{"id":31527,"date":"2015-06-12T11:21:13","date_gmt":"2015-06-12T16:21:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/?p=31527"},"modified":"2017-06-03T18:48:10","modified_gmt":"2017-06-03T23:48:10","slug":"truffauthitchcock-hitchcocktruffaut-and-the-big-reveal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/2015\/06\/12\/truffauthitchcock-hitchcocktruffaut-and-the-big-reveal\/","title":{"rendered":"TRUFFAUT\/HITCHCOCK, HITCHCOCK\/TRUFFAUT, and the Big Reveal"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Hitch<\/a><\/p>\n

Photo by Philippe Halsman.<\/em><\/p>\n

I\u2019m going through a Hitchcockian period; every week I go and see again two or three of those films of his that have been reissued; there\u2019s no doubt at all, he\u2019s the greatest, the most complete, the most illuminating, the most beautiful, the most powerful, the most experimental and the luckiest; he\u2019s been touched by a kind of grace.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Fran\u00e7ois Truffaut, letter, 1961<\/p>\n

DB here:<\/p>\n

In June of 1962, Fran\u00e7ois Truffaut wrote to Alfred Hitchcock proposing a lengthy interview. Hitchcock agreed, and Truffaut materialized in Los Angeles in August, with his translator and collaborator Helen Scott. After six days of discussion, Truffaut had accumulated, he claimed, fifty hours of tape. Over the next four years the tapes were transcribed, the book was edited, and \u00a0extra sessions were recorded to cover the films Hitchcock made in the meantime. The result was published in France in late 1966 and a year later in an English translation.<\/p>\n

Energetic scholars have recently discovered that the finished book bears signs of massive cutting, compression, and recasting of the conversation. It seems that Hitchcock approved something like the final version, but on this director we want everything. Eventually we will want a complete transcription, but with some tapes still missing, that isn\u2019t possible for now. But we do have some tapes, and just as important, we have the book known in English as Truffaut\/Hitchcock<\/em>.<\/p>\n

What Truffaut called his \u201cHitchbook\u201d is now the subject of fascinating documentary by Kent Jones. Premiered at Cannes, Hitchcock\/Truffaut<\/em>\u00a0<\/a>was so successful that an extra screening was scheduled to meet the demand. Why so much interest? Of course, Hitchcock remains a filmmaker known to everyone. But we should also recognize that\u00a0the Hitchbook was one of the most important books on film ever\u00a0published.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Popular material treated with intelligence<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"knife<\/a><\/p>\n

Alfred Hitchcock, who is a remarkably intelligent man, formed the habit early\u2014right from the start of his career in England\u2014of predicting each aspect of his films. All his life he has worked to make his own tastes coincide with the public\u2019s, emphasizing humor in his English period and suspense in his American period. This dosage of humor and suspense has made Hitchcock one of the most commercial directors in the world. . . . It is the strict demands he makes on himself and on his art that have made him a great director.<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0Fran\u00e7ois Truffaut, review of Rear Window<\/em>, 1954<\/p>\n

The film\u2019 s title is an impudent reversal: \u201cHitchcock\/Truffaut\u201d puts first things first, a dialogue between a master and his adoring admirer.<\/p>\n

At first glance, this is a clips-plus-talking-heads doc. But that impression doesn\u2019t do it justice. For one thing, many of the clips are fresh ones, drawn from rarely shown Hitchcock films. These tease us with their unfamiliarity, like a gallery of less-known pictures flanking a hall of masterpieces.<\/p>\n

Moreover, the film\u2019s perspective is far more sophisticated than what we usually find in the genre. Hitchcock\/Truffaut<\/em> respects its viewers enough to summon up suggestive and subtle links between sequences, between image and commentary. Often there\u2019s no title marring the images, so they stand out with a hallucinatory purity. Often a clip starts to play before the commentary kicks in, all the better to let the imagery strike us in its integrity; only then do we get the connection to what came before. The extracts are the prime movers, with the text snapping into place to catch up.<\/p>\n

The speed and precision of Hitchcock\u2019s movies are paralleled by the swift opening of Jones\u2019s film, which introduces the main themes. As shots from Sabotage<\/em> are intercut with the book\u2019s flipping pages, we hear a chorus of voices. These belong to\u00a0our talking heads, and the heads are full of ideas. Remarkably, all the commenters are film directors. It\u2019s a top-tier lineup, of Movie Brats (Scorsese, Schrader, Bogdanovich) and younger talents David Fincher, James Gray, Wes Anderson, and Richard Linklater. From overseas come Kurosawa Kiyoshi, Olivier Assayas, and Arnaud Desplechin. There are no academic experts, no journalists or friends or family. Everything, we quickly learn, is going to be about cinema as art, craft, and vocation.<\/p>\n

Immediately, as if reenacting\u00a0Family Plot<\/em>, the film shows how two paths crossed. A quick summary of each man\u2019s career leads to that six-day week in 1962, overseen by the beaming Helen Scott, and our film launches itself into the depths.<\/p>\n

We learn of Hitchcock\u2019s urge to outwit the audience, and his thoughts on plausibility. He reviews matters of technique, from image size to the expansion of time. How do you handle actors? How do you give your film a shape? About halfway through, the questions go bigger, and the Cahiers<\/em> concerns preside. Is M. Hitchcock a Catholic artist? (He gives his answer off-mike.) Is his work haunted by guilt, even Original Sin? (\u201cYes,\u201d he murmurs.) Don\u2019t the plots enact a transfer of guilt? Don\u2019t they exhibit the logic of dreams?<\/p>\n

At one level, Hitchcock\/Truffaut<\/em> is a fine introduction to the issues in French film writing about the Master, articulated most fully by Desplechin. But the Americans bring in plenty of insights as well. Fincher and Scorsese track\u00a0changing acting styles of the 1940s and hint at the problems those caused for Hitchcock. Schrader notes the recurring fetish-objects (keys, handcuffs) and points out that Vera Miles (Hitchcock’s choice for Vertigo<\/em>) could never have carried off Kim Novak\u2019s painfully sluttish turn.<\/p>\n

Two extended sequences are devoted to Vertigo<\/em> and Psycho<\/em>. These allow Jones and his co-screenwriter Serge Toubiana to knot together all the major themes. Vertigo<\/em> encapsulates the dream elements, and through careful editing Hitchcock\/Truffaut<\/em> turns Hitchcock\u2019s interview remarks into a commentary track under key sequences. Meanwhile, the filmmakers riff freely on what we see. What about Judy\u2019s <\/em>story? asks Fincher. Scorsese finds \u201ca sense of loss and melancholy.\u201d Judy\u2019s stepping out of the bathroom yields what Gray calls \u201cthe single greatest moment in the history of movies.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Judy<\/a><\/p>\n

