Why He Felt the Way He Did
III. The 'Hitchcock Picture'
By way of Truffaut’s sharp eye and sense of Hitchcockian style (he spent weeks rewatching Hitchcock’s films in the lead-up to the conversation), the conversation yields moments like when Truffaut says, “In the course of our conversations, we’ve gone into the dreamlike quality of many of your films, among them Notorious, Vertigo, and Psycho.” In this exchange, Truffaut identifies, if we are to follow Wollen’s theory, a preoccupation with dreams that runs through his work, and makes its way into the formal and thematic structures of the “Hitchcock picture.” Similarly, in their exchange about Rear Window, Hitchcock, says, “The symmetry is the same as in Shadow of a Doubt.” Here, we see Hitchcock acknowledge the "Hitchcock" structure, and his attempts to reshape and reimagine it throughout his work, again an indication of his preoccupations as an artist.
In talking about The 39 Steps, the two directors note:
F.T. The Trouble with Harry has that same quality of understatement.
A.H. That’s right. Understatement is important to me (Truffaut, 1984).
In this exchange we see that Hitchcock is not only being repetitive in theme and structure, but humor and sensibility. Moreover, he identifies understatement as being important to him, again showing his knowledge of the qualities that make a film his; for him, filmmaking is about appealing to his own sensibility. Early in Hitchcock, the two engage in a crucial exchange:
F.T. The Lodger, I believe, was your first important film venture.
A.H. That’s another story. The Lodger was the first true “Hitchcock movie.”
Here, Hitchcock himself introduces the label of the “Hitchcock" film. The aforementioned moments meld together to form the idea of “Hitchcock,” of an artist who is being deliberately repetitive, and understands the way in which his works are of a certain style and sensibility that link them together. This is the essence of the auteur theory.
What is equally interesting about the conversation is that both Hitchcock and Truffaut seem less interested in discussing what the public and critics thought of a film and more so in determining whether it is, in fact, Hitchcockian. The conversation marked a real departure from how Hitchcock had previously engaged with interviewers (Wood, 2002).
In Hitchcock, Hitchcock is an honest critic of his own work, unafraid to say where things went wrong in a picture. For example, in their discussion of Stage Fright (1950), Truffaut said that the film “added little or nothing to your prestige.” Hitchcock agreed: “Well, the book had just come out and several of the reviewers had mentioned that it might make a good Hitchcock picture. And I, like an idiot, believed them! I did one thing in that picture that I never should have done; I put in a flashback that was a lie.” In discussing Jamaica Inn (1939), Hitchcock said “I made the picture, and although it became a box-office hit, I’m still unhappy over it.” Note the word “still.” That Hitchcock is still unhappy over a film released twenty-three years prior to the interview, and a relatively minor film one at that, shows again that he was an artist concerned with his body of work, who was self-critical and had his own standard of evaluation. This is hardly the behavior of a light entertainer. Perhaps the most notable example of this comes in their discussion of the film released the year after Jamaica Inn:F.T. Are you satisfied with Rebecca?
A.H. Well, it’s not a Hitchcock picture; it’s a novelette, really. The story is old-fashioned; there was a whole school of feminine literature at the period, and though I’m not against it, the fact is that the story is lacking in humor.
And there it is. The rest of this book seeks to understand this crucial moment.
