Claude Chabrol - 1930-1957: Early Life and Journalism Career

1930-1957: Early Life and Journalism Career

Claude Henri Jean Chabrol was born on June 24, 1930 to Yves Chabrol and Madeleine Delarbre in Sardent, France, a village in the region of Creuse 150 miles south of Paris. Chabrol said that he always thought of himself as a country person, and never as a Parisian. Both Chabrol's father and grandfather had been pharmacists, and Chabrol was expected to follow in the family business. But as a child, Chabrol was "seized by the demon of cinema" and ran a film club in a barn in Sardent between the ages of 12 and 14. At this time, he developed his passion for the thriller genre, detective stories and other forms of popular fiction. After World War II, Chabrol moved to Paris to study pharmacology and literature at the Sorbonne, where he received a licencié en lettres. Some biographies also state that be briefly studied law and political science at the École Libre des Sciences Politiques.

While living in Paris Chabrol became involved with the postwar cine club culture and frequented Henri Langlois's Cinémathèque Française and the Ciné-Club du Quartier Latin, where he first met Éric Rohmer, Jacques Rivette, Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut and other furure Cahiers du Cinéma journalists and French New Wave filmmakers. After graduating, Chabrol served his mandatory military service in the French Medical Corps, serving in Germany and reaching the rank of sergeant. Chabrol has claimed that while in the army he worked as a film projectionist. After he was discharged from the army, he joined his friends as a staff writer for Cahiers du Cinéma, who were challenging then-contemporary French films and championing the concept of Auteur theory. As a film critic, Chabrol advocated realism both morally and aestically, mise-en-scene, and deep focus cinematography, which he wrote "brings the spectator in closer with the image" and encourages "both a more active mental attitude on the part of the spectator and a more positive contribution on his part to the action in progress." He also wrote for Arts magazine during this period. Among Chabrol's most famous articles were "Little Themes", a study of genre films, and "The Evolution of Detective Films".

In 1955 Chabrol was briefly employed as a publicity man at the French offices of 20th Century Fox, but was told that he was "the worst press officer they'd ever seen" and was replaced by Jean-Luc Godard, who they said was even worse. In 1956 he helped finance Jacques Rivette's short film Le coup du berger, and later helped finance Rohmer's short Véronique et son cancre in 1958. Unlike all of his future New Wave contemporaries, Chabrol never made short film nor did he work as an assistant on other directors work before making his feature film debut. In 1957 Chabrol and Eric Rohmer co-wrote Hitchcock (Paris: Éditions Universitaires, 1957), study of the films made by director Alfred Hitchcock through the film The Wrong Man. Chabrol had said that Rohmer deserves the majority of the credit for the book, while he mainly worked on the sections pretaining to Hitchcock's early English films, Notorious, Stage Fright and Rebecca. Chabrol had interviewed Hitchcock with Francois Truffaut in 1954 on the set of To Catch a Thief, where the two famously walked into a water tank after being starstruck by Hitchcock. Years later, when Chabrol and Truffaut had both become successful directors themselves, Hitchcock told Truffaut that he always thought of them when he saw "ice cubes in a glass of whiskey."