But Vertigo<\/em> wasn\u2019t a huge success, especially for a filmmaker who aimed at arousing the mass audience. The movie that exemplified \u201cpure film,\u201d Hitchcock says, was Psycho<\/em>. Again our\u00a0filmmakers are powerfully eloquent about its creative choices (pacing, framing, point-of-view) and, above all, its devastating shocks. It was, says Bogdanovich, \u201cthe first time that going to the movies was dangerous.\u201d Psycho<\/em>\u2019s stupendous\u00a0popularity, Truffaut remarks in the last edition of the book, made it the capstone of the Master\u2019s career. \u201cI am convinced that Hitchcock was not satisfied with any of the films he made after Psycho<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n

Many reviewers of Hitchcock\/Truffaut<\/em> have fastened\u00a0on moments in the interviews when Hitchcock expressed doubt. Should he have veered off from controlling the \u201crising shape\u201d of every story? Should he have been \u201cmore experimental\u201d? Should he have paid more attention to character rather than situation?<\/p>\n

Such questions were raised in Truffaut\u2019s 1983 addendum, but I\u2019m not convinced they\u2019re valid. They presume that plot is less valuable\u00a0than character, and that thriller plots are somehow intrinsically thinner than other kinds. Truffaut offered the best defense of the power of a gripping intrigue when he suggested that a disciplined format didn’t make things shallow.\u00a0He suggested that following Hitchcock\u2019s example could be fruitful.<\/p>\n

Don\u2019t tell me that it would be inferior or vulgar. Just think of Shadow of a Doubt<\/em> and Uncle Charlie\u2019s thoughts: the world is a pigsty, and honest people like bankers and widows detest the purity of virgins. It\u2019s all there, but inserted into a framework that keeps you on the edge of your seat.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Hitchcock put it another way: A good film, he remarked, consists of \u201cpopular material treated with intelligence.\u201d And that intelligence can take chances. Shadow of a Doubt, Lifeboat, Rope, Rear Window, Psycho<\/em>, and Family Plot<\/em> are among Hollywood\u2019s great experiments.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The Figure in the carpet<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"Knife<\/a><\/p>\n

Storyboard image for Psycho<\/strong>.<\/em><\/p>\n

My initial aim in undertaking [Truffaut\/Hitchcock<\/em>] was not to make the best-seller list, but to influence and shake up the smug attitudes of the New York critics.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Fran\u00e7ois Truffaut, letter, 1967<\/p>\n

Truffaut\/Hitchcock<\/em> had been out for a year when I got my copy in December 1968. Why did I wait? No paperback edition, and\u00a0the hardback cost a princely $10. That\u2019s about $70 in today\u2019s currency.<\/p>\n

That sturdy copy has followed me around ever since, and now, nearly fifty years later, I still find it stimulating. I can\u2019t think of another book on the cinema that has had its influence. Let me count some ways.<\/p>\n

It changed tastes.<\/strong> Truffaut tells us that he decided to do the book when he learned that American critics considered Hitchcock as merely a popular entertainer. Not all reviewers needed convincing, though. Robert Sklar found it \u201clikely to become a classic book on the art of the film. . . . No book before this one has made a better case for Hitchcock\u2019s genius or for the French \u2018author\u2019 theory of film directorship.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Hitchhook<\/a>In the pages of the New York Times<\/em>, Bosley Crowther had long treated Hitchcock as a talented purveyor of suspense who sometimes gave good value (Rear Window, To Catch a Thief, Vertigo<\/em>) but who too often favored wildly implausible plots (Strangers on a Train<\/em>) and \u201cslow buildups to sudden shocks that are old-fashioned melodramatics\u201d (Psycho<\/em>). Yet the Times<\/em> granted Truffaut\/Hitchcock<\/em> two admiring reviews. One by Eliot Fremont-Smith declared that Hitchcock had turned out \u201ca surprising number of perfect or nearly perfect movies.\u201d Arthur Knight praised Truffaut\u2019s careful preparation for the encounter and celebrated Hitchcock\u2019s almost unique control over his projects. His films were at once technically adept, emotionally exciting, and bristling with what Truffaut called \u201cmoral dilemmas.\u201d<\/p>\n

As Sklar indicates, Truffaut\/Hitchcock<\/em> gave aid and comfort to auteurists. If you wanted to make a case for creative artistry in Hollywood, Hitchcock was the logical point man\u2014a cinematic virtuoso and a director whose films were instantly recognizable. Andrew Sarris\u2019s first Village Voice<\/em> review set the tone: Psycho<\/em> indicated that \u201cthe French have been right all along.\u201d The English critics of Movie<\/em> followed with vigorous analytical essays, while Robin Wood\u2019s probing thematic study Hitchcock\u2019s Films<\/em> (1965) may have helped establish an audience for Truffaut\u2019s book. Truffaut predicted in 1983 that \u201cBy the end of the century, there will be as many books written about him as there are now about Marcel Proust.\u201d The prophecy may well have been fulfilled, and in a new century the literature seems to be\u00a0swelling even faster.<\/p>\n

The book affected tastes in another way, I think. It appeared when French filmmaking enjoyed great prominence in America. Unlike what happened in later decades, in the 1960s and early 1970s we could see virtually everything being made by Truffaut, Varda, Chabrol, Demy, Resnais, Bresson, Rohmer, Melville, and other major filmmakers; Godard sometimes gave us three a year. There were middlebrow hits too, like Sundays and Cyb\u00e8le<\/em> (1962) and A Man and a Woman <\/em>(1966). It seems hard to believe now, but in 1966-1967, twelve numbers of Cahiers du cin\u00e9ma<\/em> were published in a handsome English-language edition. Just as important, the year 1967 brought America not only Truffaut\u2019s book but Hugh Gray\u2019s translation of Bazin\u2019s What Is Cinema?<\/em><\/p>\n

For years afterward, France set the tone for both arthouse distribution and serious cinephilia. Importers brought us La Cage aux Folles, Tous les matins du monde, Am\u00e9lie, Ma vie en rose,<\/em> and other vessels of Gallic charm and profundity. Journalists and programmers stalked through French festivals\u00a0searching for the next big auteurs.\u00a0Later, academics learned about semiology, neo-Marxism, and Lacanian psychoanalysis from their Parisian counterparts. To this day, critics beg their editors to send them to Cannes and academics beg presses to consider another book on Deleuze. The Hitchbook\u00a0helped establish France as the home of adventurous\u00a0thinking about cinema.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Master and disciple<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"Truffaut<\/a><\/p>\n

