Film-makers on film: Claude Chabrol

Film-makers on film: Claude Chabrol

Last Updated: 12:01am BST 24/01/2004

Half a century ago, a band of young cinephiles were regular fixtures in the front rows of the Paris Cinémathèque, devouring everything the famously eclectic programme had to offer. Among them were Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques Rivette, Eric Rohmer, François Truffaut and Claude Chabrol. And here Chabrol saw something which, he says today, "took my breath away and for me is still the most beautiful film in the world".

That film was Sunrise, made in 1927 by the German director FW Murnau shortly after he went to Hollywood. "I had just watched The Testament of Dr Mabuse by Fritz Lang, and had almost decided to become a director. When I saw Sunrise, that clinched it. In fact," he adds jokingly, "that's why I married my wife [she is named Aurore, the French title of Sunrise]."

Along with his comrades from the Cinémathèque, Chabrol cut his teeth writing for the trail-blazing magazine Cahiers du Cinéma, which re-defined the critical canon throughout the 1950s with its provocative polemics and re-evaluations. He grumbles good-humouredly now that he never got to review Sunrise: Rohmer was an equally passionate devotee and had bagged Murnau's films all for himself.

In 1958 Chabrol made his first movie, Le Beau Serge, his colleagues followed suit – Truffaut with 400 Blows, Godard with Breathless, Rohmer with Le Signe du lion – and the Nouvelle Vague was born. He has remained astonishingly prolific, directing more than 50 films. He gave this interview recently at the San Sebastian Festival while presenting his latest, La Fleur du mal.

"The funny thing about Sunrise is, it's a banal, simple, intimate piece, very easy to understand," he says. "But it succeeds in becoming a story about human nature. I've never known anyone who watched it without realising that they'd seen something very important."

The film outlines the love triangle between an unnamed Man, his Wife, and a Woman From the City. He is a farmer living in an idyllic village; the Woman seduces him, then tries to lure him to the nearby city. The Man agrees to drown his Wife, but cannot bring himself to do it and, during a day in the city, the two rediscover their love.

It's easy to see why this appealed to Chabrol, who wrote a famous article for Cahiers in 1959 asserting that there was no difference between big, self-important subjects and the "little themes" of everyday life. His own greatest films – La Femme infidèle, Que la bête meure, Le Boucher, Violette Nozière – have explored just this domestic territory: jealousy, murder, deceit and obsession. What counts is not the story, but the manner of its telling – which in the case of Sunrise is magnificent.

Murnau had studied art history and Chabrol describes the film as "almost a history of painting. The first few minutes show a train and people leaving on holiday in a series of superimpositions; it's like an Art Deco poster. Suddenly we arrive in the country and the images become almost Breughelian. Later, bits of reeds floating on the water evoke [the Surrealist painter] Yves Tanguy. It's very strange and extraordinarily beautiful."

Murnau employs many sophisticated effects: unusual angles, pans, montages, multiple exposures, and sinuous tracking shots. But he also knows when to keep it simple – for example, during the boat trip on the lake when the Man almost drowns his Wife. "George Stevens was directly inspired by that sequence in A Place in the Sun," Chabrol says. "But Stevens feels obliged to add music, elaborate camera angles, long shots showing the surrounding countryside.

"Whereas Murnau shoots it very plainly, from the Man's point of view – there's just a slight adjustment of the framing now and then. It's infinitely stronger, darker and more genuinely poetic. You can't understand what is meant by mise-en-scène unless you have seen Sunrise because it's the closest you can get to perfection."

Chabrol is referring here to a cornerstone of the Cahiers doctrine: the importance of visual techniques – rather than the script – in creating an imaginative world. "I don't take myself for Murnau, God knows, but I am directly influenced by him in trying to express, through my images, the composition and the rhythm of the editing, more than the storyline alone can.

"Sunrise is at the absolute pinnacle of silent cinema. But he could have adapted to the coming of sound, the proof being that he made silent versions of two plays, Tartuffe and Faust, which could have easily been sound films."

We shall never know: Murnau died in 1931, aged 42, in a car crash. "He was homosexual and it was rumoured that the accident happened because he was making advances on his chauffeur."

The French are not alone in their admiration for Murnau: a recent poll of international critics in Sight and Sound magazine placed Sunrise seventh in the top films of all time. It may soon gain further ground: a restored version is re-released in cinemas on February 6 and on DVD, with many brilliant bonus features including a perceptive commentary by the cinematographer John Bailey.

Claude Chabrol, director, actor, producer, writer

Born: Paris, 1930

Selected films (as director): Le Beau Serge (1958); La Femme infidèle (1969); Que le bête meure (1969); Le Boucher (1970); Violette Nozière (1978); Le Sang des autres (1984); Madame Bovary (1991); L'Enfer (1994); La Fleur du Mal (tba).