Exceprts. Hitchcock. François Truffaut. Introduction.

Powerful rhetoric. Truffaut was indeed a great prose-writer.

He succeed in changing the general opinion about Hitchcock as he intended.

It all began when we broke the ice.

  That happened in the winter of 1955, when Alfred Hitchcock, having completed the location shooting of To Catch a Thief [1955] on the Côte d'Azur, came to the Saint-Maurice studios, in Joinville, for the post-synchronisation of the picture. My friend Claude Chabrol and I decided to go there to interview him for Cahiers du Cinéma. Armed with a long list of intricate questions and a borrowed tape recorder, we sallied forth in high spirits.

  In Joinville we were directed to a pitch-black auditorium, where a loop showing Cary Grant and Brigitte Auber in a motorboat was being run cotninuously on the screen. In the darkness we introduced ourselves to Hitchcock, who courteously asked us to wait for him at the studio bar, across the courtyard.

  Both ["]movie-crazy["], thrilled by our brief preview of Hitchcock's latest work, we emerged into the blinding glare of daylight, literally bursting with excitement. In the heat of our discussion we failed to notice the dark-gray frozen pond in the middle of the courtyard. With a single step forward we went over the ledge, landing on a thin layer of ice, which immediately gave way. Within weseconds we were immersed in a pool of freezing water and a state of shock. In a hollow voice I asked Chabrol, "What about the tape recorder?" He replied by slowly raising his left arm to hold the case in mid-air, with the water bleakly oozing out from all sides like a stream of tears.

  Staggering around the sloping basin, unable to reach the edge without sliding right back to the center, we were trapped in a situation straight out of a Hitchcock movie. Eventually, with the helping hand of a charitable bystander, we managed to reach firm ground.

  A wardrobe mistress who was passing by invited us to follow her to a dressing room where we might take off our clothes and dry out. When we attempted to thank her for her kindness, she said in a businesslike way, "What a way to make a living! Are you extras for Rififi?" Upon learning that we were reporters, she lost all interest and told us to clear out.

  A few minutes later, still soaking wet and shivering with cold, we made out way to the bar, where Hitchcock awaited us. He merely looked at us over and, without a single comment on our appearance, amiably suggested another appointment for that evening at the Hotel Plaza Athénée.

  A year later, upon spotting us at one of his Paris press conferences, Hitchcock finally acknowledged the incident by saying, "Gentlemen, every time I see a pair of ice cubes clicking together in a glass of whiskey, I think of you two."

  We subsequently learned that he had embellished the story with a twist of his own. According to the Hitchcock version, Chabrol was dressed as a priest and I was wearing a gendarme's uniform when we turned up for the interview.

  It was almost a decade after that preliminary aquatic contact that I undertook to approach Hitchcock again with a series of probing questions about his work. What prompted me to emulate Oedipus' consultation of the oracle was that my own efforts as a film-maker, in the years that followed, made me increasingly aware of the exceptional importance of Hitchcock's contribution and of its particular value to all those who work in the screen medium.

  The examination of Hitchcock's directional career, ranging as it does from his silent movies in Great Britain to his current color films in Hollywood, is a richly rewarding source of discovery. In Hitchcock's work a film-maker is bound to find the answer to many of his own problems, including the most fundamental question of all: how to express oneself by purely visual means.

  I am not so much the author of the initiator, or if you prefer, the instigator, of this work on Alfred Hitchcock. The book is essentially a journalistic work, made possible when Alfred Hitchcock agreed to a fifty-hour-long interview.

  In 1962 I wrote to Mr. Hitchcock, asking whether he would answer some five hundred questions dealing solely with his career, in chronological order, and suggesting that our discussion deal with the following

  a. the circumstances attending the inception of each picture

  b. the preparation and structure of the screenplays

  c. specific directorial problems on each film

  d. Hitchcock's own assessment of the commercial and artistic results in relation to his initial expectations for each picture

  Hitchcock cabled his agreement. There now remained one last hurdle, the language barrier, and I turned to my friend Helen Scott, of the French Film Office in New York. An American raised in France, her thorough command of the cinéma vocabulary, her sound judgment and exceptional human qualities, made her the ideal accomplice for the project.

  We arrived in Hollywood on August 13, Hitchcock's birthday. Every morning he would pick us up at the Beverly Hills Hotel to take us to his office at Universal Studios, With each of us wearing a microphone, and a sound engineer in the next room recording our voices, we kept up a running conversation from nine to six every day, achieving something of a track record as we talked our way through lunches.

  A witty raconteur, noted for his entertaining interviews, Hitchcock started out true to form, regaling us with a series of amusing anecdotes. It was only on the third day that he became more sober and thoughtful in spelling out the ups and downs of his career. His assessment of the achievements and the failures was geniunely self-critical, and his account of his doubts, frustrations, and hopes was completely sincere.