I\u2019d like everyone who makes films to be able to learn something from it, and also everyone whose dream it is to become a filmmaker.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Fran\u00e7ois Truffaut, letter, 1962<\/p>\n

It influenced filmmakers.<\/strong> Jones\u2019 documentary highlights\u00a0the Hitchbook’s enduring power for generations of directors.\u00a0Wes Anderson says that his copy has fallen to tatters; Fincher read his dad\u2019s over and over, marveling at how the layout of images made the editing patterns apparent. For the young Gray it was \u201ca window into the world of cinema.\u201d The book, says Scorsese, gave courage to a generation: \u201cWe became radicalized.\u201d It showed that he and his cohort \u201ccould go ahead.\u201d<\/p>\n

The book\u2019s impact came from its insider aspects. As Schrader points out, we already had many books about the art of cinema, but Hitchcock shared secrets of\u00a0craft. How did he get particular effects, like Foreign Correspondent<\/em>\u2019s plane crash, with the ocean bursting straight into the cockpit? Hitchcock had views on what made film art (montage, mostly) but he also knew, as Fincher puts it, what made it fun. The flagrant virtuosity which Hitch\u2019s detractors attacked was a powerful stimulant for 1960s filmmakers. The chef has taken us into the kitchen and revealed his recipes.<\/p>\n

Take camera placement. Many of today\u2019s moviemakers and TV directors are fairly indifferent to the niceties of framing. Scorsese crisply shows how important the high angle is in Hitchcock\u2019s work. You can read it thematically (God looking down) but it\u2019s also elegantly functional. In Topaz<\/em>, Scorsese points out, the camera\u2019s deviation from the straight-on view is unsettling, and it accentuates the defector\u2019s eye movements. An unexpected, queasily close high-angle is practically a Hitchcock signature, as here from The Man Who Knew Too Much<\/em>\u00a0and North by Northwest<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\"Man<\/a>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\"NbyNWh221\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Beyond their craft, Hitchcock films yielded a personal vision of the world. That vision wasn\u2019t a matter of messages articulated in clunky dialogue (vide<\/em> Stanley Kramer). Hitch\u2019s personality soaked into the very textures of his plots, his characterizations, and above all his attitude toward the story and the audience. The Cahiers<\/em> critics had found individual\u00a0expression in the Hollywood studio product, and Hitchcock\u2019s world revealed some fairly sordid corners.<\/p>\n

He was obsessed with looking, duplicity, doubles, and hidden identities. Some of his characters, such as Uncle Charlie in Shadow of a Doubt<\/em> and John Brandon in Rope<\/em>, are suave sociopaths. In Notorious<\/em>, the putative hero is a cynical bully, while the Nazi he\u2019s stalking is a gentle and charming husband. A detective obsessed with a woman manages to kill her twice; a husband who wishes his wife dead gets what he wanted. The plots pass harsh judgment on momentary slips, like looking out your back window, listening politely\u00a0to a loopy\u00a0train passenger, or placing imaginary racetrack bets. If Ben Jonson lifted sardonic misanthropy to the level of art, why couldn\u2019t Hitchcock?<\/p>\n

It\u2019s as if the Movie Brats and those who followed were scoping out the realities of the business they were entering. I think they took hope from a man who made a great deal of money working with stars, flummoxing producers (Selznick in particular), embracing new technologies (sound, widescreen, even 3D), and managing to put an idiosyncratic spin on forced-march projects. It\u2019s easier to reconcile the one-for-them-and-one-for-me dynamic when you remember what Hitch made of assignments like Rebecca, Dial M for Murder<\/em>, and (even) Topaz<\/em>. By letting Hitchcock explain the commercial pressures he faced, and the ways he found to dodge or work within them, Truffaut must have given young filmmakers a conviction that they could do personal work in the industry.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Pictures that work hard<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"Pages<\/a><\/p>\n

The interest of the book will lie in the fact that it will describe in a very meticulous fashion one of the greatest and most complete careers in the cinema and, at the same time, constitute a very precise study of the intellectual and mental, but also physical and material, \u201cfabrication\u201d of films.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Francois Truffaut, letter, 1962<\/p>\n

It influenced film criticism too. <\/strong>For one thing, it confirmed the interview as a legitimate critical tool.<\/p>\n

Truffaut didn\u2019t invent the cinephiliac director interview, of course. Cahiers<\/em> and Movie<\/em> undertook\u00a0interrogations of directors; Pauline Kael notably mocked Movie<\/em> for asking Minnelli about a crane shot. But after the revelations of Truffaut\/Hitchcock<\/em>, people who wanted to put movies down couldn\u2019t automatically assume that directors were inarticulate. Yes, they\u2019d recycle their favorite stories, usually mythical; yes, they knew ways to dodge the hard questions; but get them going on craft and you stood a chance of learning something. The god of cinema dwelled among the details, and Hitchcock spread out details with solemn largesse.<\/p>\n

Sarris had displayed some of the possibilities in his Interviews with Film Directors<\/em> (1967 again!). But that book republished interviews already out there. Truffaut\u2019s through-composed marathon showed the power of the interview format as an analytical probe. Today, nobody would think of writing about a filmmaker without consulting published interviews\u2014or better yet, trying to wangle a fresh one. The book-length interview has become a genre, as in the X-on-X series<\/a> from Faber and Faber and, more lavishly, Matt Zoller Seitz\u2019s books on Wes Anderson<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Furthermore, despite Truffaut\u2019s insistence on Hitchcock\u2019s commitment to \u201cpure cinema,\u201d the book gave new credence to a quasi-literary approach to film criticism. Truffaut repackaged the Cahiers<\/em> thematic interpretations of Hitchcock. A film\u2019s true meanings were elusive; they had to be unearthed. Films could now be read<\/em>. Once we could find Catholic guilt in Strangers on a Train<\/em> and an omniscient, perhaps bemused deity in a high angle, why not extend the strategy to other filmmakers? It seems to me that Truffaut\/Hitchcock<\/em> was a major step toward our apparently endless efforts to find hidden meanings in popular filmmaking.<\/p>\n

\"Cover<\/a>To his credit, Truffaut understood that such reading had to be very close. He needed pictures. His correspondence details his demand that the illustrations \u201ccorrespond exactly to Hitchcock\u2019s own comments on the film.\u201d Truffaut shrugged off any worries about permissions. Film books of the day, when they included pictures, used production stills\u2014photos taken on the set, which seldom corresponded to what was on the screen. Truffaut used some production stills, but he took pride in packing in genuine frame enlargements, actual images from film prints. I can think of only one earlier author who systematically deployed actual frames to illustrate points of technique: Sergei Eisenstein, in The Film Sense<\/em> (1943) and Film Form<\/em> (1949).<\/p>\n

