Why He Felt the Way He Did
II. Establishing 'Hitchcock'
By 1962, Hitchcock had released nearly all of his films that critics have generally lauded as masterpieces, and was wrapping up work on his fortieth feature, The Birds. At around this time, François Truffaut arrived in the United States to promote his third feature, Jules and Jim (1962). Truffaut was surprised to learn that Hitchcock was not taken seriously as an artist in the United States. The Hitchcock found in the pages of the New York Times was far different from the auteur that graced the cover of Cahiers du cinéma in September of 1956. In fact, Truffaut himself was a more highly regarded filmmaker by American critics. And so Truffaut, forever a warrior of the cinema, decided to take action. In June of that year, he wrote to Hitchcock and proposed a book-length interview. He summarized the point of his invitation as such:
In the course of my discussions with foreign journalists and especially in New York, I have come to realize that their conception of your work is often very superficial. Moreover, the kind of propaganda that we were responsible for in Cahiers du cinéma was excellent as far as France was concerned, but inappropriate for America because it was too intellectual (Truffaut, 1990).
He continued:
The body of work would be preceded by a text which I would write myself and which might be summarized as follows: if, overnight, the cinema had to do without its soundtrack and became once again a silent art, then many directors would be forced into unemployment, but, among the survivors, there would be Alfred Hitchcock and everyone would realize at last that he is the greatest film director in the world.
Their conversation yielded Truffaut’s intended result: overdue critical recognition for Hitchcock as not only an artist, but an auteur.
Though Truffaut’s work is often credited with establishing what Jonathan Everett Haynes has referred to as the “myth of Hitchcock,” two important works preceded it: Claude Chabrol and Eric Rohmer’s Hitchcock: The First Forty-Four Films, published in 1957, and Peter Bogdanovich’s 1961 interview with Hitchcock published by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and reprinted in Who the Devil Made It. In preparing for his conversation with Hitchcock, Truffaut set himself in opposition to the work by Chabrol and Rohmer, which he deemed “excessively intellectual" (Haynes, 2013). Instead, in what Haynes called a “flagrantly auteurist” turn, the conversation became Hitchcock being “asked to describe his original intentions for each of his projects and then to comment on how well he believes the finished films have realized them. The object of this exercise is to handcuff, so to speak, Hitchcock the man to the ‘Hitchcock’ we imagine when watching the films.” To read Hitchcock is to understand the deliberateness behind not only each film, but each shot. Through each exchange, one sees Hitchcock’s mind at work, an artist with a clear vision that permeates each film. In doing so, Truffaut reframed Hitchcock as not just an auteur, but one of the great artists of the 20th century.In the years preceding the 1966 publication of Hitchcock, Hitchcock had already begun to establish himself as not an auteur in the aforementioned sense, but a commercial author, the brilliant mind behind a kind of suspense that was its own genre. In his study, Film Adaptation and Its Discontents, Thomas Leitch explores the way in which Hitchcock chose works to adapt for the screen. After The Paradine Case (1947), all but two of Hitchcock’s films were adapted from works of literature. Leitch describes Hitchcock’s tendency to pick works with mostly unknown authors in order to bolster his claim to authorship. He cites Strangers on a Train (1951), The Trouble with Harry (1956), and Psycho (1960) as three examples of works that were purchased cheaply and turned into Hitchcockian blockbusters. Hitchcock’s commercial auteurship came in another form: using his physical image to build a brand and promote his motion pictures. Of this, Leitch writes:
His success in turning his own corporeal presence into a trademark in his cameo appearances, his witting endpapers to Alfred Hitchcock Presents and The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, the monthly mystery magazine and the board game to which he lent his name and image, even the signature eight-stroke silhouette with which he often signed autographs established him as the quintessential directorial brand name, an auteur capable of eclipsing authors whose claim to authority was simply less powerful (Leitch, 2007).
Leitch’s summary of the Hitchcock brand reveals something about the director himself: that he both actively sought credit for being a directorial genius, but also for being the creator or author of his works. This is not something that just any director would do, but one who understood the aforementioned “Hitchcock touch,” and how it permeated his body of work. It seems as though Hitchcock was aware of the “Hitchcock” Wollen alludes to, and did everything in his power to cultivate how the public understood him as an author. In the Truffaut conversation, the commercial author and directorial auteur become one. What Hitchcock’s branding shows is that he was just as concerned with bolstering his claim to authorship/auteurship as Truffaut was, which helps explain why a film like Rebecca, itself full of competing authors, would have been slighted by Hitchcock.