  What emerged, as the talks progressed, was a striking contrast between Hitchcock's public image and his real self. Under the invariably self-possessed and often cynical surface is a deeply vulnerable, sensitive, and emotional man who feels with particular intensity the sensations he communicates to his audience.

  The man who excels at filming fear is himself a very fearful person, and I suspect that this trait of his personality has a direct bearing on his success. (accurate) Throughout his entire career he has felt the need to protect himself from the actors, producers, and technicians who, insofar as their slightest lapse of whim may jeopardise the integrity of his work, all represent as many hazards to a director. How better to defend oneself than to become the director no actor will question, to become one's own producer, and to know more about technique than the technians?

  To stay with the audience, Hitchcock set out to win it over by reawakening all the strong emotions of childhood. In his work the viewer can recapture the tensions and thrills of the games of hide-and-seek or blindman's buff and the terror of those nights when, by a trick of the imagination, a forgotten toy on the dresser gradually acquires a mysterious and threatening shape.

  All of this brings us to suspense, which, even among those who acknowledge Hitchcock's mastery of it., is commonly regarded as a minor form of the spectacle, whereas it is the(italicised) spectacle in itself.

  Suspense is simply the dramatization of a film's narrative material, or, if you will, the most intense presenation possible of dramatic situations. Here's a case in point: A man leaves his house, hails a cab, and drives to the station to catch a train. This is a normal scene in an average picture. Now, shoul that man happen to look at his watch just as he is getting into the cab and exclaim, "Good God, I shall never make that train!" that entire ride automatically becomes a sequence of pure suspense. Every red light, traffic signal, shift of the gears or touch on the brake, and every cop on the way to the station will intensify its emotional impact.

  The manifest clarity and persuasive power of the image are such that it simply will not occur to the viewer to reason: "What's his hurry? Why can't he take the next train?" Thanks to the tension created by the frenzied imagery on the screen, the urgency of the action will never be questioned.

  Obviously, this insistence on the dramatisation cannot avoid the "arbitrary", and although Hitchcock's art is precisely the ability to impose the "arbitrary", this sometimes leads the die-hards to complain about implausibility. While Hitchcock maintains that he is not concerned with plausibility, the truth is that he is rarely implausible. What he does, in effect, is to hinge the plot around a striking coincidence, which provides him with the master situation. His treatment from then on consists in feeding a maximum of tension and plausibility into the drama, pulling the strings ever tighter as he builds up toward a paroxysm. Then he suddenly lets go, allowing the story to unwind swiftly.

  In general the suspense sequence of a film are its "privileged moments", those highlights that linger on in the viewer's memory. But Hitchcock wants each and every scene to be a "previleged moment", and all of his efforts throughout his career have been directed toward achieving pictures that have no gaps or flaws.

  It is this determination to comple the audience's uninterrupted attention, to create and then to keep up the emotion, to sustain the tension throughout, that makes Hitchcock's pictures so completely personal and all but inimitable. For it is not only on the crucial passages of the story that he exercises his authority; his single-mindedness of purpose is alo reflected in the exposition, the transitions, and all the sequences which in most films are generally inconsequential.

  Even an episode that merely serves to bridge two key sequences will never be commonplace for Hitchcock loathes the "ordinary". For instance, a man who is in trouble with the law, but who we know is innocent, takes his case to a lawyer. This is an everyday situation. As handled by Hitchcock, the lawyer will appear to be skeptical and rather reluctant to become involved. Or he may, as in The Wrong Man [(1957)], agree to go along only after warning his prospective client that he lacks experience in this kind of legal work and may not be the right man for the case.

  By introducing this disturbing note, a feeling of apprehension and anxiety has been created that invests this ordinary situation with potential drama.

  Another illustration of this approach is his out-of-the-ordinary twist to the conventional scene in which a young man is introducing his girl friend to his mother. Naturally, the girl is anxious to please the older woman, who may one day become her mother-in-law. In contrast to her boy friend's relaxed manner, hers is clearly shy and flustered. With the son's introductory ritual fading into the off-screen background, the viewers will see a change come over the woman's expression as she stares at the girl, sizing her up with that purely Hitchcockian look so familiar to cinephiles. The young girl's inner turmoil is indicated by a slight movement of retreat. Here again, by means of a simple look, Hitchcock creates one of those domineering mothers he excels at portraying.

  From this point on, all of the family scenes in the picture will be charged with emotion and taunt with conflict, with every detail reflecting Hitchcock's determination to keep banality off the screen.

  The art of creating suspense is also the art of involving the audience, so that the viewer is actually a participant in the film. In this area of the spectacle, film-making is not a dual interplay between the director and his picture, but a three-way game in which the audience, too, is required to play. In the filminc context, suspense, like Tom Thumb's white pebbles or Little Red Riding-hood's walk through the woods, is a poetic means that serves to heighten the emotions and to make the heart beat faster.