Today, when hundreds of websites run clips and framegrabs, we need to remember just how bold and tenacious Truffaut was. He borrowed 35mm prints from studio archives and spent three days in London making stills from the British titles not available in France. He could then provide meticulous shot-by-shot presentations of sequences\u2014central to proving the artistry of a man who put editing at the center of film art. The original French edition flaunted its production values, slugging frames from the Psycho<\/em> shower sequence across front and back cover.<\/p>\n

Once Truffaut made such displays thinkable, film criticism could become more analytical. Enterprising writers got hold of prints, projected them incessantly or studied them on editing machines. Most notable was Raymond Bellour, whose 1969 analysis of The Birds <\/em>(below) pushed analysis to an unprecedented degree of exactitude.<\/p>\n

\"BIRDS<\/a>Throughout the 1970s, film critics became more adept at this shot-by-shot study. It was one hallmark of my generation of academic film writers, especially in dissertations. That group included Ted Perry at Iowa (in a dissertation on L\u2019Eclisse<\/em><\/a>, 1968) and NYU scholars Fred Camper, Paul Arthur, and Vlada Petri\u0107. P. Adams Sitney\u2019s trailblazing Visionary Film<\/a><\/em> (1974) brought this sort of scrutiny to the avant-garde tradition. I followed the same line in my 1973 monograph on La Passion de Jeanne d\u2019Arc<\/em>\u00a0and in my 1975 dissertation on 1920s French cinema.<\/p>\n

French scholars were following Bellour\u2019s lead, and a significant school of textual analysts emerged. The BFI magazine Screen<\/em> opened up similar avenues with Stephen Heath\u2019s 1975 analysis of Touch of Evil<\/em>. A few teachers started to incorporate frame enlargements as slides for lecture courses. Kristin and I did, while inserting frame enlargements into our publications. We may have been the first to publish a film aesthetics textbook, Film Art<\/em> (1979), relying\u00a0on actual shots, not production stills.<\/p>\n

Studying films shot by shot was difficult, requiring 16mm or 35mm prints and machinery like analysis projectors and flatbed viewers. To document the shots, you had to take frame enlargements with a bellows and a still camera. By the time videotape and laserdiscs came along, intensive study was far easier. Not until we got DVD technology, though, was it simple\u00a0to make decent frame grabs to illustrate critical pieces.<\/p>\n

Now everybody does what Truffaut did. But let\u2019s remember that we analysts, along with nimble video essayists like Seitz<\/a>, Kevin B. Lee<\/a>, and Tony Zhou<\/a>, owe a debt to Truffaut\u2019s obstinate insistence that \u201cquoting\u201d a film, even partially, allows us to understand it more deeply.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Looking in his direction<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"truffaut<\/a><\/p>\n

This book on Hitchcock is merely a pretext for self-instruction.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Fran\u00e7ois Truffaut, letter 1962<\/p>\n

Given Truffaut\u2019s deep admiration for the Master of Suspense, we\u2019ve long assumed that he tried to learn from him. Like Hitchcock, he cared very much about evoking a response from his audience, and he sought as well to master the disciplined technique that could create precise effects. As early as The 400 Blows<\/em>, he had Hitchcock in mind, as he confessed in the interview.<\/p>\n

The recent availability of the 1962 tapes enabled Hitchcock scholar Sidney Gottlieb, in an article teasingly titled \u201cHitchcock on Truffaut,\u201d to explore portions of the conversation in which Hitchcock comments on a key passage in Truffaut\u2019s film. Truffaut tells Hitchcock of the moment when Antoine Doinel and his schoolmate, playing hooky, catch his mother kissing her lover on the street. Antoine rushes off and she guiltily turns away, telling her lover that her son has recognized her. Hitchcock, who apparently hasn\u2019t seen the film, asks about Truffaut\u2019s intention and tries to visualize the scene.<\/p>\n

Jones\u2019 film smoothly incorporates the sequence, letting\u00a0the men\u2019s voice-over discussion provide a gloss. The passage\u00a0allows us to pinpoint some important\u00a0aspects of Hitchcock’s discipline.<\/p>\n

Truffaut is shooting on location, with a camera that’s often very far from the action. We see the boys walking right to left in an extreme long shot, and then we cut to another extreme long shot, in which Antoine\u2019s mother and the lover are embracing by a M\u00e9tro entrance. They are centered, but there\u2019s a great deal of city life in this frame as well, so one can easily miss\u00a0them. Even if we notice the couple, we can’t clearly recognize\u00a0the woman as\u00a0the mother.<\/p>\n

\"screenshot_17\"<\/a>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\"screenshot_18\"<\/a><\/p>\n

In order\u00a0to make clear what\u2019s happening at the M\u00e9tro entrance, Truffaut gives us two further shots of the couple. The first conveys only the act of kissing; we can\u2019t really identify the characters. The second shot reveals\u00a0that the woman is Antoine\u2019s mother.<\/p>\n

\"screenshot_19\"<\/a>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\"screenshot_20\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Truffaut indicates to Hitchcock that he was short of footage, but there\u2019s also the problem of shooting on location. Truffaut could have cut directly from the extreme long-shot to reveal the mother (that is, from my second shot to my fourth). But that would have been rather disjunctive, and without the railing in the third shot we wouldn\u2019t know the characters\u2019 orientation very clearly. The shot of the railing indicates that we\u2019re roughly opposite to the angle taken in the extreme long shot. Still, the whole series\u2014three shots needed to establish that the mother has a lover and is kissing him\u2014is somewhat uneconomical.<\/p>\n

Having given us important information about the mother\u2019s affair, Hitchcock might have made us wait longer, raising suspense about whether Antoine would discover the illicit couple. Instead Truffaut cuts immediately to a panning shot of Antoine and his pal passing and looking more or less to the camera. That\u2019s followed by a shot of the mother seeing Antoine and turning abruptly away. The boys also turn away and hurry off.<\/p>\n

\"screenshot_26\"<\/a>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\"screenshot_30\"<\/a>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\"screenshot_31\"<\/a>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\"screenshot_34\"<\/a><\/p>\n

We\u2019re in the familiar territory of constructive editing<\/a> and the Kuleshov effect<\/a>. There\u2019s no establishing shot that includes all the dramatic elements. Similarity of locale, the exchange of glances, continuity of sound effects, and the concept (they see each other) knit the shots together.<\/p>\n

