Claude Chabrol, 1968: guest blog by Thomas Fuller

On the 50th Anniversary of 1968 I celebrate Chabrol, a filmmaker who dresses his female star in Chanel in the first scene and has her murdered by a Parisian hippie-chick sidewalk street artist in the last. Has any other filmmaker so vividly married the happy and prosperous post-World War Two world with the furious young rejection of that world by 1968?

Chabrol drew a line directly from Daniel Cohn-Bendit protesting in front of the Sorbonne in 1968 to Steven Mnuchin holding, for photo-op purposes, an uncut sheet of one-dollar bills bearing Mnuchin's name in front of the US Treasury, Washington D.C, November, 2017.

In Chabrol's films, especially those made from 1966-1970, I can now see the transformation of the kind of capitalism I grew up with, the kind I could understand, and still understand, as a force for re-building and then building more on that re-building, mostly for the 'good' of the people, by those who'd lived through two world wars; and I can see its unraveling, the disproportionate freedoms that were granted and denied, the ozone hole created by global capitalism, the recycling of the 'systems' of hope and fear in the films of Claude Chabrol. 

Whatever happened to 1968?

Chabrol devoured it, he used it up, all its beauty, creepiness, wonder, pretense, promise. He screen-played the energy right out of it and put it in his films so that I can watch them once again on Netflix in the year 2018.    

Thomas Fuller was 18 years old in 1968. He remembers when he first heard the phrase "all politics is personal" and of collecting signatures needed to place the poet-politician Eugene McCarthy on the ballot in the California Presidential Primary that year, his first political act. Mr. Fuller's new book,"The Classical World-A Novel of Ideas" (IF SF Publishing) will be out sometime this year.