor with a natural and rebellious style, she helped to launch the French New Wave
Bernadette Lafont, who has died aged 74, could have claimed to be the first female star of the Nouvelle Vague. François Truffaut chose the sensual, dark-haired, 18-year-old Lafont and her new husband, Gérard Blain, to play lovers in the director's first professional film, Les Mistons (The Mischief-Makers, 1957). In this charming short, shot in Nîmes one summer, a group of pubescent boys spy on Lafont and Blain's lovemaking in the fields. Blain and Lafont were also picked to appear in arguably the first French New Wave feature, Claude Chabrol's Le Beau Serge (1958). In this film, about a young man returning to his childhood home, Lafont played the "village vamp".
Lafont's fresh look and performance style crystallised the movement's ideological and cinematic ambitions. Truffaut and his colleagues found mainstream stars inadequate to their needs, using instead unknown and non-professional actors,...
Bernadette Lafont, who has died aged 74, could have claimed to be the first female star of the Nouvelle Vague. François Truffaut chose the sensual, dark-haired, 18-year-old Lafont and her new husband, Gérard Blain, to play lovers in the director's first professional film, Les Mistons (The Mischief-Makers, 1957). In this charming short, shot in Nîmes one summer, a group of pubescent boys spy on Lafont and Blain's lovemaking in the fields. Blain and Lafont were also picked to appear in arguably the first French New Wave feature, Claude Chabrol's Le Beau Serge (1958). In this film, about a young man returning to his childhood home, Lafont played the "village vamp".
Lafont's fresh look and performance style crystallised the movement's ideological and cinematic ambitions. Truffaut and his colleagues found mainstream stars inadequate to their needs, using instead unknown and non-professional actors,...
- 7/26/2013
- by Ronald Bergan
- The Guardian - Film News
The great Claude Chabrol, who passed away at the age of 80 last Sunday, left behind a prodigious body of work. But when I started to think about his posters I realized that, whereas there are indelibly iconic posters for the films of Truffaut and Godard, those for Chabrol come less easily to mind, if at all. In the last twenty or thirty years his keyart has been dominated by photographs of the stars who queued up to work with him, but looking back at his early work I came across a number of superb posters that should be better known. I also discovered that there were plenty of films that I hadn’t even heard of (the man made over fifty features), among them the 1961 revenge drama Les Godelureaux (Wise Guys) and the 1964 spy-thriller Le Tigre Aime la Chair Fraîche (Code Name: Tiger), an attempt to start a French version...
- 9/18/2010
- MUBI
Claude Chabrol is the kind of figure who could be reclaimed after death – there are some films that might look much better years later
Nearly 50 years ago, Claude Chabrol – who died last weekend – wrote an essay, Big Subjects, Little Subjects, in which he set out an attitude to movies and a guide to his own career (which had only just begun). "You can make a film about the French Revolution, or a squabble with the next-door neighbour, the apocalypse of our time or how the barmaid became pregnant, the last hours of a hero of the Resistance, or the inquest on a murdered prostitute. It's all a question of personality."
If you wanted to demonstrate this theory in defence of modesty, you could point to Madame Bovary (1991), where despite the presence of Isabelle Huppert in the title role, Chabrol seems a little overawed or diffident with the material. If only...
Nearly 50 years ago, Claude Chabrol – who died last weekend – wrote an essay, Big Subjects, Little Subjects, in which he set out an attitude to movies and a guide to his own career (which had only just begun). "You can make a film about the French Revolution, or a squabble with the next-door neighbour, the apocalypse of our time or how the barmaid became pregnant, the last hours of a hero of the Resistance, or the inquest on a murdered prostitute. It's all a question of personality."
If you wanted to demonstrate this theory in defence of modesty, you could point to Madame Bovary (1991), where despite the presence of Isabelle Huppert in the title role, Chabrol seems a little overawed or diffident with the material. If only...
- 9/16/2010
- by David Thomson
- The Guardian - Film News
Prolific French director of films with murder at their heart
The film director Claude Chabrol, who has died aged 80, created the first ripple of the French new wave with his first feature, Le Beau Serge (1958). Unlike some of his other critic colleagues on the influential journal Cahiers du Cinéma, who also became film-makers, Chabrol was perfectly happy in the mainstream. Along with Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, Eric Rohmer and Jacques Rivette, he paid serious attention to Hollywood studio contract directors who retained their artistic personalities through good and bad films, thus formulating what came to be known as the "auteur theory".
In 1957, he and Rohmer wrote a short book on Alfred Hitchcock, whom they saw as a Catholic moralist. Hitchcock's black humour and fascination with guilt pervades the majority of Chabrol's films, most of which have murder at their heart. However, although Chabrol's thematic allegiance to Hitchcock remained intact, his...
The film director Claude Chabrol, who has died aged 80, created the first ripple of the French new wave with his first feature, Le Beau Serge (1958). Unlike some of his other critic colleagues on the influential journal Cahiers du Cinéma, who also became film-makers, Chabrol was perfectly happy in the mainstream. Along with Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, Eric Rohmer and Jacques Rivette, he paid serious attention to Hollywood studio contract directors who retained their artistic personalities through good and bad films, thus formulating what came to be known as the "auteur theory".
In 1957, he and Rohmer wrote a short book on Alfred Hitchcock, whom they saw as a Catholic moralist. Hitchcock's black humour and fascination with guilt pervades the majority of Chabrol's films, most of which have murder at their heart. However, although Chabrol's thematic allegiance to Hitchcock remained intact, his...
- 9/14/2010
- by Ronald Bergan
- The Guardian - Film News
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