Again, though, there\u2019s a certain roughness to the effect. The second shot of the mother looking into the camera seems\u00a0to be roughly Antoine\u2019s point of view, but that camera setup has already been given us as an \u201cobjective\u201d shot of her kissing her partner. Apart from the eyeline, there isn\u2019t any marker of the second one as subjective\u2014such as a sidelong camera movement that might correspond to Antoine\u2019s walking viewpoint. POV shots can be slippery in classical filmmaking, so it\u2019s not exactly an error, but Truffaut gave up the chance for a more nuanced variant.<\/p>\n

The couple\u2019s placement remains a little vague in this shot too, again because there\u2019s no railing to orient us. If the mother is more or less blocked by her lover (her back is to the railing), her later glance at Antoine must fall quite far down the sidewalk on her left. But when he passes he\u2019s further up the sidewalk, on her right. Yet he\u2019s supposedly looking more or less directly at her.<\/p>\n

Put it another way. In the physical terms given by earlier shots, the lover\u2019s back would hide the mother\u00a0from Antoine until he was quite far down the sidewalk on her left. He\u2019d have to turn back to see her. Yet the boy seems to be looking at her from a position more or less opposite her, in effect \u201cthrough\u201d the lover\u2019s back.<\/p>\n

Plainly we get the point of the scene. But there\u2019s a certain roughness to the presentation. That may be why Truffaut felt he needed the return to the railing setup to show the mother turning away, followed by an explicit underscoring of what just happened through dialogue.<\/p>\n

\"screenshot_38\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Hitchcock, a little sadly: \u201cI would\u2019ve hoped that there was nothing spoken.\u201d<\/p>\n

Truffaut admitted to Hitchcock that he didn\u2019t have enough footage and was forced to intercut the shots too much. \u201cIn the cutting room it was absurd. . . . It was less good than if I\u2019d thought it out beforehand. Then I would have had a variety [of shots].\u201d<\/p>\n

In the interview Hitchcock goes on to remake the sequence at one remove. He suggests that we could start with Antoine walking and markedly seeing the mother. Then we see her turn, \u201clooking in his direction.\u201d The boy turns away, then she turns away. Simple and straightforward.<\/p>\n

To get a concrete example, consider how Hitch directed a scene of one person catching another by surprise. In Stage Fright<\/em>, the blackmailing maid Nellie Goode has come to the garden party to squeeze more money from Eve Gill. Hitchcock shows us that Nellie is present and then shows Eve and Ordinary Smith approaching unawares in a distant shot\u2014more or less from Nellie\u2019s optical standpoint.<\/p>\n

\"screenshot_02\"<\/a>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\"screenshot_03\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Thus the shot of the person seen is anchored in relation to the person seeing. After a reverse angle on Nellie, with the long-shot scale more or less matching its mate, we get a shot of Eve noticing Nellie.<\/p>\n

\"screenshot_05\"\u00a0 \u00a0\"screenshot_09\"<\/p>\n

We have another piece of constructive editing, but we scarcely notice the absence of a master shot. The geography is crystal clear, not least because of the marked eyeline. And now, as in Truffaut\u2019s scene, an objective framing becomes subjective. We get a parallel series of shots, one setup showing Nellie advancing, the other a tight framing just on Eve, who halts Nellie by signaling with her eyes and mouth. On the couple, the framing has gone from long-shot to two-shot to single.<\/p>\n

\"screenshot_10\"<\/a>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\"screenshot_12\"<\/a><\/p>\n

When Nellie stops, puzzled, Eve launches her plan to send Smith off to her girlfriends. Eve leaves, Smith follows, and we\u2019re back to Nellie watching in annoyance.<\/p>\n

\"screenshot_15\"<\/a>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\"screenshot_16\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Bare-bones though it is, this sequence is more complicated than Truffaut\u2019s, because the third party, Ordinary Smith, mustn\u2019t be allowed to notice Nellie. We take it for granted that the mother\u2019s lover doesn\u2019t recognize Antoine, but Eve must actively distract Smith. Moreover, there is dialogue running throughout this action, as Smith chatters away to charm Eve. So we have the familiar Hitchcock technique of playing banal dialogue in counterpoint to suspenseful imagery.<\/p>\n

Everything that happens\u2014Nellie waiting in ambush, the exchange of looks, the fluttering expressions on Eve\u2019s face, the policeman\u2019s obtuseness\u2014is rendered fully. The functional precision of this simple passage shows why Hitchcock liked shooting in the studio. He could control all his angles, eyelines, and shot scales exactly. Truffaut had to make do with what he could grab on a very busy location. Still, as he points out, he compensated somewhat by the very tightly controlled scene later in 400 Blows<\/em>, when Antoine\u2019s parents come to school. There the closed conditions of the classroom allowed a\u00a0sharper articulation of glances and camera angles. It\u2019s no set-piece, but it\u2019s a tidier piece of work, somewhat Hitchcockian.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The Truffaut thriller<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"MM500\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Mississippi Mermaid<\/strong> (La Sir\u00e8ne du Mississippi<\/strong>).<\/em><\/p>\n

I have adapted too many novels, especially American novels. Oddly enough, it has become quite clear that (with the exception of Jules et Jim<\/em>) my intentions have been better understood when I have filmed such original screenplays as Les 400 Coups, Baisers voles, L\u2019Enfant sauvage,<\/em> and La Nuit am\u00e9ricain<\/em> than when having filmed Irish and Goodis.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Fran\u00e7ois Truffaut, letter, 1974<\/p>\n

Mystery novels were popular in France well before World War II, and films prefiguring the tone of noir cinema, such as P\u00e9p\u00e9 le Moko<\/em> and Le jour se l\u00e8ve,<\/em> began to appear in the late 1930s. The Nazi occupation, by shutting off American films, stimulated the French industry, which during the war produced some important films of crime and suspense. Over the same years Simenon, who wrote both detective stories and psychological thrillers, became a respected literary figure. But it was not until the postwar period that the roman noir<\/em> became a major literary trend. That was partly due to new publishing initiatives like the S\u00e9rie Noire collection (established 1945), which translated a great many American and English crime writers, and the Fleuve Noir series (1949), which cultivated French authors. Within this lively milieu, the team of Boileau and Narcejac achieved fame with novels that became the sources for Les diaboliques<\/em> and Vertigo<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\"Mariee<\/a>The burst of translations of American authors in the 1940s and 1950s paralleled the postwar flood of US films, including films noirs. Truffaut, like his Nouvelle Vague friends, grew up reading crime fiction and watching Hollywood thrillers. He was fourteen years old when Double Indemnity<\/em> was released in Paris, and twenty-two when Rear Window<\/em> was. Over those same years crime writers like Cornell Woolrich and David Goodis were being translated in French editions. Writing of Woolrich, whom he knew under the pseudonym William Irish, Truffaut recalled:<\/p>\n