  To reproach Hitchcock for specialising in suspense is to accuse him of being the least boring of filmmakers; it is also tantamount to blaming a lover who, instead of concentrating on his own pleasure, insists on sharing it with his partner. The nature of Hitchcock's cinéma is to absorb the audience so completely that the Arab viewer will forget to shell his peanuts, the Frenchman will ignore the girl in the next seat, the Italian will suspend his chain smoking, the compulsive cougher will refrain from coughing, and the Swedes will interrupt their love-making in the aisles.

  Hitchcock is universally acknowledged to be the world's formost technician; even his detractors willingly concede him this title. Yet, isn't it obvious that the choice of a scenario, its construction, and all of its contents are intimately connected to and, in fact, dependent upon that technique? All artists are indinant, and rightly so, at the critical tendency to separate form from content. This procedure is particularly illogical when applied to Hitchcock, who, as Eric Rohmer and Claude Chabrol correctly point out in their book, is neither a simple storyteller nor an esthete. "Hitchcock," they write, "is one of the greatest inventors of form in the history of cinéma. Perhaps the only film-makers who can be compared with him in this respect are Murnau and Eisenstein... Here, form does not merely embellish content, but actually creates it."

  The art of film-making is an especially difficult one to master, inasmuch as it calls for multiple and often contradictory talents. The reason why so many brilliant or very talented men have failed in their attempts at directing is that only a mind in which the analytic and synthetic are simultaneously at work can make its way out of the maze of snares inherent in the fragmentation of the shooting, the cutting, and the montage of a film. To a director, the greatest danger of all is that in course of making his film, he may lose control of it. Indeed, this is the most common cause of all fatalities.

  Each cut of a picture, lasting from three to ten seconds, is information that is given to the viewer. This information is all too often obscure or downright incomprehensible, either because the director's intentions were vague to begin with or he lacked the competence to convey them clearly.

  To those who question whether clarity is all that important, I can only say that it is the most important quality in the making of a film. By way of explanation, here is a typical example: "At this point, Balachov, understanding that he had been cheated by Carradine, went to see Benson, proposing that they contact Tolmachef and share the loot between them," etc., etc.

  In hundres of films, this dialogue, or a variant thereof, has left you bewildered, or worse, indifferent to the proceedings on the screen. For, while the authors know all about Balachov, Carradine, Benson, and Tolmachef, you, the viewer, are utterly confused by virtue of that cardinal rule of cinéma: What is said instead of being shown is lost upon the viewer.

  Since Hitchcock chooses to express everything by purely visual means, he has no use whatever for Messrs. Balachov, Carradine, Benson, and Tolmachef.

  One of the charges frequently leveled at Hitchcock is that the simplification inherent in his emphasis on clarity limites his cinématic range to almost childlike ideas. To my mind, nothing could be further from the truth; on the contrary, because of his unique ability to film the thoughts of his characters and make them perceptible without restoring to dialogue, he is, to my way of thinking, a realistic director.

  Hitchcock a realist? In cinéma, as on the stage, dialogue serves to express the thoughts of the characters but we know that in real life the things people say to each other do not necessarily reflect what they actually think or feel. This is especially true of such mundane occasions as dinner and cocktail parties, or of any meeting between casual and acquaintances. (One of differences between Théâtre and Cinéma.)

  If we observe any such gathering, it is clear that the words exchanged between the guests are superficial formalities and quite meaningless, whereas the essential is elsewhere; it is by studying their eyes that we can find out what is truly on their minds.

  Let us assume that as an observer at a reception I am looking at Mr. Y as he tells three people all about his recently holiday in Scotland with his wife. By carefully watching his face, I notice he never takes his eyes off Mrs. X's legs. Now, I move over to Mrs. X, who is talking about her children's problems at school, but I notice that she keeps staring at Ms. Z, her cold look taking in every detail of the younger woman's elegant appearance.

  Obviously, the substance of that scene is not in the dialogue, which is strictly conventional, but in what these people are thinking about. Merely by watching them I have found out that Mr. Y is physically attracted to Mrs. X and that Mrs. X is jealous of Ms. Z.

  From Hollywood Cinécittà no film-maker other than Hitchcock can capture the human reality of that scene as faithfully as I have described it. And yet, for the past forty years, each of his pictures fetures several such scenes in which the rule of counterpoint between dialogue and image achieves a dramatic effect by purely visual means. Hitchcock is almost unique in being able to film directly, that is, without resorting to explanatory dialogue, such intimate emotions such as suspicion, jealousy, desire, and envy. And herein lies a paradox: the director who, through the simplicity and clarity of his work, is the most accessible to a universal audience is also the director who excels at filming the most complex and subtle relationships between human beings.

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