PARIS On the set of his latest film, a tiny apartment in a Paris suburb, Claude Chabrol is every inch French cinema's elder statesman as he puffs on a fat cigar and gives Isabelle Huppert her marching orders. Moments later, the 75-year-old...

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The New York Film Society of Lincoln Center continues its month-long series of reappraisals of gifted—and even honored-in-their-own-time—film icons, with a four-film revival May 25 and May 26 of John Schlesinger’s British-made Billy Liar (1963) and Sunday Bloody Sunday (1971), and his American-made Midnight Cowboy...

Alain Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad (1961), from a screenplay by Alain Robbe-Grillet, will be revived for the first time in decades at Film Forum for two weeks from Jan. 18 through Jan. 31 in a new 35mm Scope print. It was Resnais’ second feature-length...

An artist lives in his art; that is, his art is characterised by the impulses, sympathies and recoils which determine his nature as a human being. Yet equally, for the artist who loses faith, art can become a perverse refuge: an enclosed, private world within which he spins fantasies of his own defeat…. Unlike 'ivory tower' artists, who exclude pain, 'private world' artists … indulge in it masochistically; but, to almost an equal extent, have ceased to explore, to s...

Chabrol owes a debt to Hitchcock, but there are significant differences between their universes. Chabrol himself in recent interviews has not missed an opportunity to suggest that Fritz Lang's films might be more important referents than Hitchcock's, and with good reason, I think. Central to the classic Hitchcock film is a sense of the tension in the relationship between pursuer and pursued—an element which is not all that important in Chabrol's films, and which he often avoids c...

This Man Must Die (Que la Bête Meure) may be Chabrol's Iliad. It is, at least according to the description of that work given by the film's protagonist as he helps Philippe with his homework—Philippe, adolescent son of the man whom he intends to kill for the death of his own young son in a hit-and-run accident. He offers The Iliad as an example of a work which is conventional, even banal, in its story, but unconventional, even "poetic," in its details. That, he anno...