The cinephiles of my generation knew Irish before they had read a single line of his, because many of his novels and short stories were the basis of the bizarre and fascinating films of the forties and fifties, such as Jacques Tourneur\u2019s The Leopard Man<\/em>, Robert Siodmak\u2019s Phantom Lady<\/em>, Roy William Neil\u2019s Black Angel<\/em>, John Farrow\u2019s Night Has a Thousand Eyes<\/em>, Ted Tetzlaff\u2019s The Window<\/em>, and especially one of the best if not the best Hitchcock film, Rear Window<\/em>.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Truffaut\u00a0came to admire the novels’ authors for their modesty, their professionalism, and their ability to create, behind a pulp surface, \u201cfree works\u201d that opened onto sadness, dream worlds, and lost memories.<\/p>\n

No wonder, then, that when the young directors sought to make films of wide popular appeal, they turned to noir. If you wanted to generate emotion in a wide audience and to tackle a project that posed formal and technical challenges, some version of the thriller seemed a\u00a0promising way to go. Claude Chabrol, co-author of a book on Hitchcock, built his career on suspense films, sometimes adapted from English-language authors. More notoriously, Jean-Luc Godard\u2019s Made in USA<\/em> was an unrecognizable rendering of a crook novel by the great Donald Westlake<\/a>. As late as 1986 Godard undertook to adapt a James Hadley Chase novel for French television.<\/p>\n

Truffaut turned to American thrillers when he wanted a change of pace from his dramas. Naturally the spirit of Hitchcock hovered over such projects.\u00a0By looking at some problems he faced, we can get another angle on what he learned, or did not learn, from the Master.<\/p>\n

As Truffaut became more wedded to shooting in studio conditions, he might have handled scenes with a degree of Stage Fright<\/em> precision. But he had a predilection for lengthy takes, with fairly open horizontal staging covered in simple, lateral camera movements. Often shooting in anamorphic widescreen, something Hitchcock never did, Truffaut needed to fill up the horizontal expanse, Fluid panning and tracking from a fair distance seemed a good solution. But that meant sacrificing Hitchcock\u2019s urge to build scenes out of details, tight shots of facial expression or close-ups of significant props.<\/p>\n

If\u00a0Truffaut needs a detail, he may accentuate it with an abrupt close-up. In The Bride Wore Black<\/em>, Julie Kohler wants to be alone with her victim.\u00a0When the victim’s friend brings her a drink, she dumps it into a flower pot, signaling that he should take off.<\/p>\n

\"screenshot_01\"<\/a>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\"screenshot_02\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Much later, the friend\u00a0casually waters his own African violet. (Did he inherit his dead friend\u2019s plant?) The\u00a0gesture reminds him of where he\u2019s seen the woman before. The cut-in detail functions as a sort of flashback for us.<\/p>\n

\"screenshot_04\"<\/a>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\"screenshot_06\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The example indicates Truffaut\u2019s inclination to use close-ups of faces and objects to punctuate the master shot\u2014a more traditional and conservative choice than Hitchcock’s urge to build an entire scene out of bits.<\/p>\n

Truffaut confronted larger narrative problems in the thriller genre. One involves the protagonist. In the classic thriller, as opposed to the detective story, the protagonist is either the criminal, the victim, or a bystander drawn into the intrigue (as in Rear Window<\/em>). And typically our range of knowledge roughly corresponds to that of the protagonist.<\/p>\n

In Truffaut’s\u00a0first thriller, Shoot the Piano Player<\/em>, he adheres fairly closely to the standpoint of the protagonist, as presented in the source novel, David Goodis\u2019 Down There<\/em> (1956). Likewise, Mississippi Mermaid<\/em> attaches us to Louis Mah\u00e9, a plantation owner who has married a woman whom he knows only from letters. He eventually discovers that she\u2019s an impostor and a hardened criminal. Like its source, the Cornell Woolrich novel Waltz into Darkness<\/em> (1947), the film restricts us quite closely to Mah\u00e9\u2019s range of knowledge. At only one point do we leave Mah\u00e9 and follow his business partner, who glimpses the wife quarreling violently with another man. Nothing much comes of this, but we are alerted to her possible treachery.<\/p>\n

Another Woolrich novel, The Bride Wore Black<\/em> (1940), has a bolder structure. The protagonist is the woman bent on revenge who kills five men, one by one. The viewpoint shifts from victim to victim. After the first killing we know, as the men don\u2019t, that this woman who enters their lives is a murderer, so the suspense comes in wondering whether they\u2019ll escape. Each section of the book concentrating on a\u00a0victim ends with a chapter devoted to the policeman who is trying to make sense of these apparently random deaths. He becomes a secondary protagonist.<\/p>\n

\"Long<\/a>By contrast, Truffaut makes the policeman merely a walk-on (although a friend of two victims, the plant-waterer seen above, plays a minor investigative role). Instead Truffaut\u00a0attaches us to\u00a0Julie more strongly, so that we follow her from crime to crime. As she calculates ways\u00a0to enter each man’s life, the emphasis falls on how she plays\u00a0to each one\u2019s fantasies. While early victims are given privileged scenes apart from Julie, as the film goes along we are bound more closely\u00a0to her. Truffaut’s belief in overpowering\u00a0love\u00a0traces how she dedicates her life to avenging her dead husband.<\/p>\n

Another gender shift is followed in Vivement, Dimanche!<\/em> (Confidentially Yours<\/em>; \u201cCan\u2019t Wait for Sunday!\u201d). Charles Williams\u2019 novel, The Long Saturday Night<\/em> (1962), is told in the first person by a man hunted by the police for a pair of murders. We\u2019re attached to him as he flees, investigates on his own, and hides out in his real estate office. At certain points he sends his secretary out to do some snooping, and she plays a critical role in trapping the real killer. But clearly the accused man functions as protagonist.<\/p>\n

In adapting the book, Truffaut turns his lover, Fanny Ardent, into a detective. She will risk her life for the man she silently adores: \u201can ordinary woman, a valiant secretary, determined to prove her boss\u2019s innocence.\u201d As a result, early portions of the film show the trap closing around the self-centered, quarrelsome Vercel. Once he gets immobilized hiding in his office, our attachment shifts to Barbara, the resourceful secretary, and we follow her investigation. The structure is a bit like that of Phantom Lady<\/em>, in which a woman tries to find evidence to clear her imprisoned lover. Eventually Vercel and Barbara learn to work together. The situation echoes those American mystery-comedies like The Ex-Mrs. Bradford<\/em> (1936) and Fast Company<\/em> (1938), centering on a married couple who solve a crime in tandem. Here, though, the grudging cooperation creates the romance.<\/p>\n

