Claude Chabrol, the New Wave critic who became cinema's connoisseur of bourgeois malice, gets a twenty-film retrospective at BFI Southbank this autumn.
BFI Southbank gives six weeks of its autumn programme to a single director this year: twenty features by Claude Chabrol, drawn from a working life of nearly eighty, running 1 September to 6 October 2026.
Chabrol was born in Paris in 1930 and grew up in Sardent, a Creuse village where he ran a film club out of a barn as a boy. He studied pharmacology and literature at the Sorbonne, then joined Cahiers du Cinéma as a critic alongside Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, Éric Rohmer and Jacques Rivette, the future New Wave. His 1958 debut, Le Beau Serge, took its cue from Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt, and the thriller stayed his form for five decades and some eighty films, working through Simenon and Highsmith. Stéphane Audran, his wife at the time, starred in Les Biches, La Femme infidèle and Le Boucher; Isabelle Huppert took over as his defining collaborator from Violette Nozière in 1978 to Madame Bovary and La Cérémonie.
Bong Joon Ho and Park Chan-wook both cite him among their influences, and he kept directing almost to his death in Paris in 2010, at eighty.
Catherine Wheatley curates the season, opening with a BFI re-release of La Femme infidèle from 11 September. Chabrol’s daughter Cécile Maistre-Chabrol introduces two screenings, on 3 and 6 October, and ten films from the run stay on BFI Player.