Jacob Leigh

The Late Films of Claude Chabrol (eBook, PDF)

Genre, Visual Expressionism and Narrational Ambiguity

• Format: PDF

Produktbeschreibung

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.

Produktdetails

• Verlag: Bloomsbury Publishing Inc
• Seitenzahl: 208
• Erscheinungstermin: 19. Oktober 2017
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9781501312502
• Artikelnr.: 49258550

Autorenporträt

Jacob Leigh teaches Film Studies at Royal Holloway, University of London. UK. He teaches the work of a wide range of filmmakers, including Howard Hawks, Eric Rohmer, Claude Chabrol, Fritz Lang, Alfred Hitchcock, George Cukor, F.W. Murnau, John Ford, Max Ophuls, Carl Dreyer, Yasujiro Ozu and Roberto Rossellini. His research is focussed on the following areas: film interpretation, film style, film storytelling and film aesthetics. He wrote his PhD and first book on realism and politics in Ken Loach's films and since then he has written about Terrence Malick, Eric Rohmer and Claude Chabrol.