The selection of a film’s protagonist and center of consciousness impinges on a second problem that\u2019s worth considering. A thriller, while not having the structure of the classic detective tale, may harbor some mysteries. That is, the reader\/viewer is not given some key information about past or offstage events. At some point that information must be presented, so the question is: When?<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Timing the Big Reveal<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"Judy<\/a><\/p>\n

Vertigo.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Like the detective story, the thriller often saves the Big Reveal for the end. Hitchcock employed this in The 39 Steps, Spellbound<\/em>, and Stage Fright<\/em>. But Hitchcock plays with the Big Reveal. Shadow of a Doubt<\/em> doesn\u2019t fully confirm Uncle Charlie\u2019s guilt until Young Charlie realizes it, about halfway through the film. Creating the Big Reveal through a switch in attached viewpoint helps him here, as Young Charlie has become the protagonist. In Frenzy<\/em>, the killer\u2019s identity is revealed to us thirty minutes in, so that we can feel suspense as he approaches other victims and as the innocent man seems more likely to be charged.<\/p>\n

Boldest of all, however, is the Big Reveal in Vertigo<\/em>. The original novel saved it for the very end, but Hitchcock made a daring choice. After nearly 100 minutes of being attached to Scottie Ferguson, we get a scene fully 30 minutes before the end that suddenly gives us access to what another character knows. A flashback, guided by Judy\u2019s anxious look to the camera, clears up the entire situation. On the tape, Hitchcock says:<\/p>\n

What will Stewart say when he finds that this is one and the same woman? This is your main thought. In addition, you have this added value. You watch the woman resisting being changed back. . . . Now you have a woman who realizes this is a man who\u2019s practically unmasking her. <\/strong><\/p>\n

The wider range of knowledge not only enhances suspense but makes Scottie a more pitiable figure, as we realize that his weaknesses have been exploited. The fact that Judy writes the letter to explain it also measures the extent of her love for him and her shame at participating in the murder scheme. Narrationally, the film dispels mystery to heighten suspense and the romantic drama\u2014as well as the \u201csex-psychological side,\u201d as Hitch calls it, evoking necrophilia.<\/p>\n

In their conversation Hitchcock and Truffaut often turned to issues about when to reveal backstory, and Truffaut took some of the lessons to heart. He uses the option playfully in Vivement, Dimanche!<\/em> in two misleading ellipses. At one point we see Vercel going back to his house at night, and then we cut to Barbara in her theatre rehearsal. Next morning in the office, Vercel tells her his wife is dead, and we get a flashback that replays his arrival home but prolongs it to include\u00a0his discovery of her corpse. Later, when Barbara discovers the secret panel in the lawyer\u2019s office, we again cut away to a new scene, and only later does her flashback explain what she discovered. Since the lawyer is obviously the killer (as isn\u2019t true in the book), I take these as narrational filigree aiming to keep us engaged.<\/p>\n

Vivement, Dimanche!<\/em> saves its Big Reveal for the end, as does its source. In Shoot the Piano Player<\/em>, the long flashback to Charlie\u2019s concert career that takes up the middle stretch\u00a0<\/em>likewise corresponds to a centrally placed flashback in Goodis\u2019 novel. Mississippi Mermaid<\/em> makes Marion\u2019s confession the fulcrum of the film; in choosing to join her on the run, Mah\u00e9 becomes a criminal himself. Woolrich\u2019s novel has the same structure, making the mystery component occupy the first half and the suspense-pursuit component dominate the second.<\/p>\n

Something closer to the Vertigo<\/em> gambit takes place in Truffaut\u2019s handling of The Bride Wore Black<\/em>. In the original novel, Woolrich postpones revealing Julie\u2019s motive until the very end of the book. The trauma impelling her is the murder of her husband as they were leaving the wedding ceremony. Through dramatic irony, in her confrontation with the cop, she learns that her interpretation of that event was mistaken. The men she killed were innocent. Her fianc\u00e9, whom she revered, was a petty criminal shot by other crooks.<\/p>\n

\"Julie<\/a><\/p>\n

By making Julie the protagonist, however, the film puts a greater stress on the thwarted love that turns to righteous violence. (Julie\u2019s name, Kohler, suggests col\u00e8re<\/em>, wrath.) Truffaut enhances this element of passion-beyond-limits through a choice about\u00a0exposition. Instead of saving the Big Reveal for the end, he exposes Julie\u2019s motive in two steps. As her second victim dies, we get a brief flashback to the wedding at which her husband is shot. This encourages\u00a0us to start to sympathize with\u00a0her vengeance campaign.<\/p>\n

At the film\u2019s midpoint, when Julie traps her third victim, there\u2019s a full flashback to the wedding, and we learn what led to the husband\u2019s death. No rival gangsters are involved. Five irresponsible men playing with a rifle have robbed Julie\u00a0of happiness. Now, thirty-five minutes into the film, we understand Julie\u2019s motive and can sympathize as she proceeds to use the men\u2019s vanities against them. In a finale wholly devised for the film, she is resolutely unchastised and manages to polish off her last victim in prison. Unlike Woolrich\u2019s bride in black, who regrets her tragic error, Truffaut’s avenging angel has remained pitiless\u00a0to the bloody end.<\/p>\n

The revelation of Julie\u2019s motive doesn\u2019t have the force of Judy\u2019s flashback in Vertigo<\/em>, which breaks very abruptly from our lengthy attachment to Scottie. But as in Hitchcock\u2019s film, a Big Reveal before the climax expands our awareness of the dramatic forces at work and increases our sympathy for the protagonist.<\/p>\n

Truffaut will never be as experimental as Hitchcock; as Andrew Sarris once remarked, between form and vitality Truffaut chooses vitality. And I think he has a tendency to sabotage his thriller elements. He provides a quasi-optimistic ending \u00a0to Mississippi Mermaid<\/em> and he reveals, in Baisers vol\u00e9s<\/em>, that an apparent stalker nurtures\u00a0a pure love. I once argued that this is Truffaut’s “Renoirian” side, letting him break\u00a0noir formulas in favor of something more poignant. Still, I think that in his quiet way he absorbed some lessons of the Master.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Kent Jones\u2019 film opens up the Hitchcock\u2014Truffaut relationship in fresh ways, and it stirs us to follow up the ideas that intrigue us. It\u2019s the most stimulating film about a director that I\u2019ve ever seen, teaching you about not just Hitchcock but cinema in general. Just as interviews can illuminate the films we love, so can documentaries, if they blend admiration with analysis. Popular material, yes, and treated with intelligence.<\/p>\n

