Claude Chabrol, the New Wave critic who became cinema's connoisseur of bourgeois malice, had a twenty-film retrospective at BFI Southbank in autumn 2026.
BFI Southbank on the South Bank gave 20 films by Claude Chabrol, the New Wave thriller director, a season from Tuesday 1 September to Tuesday 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. He studied pharmacology and literature at the Sorbonne, then wrote for Cahiers du Cinéma alongside Godard, Truffaut, Rohmer and Rivette.
His 1958 debut, Le Beau Serge, took its cue from Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt, and the thriller stayed his form across some 80 films. Stéphane Audran, his wife at the time, starred in Les Biches and Le Boucher. Isabelle Huppert became his defining collaborator, from Violette Nozière in 1978 to La Cérémonie.
He kept directing almost to his death in Paris in 2010, at 80. Bong Joon Ho and Park Chan-wook both cite him among their influences.
Catherine Wheatley curated the season, which opened with a BFI re-release of La Femme infidèle from 11 September. Chabrol’s daughter, Cécile Maistre-Chabrol, introduced two screenings, on 3 and 6 October, and ten films from the run were on BFI Player.