\n

Thanks to Kent for sharing Hitchcock\/Truffaut<\/em>\u00a0with me, to Kelley Conway for help with a French translation, and to Lea Jacobs and Kristin for identifying the plants.<\/p>\n

A bold vertical cover design made the Hitchbook universally known as Truffaut\/Hitchcock<\/em>, but the title is, strictly speaking, “Hitchcock<\/em> by Fran\u00e7ois Truffaut, with the collaboration of Helen Scott” (Simon and Schuster, 1966). The revised edition, with the same title, came out in 1983. Truffaut\u2019s comments about Hitchcock\u2019s morale after Psycho<\/em>\u00a0are on p. 328 there.<\/p>\n

The broadcast version of the interviews is online at slashfilm<\/a>. The portion discussing the 400 Blows<\/em> scene is in Part 22, starting around 11:30; the material on Vertigo<\/em> is in Part 21, starting at 17:28.\u00a0For an in-depth report on differences between the tapes and the book, see Janet Bergstrom, \u201cLost in Translation? Listening to the Hitchcock\u2014Truffaut Interview,\u201d in Thomas Leitch and Leland Poague, A Companion to Alfred Hitchcock<\/a><\/em> (Wiley Blackwell, 2014), 386-404.<\/p>\n

Quotations from Truffaut\u2019s letters come from Fran\u00e7ois Truffaut, Correspondence 1945-1984<\/em><\/a>, ed. Gilles Jacob and Claude de Givray, trans. Gilbert Adair (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1989), 192, 218, 311, 426. The Rear Window<\/em> review is in The Films in My Life<\/a><\/em>, trans. Leonard Mayhew (Simon and Schuster, 1975), 77. Truffaut\u2019s intentions about Vivement, Dimanche!<\/em> are discussed in Antoine de Baecque and Serge Toubiana, Truffaut: A Biography<\/a><\/em> (Knopf, 1999), 373. The letter in which he talks about changing American critics\u2019 minds is mentioned here as well, on p. 194.<\/p>\n

The reviews I\u2019ve quoted are Robert Sklar, \u201cTwo Masters of Cinema,\u201d The Reporter<\/em> (8 February 1968), 48; Eliot Fremont-Smith, \u201cDial H for Suspense,\u201d New York Times<\/em> (11 December 1967), 45; and Arthur Knight, \u201cWith the Master,\u201d New York Times<\/em> (17 December 1967), 6, 27. In a nuanced\u00a0review, Leo Braudy charged that Truffaut’s concern with technique diverted him from analyzing the films’\u00a0more disturbing aspects (“Hitchcock, Truffaut, and the Irresponsible Audience,”<\/a> Film Quarterly<\/em> 21, 4 (Summer 1968), 21-27). \u00a0Jones’ film, thanks to his script and his commenters, happily goes\u00a0in that direction.<\/p>\n

Raymond Bellour’s “System of a Fragment (on The Birds<\/em>)” is available in a revised version in The Analysis of Film<\/a><\/em>, ed. Constance Penley (Indiana University Press, 2000), 28-67. He pays tribute to Truffaut’s “great book of interviews” with Hitchcock and recalls that Truffaut helped him prepare his analysis by providing a shot breakdown based on the release print.<\/p>\n

Sidney Gottlieb, \u201cHitchcock on Truffaut,\u201d Film Quarterly<\/em> 66, 4 (Summer 2013), 10-22 considers the two Hitchcockian scenes in 400 Blows<\/em> in detail. The portions I\u2019ve quoted are available in Sid\u2019s other version of the piece, \u201cHitchcock on Truffaut,\u201d in Hitchcock on Hitchcock 2<\/a><\/em> (University of California Press, 2015), 134-136. My quotation about handling popular material with intelligence comes from the same volume, in\u00a0the 1930 essay \u201cMaking Murder!,\u201d 166.<\/p>\n

Truffaut\u2019s comments about inserting serious concerns in a thriller framework come from a 1962 Cahiers<\/em> interview in which he imagines Chabrol\u2019s Bonnes femmes<\/em> as done by Hitchcock (\u201cThe Shop-Girl Vanishes\u201d). In the same interview Truffaut confesses that he modeled Shoot the Piano Player<\/em> too closely on\u00a0Goodis’s novel and regrets including the flashback. See \u201cInterview with Fran\u00e7ois Truffaut (second extract),\u201d in Peter Graham, ed., The New Wave<\/a><\/em> (Doubleday, 1968), 94-95, 108. Truffaut discusses American thriller writers in \u201cLes Espadrilles de William Irish,\u201d in Le Plaisir des yeux<\/em> (Cahiers du cin\u00e9ma, 1987), 133-137. I take Sarris\u2019s remark about form and vitality from \u201cFran\u00e7ois Truffaut,\u201d in Interviews with Film Directors<\/a><\/em> (Bobbs-Merrill, 1967), 447.<\/p>\n

There’s a fair amount about\u00a0Hitchcock on this site; you could start here<\/a>. The high angle in North by Northwest<\/em> is discussed in Chapter 4 of our Film Art: An Introduction<\/em>, where we point out that Hitchcock makes a joke of it. (Van Damm suggests that silencing\u00a0Eve is a matter “best disposed of\u00a0from a great height.”)\u00a0For a discussion of how Hitchcock’s work relates to 1940s American suspense\u00a0fiction, see the web essay, “Murder Culture.”<\/a>\u00a0As usual, Mike Grost’s encyclopedic survey of crime and mystery fiction<\/a> is a\u00a0powerful\u00a0resource; see in particular his discussion of “the Woolrich school.”<\/a><\/p>\n

\"Psycho<\/a>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\"Vivement<\/a><\/p>\n

Psycho; Vivement, Dimanche!<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Photo by Philippe Halsman. I\u2019m going through a Hitchcockian period; every week I go and see again two or three of those films of his that have been reissued; there\u2019s no doubt at all, he\u2019s the greatest, the most complete, the most illuminating, the most beautiful, the most powerful, the most experimental and the luckiest; […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[78,212,57,33],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-31527","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-directors-hitchcock","category-directors-truffaut","category-hollywood-aesthetic-traditions","category-national-cinemas-france"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31527","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=31527"}],"version-history":[{"count":47,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31527\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":37143,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31527\/revisions\/37143"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31527"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=31527"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=31527"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}