Au-Cinema Films

Hitchcock As Auteur

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As I discussed in chapter 7, the New Wave theorists distinguished between those directors they considered auteurs, whose unique style and vision marked their films, and those directors who were merely faithful adapters of their literary sources or of other writers' screenplays. The Hollywood directors the French critics praised as auteurs include Howard Hawks, John Ford, Anthony Mann, Nicholas Ray, George Cukor, Orson Welles, and above all, Alfred Hitchcock. The French auteur theorists and directors Claude Chabrol and Eric Rohmer point out in their pioneering book Hitchcock (1957) that Hitchcock's films are deeply infused with anxiety, guilt, and existential angst, which they trace to his Catholic upbringing and education. They conclude their book with the claim that "Hitchcock is one of the greatest inventors of form in the entire history of cinema. . . . Our effort will not have been in vain if we have been able to demonstrate how an entire moral universe has been elaborated on the basis of this form and by its very rigor."1

Although a number of critics wrote about Hitchcock as a serious artist, notably Robin Wood, Ian Cameron, and the American director Peter Bog-danovich, Hitchcock's reputation as an artist was elevated in America by the translation in 1966 of François Truffaut's Hitchcock. In this book, based on fifty hours of interviews, Hitchcock and Truffaut discuss in chronological order the technical underpinnings and thematic implications of every Hitchcock film then made. The revised edition, translated into English in 1984, includes commentary on the films made after 1966. In the introduction to the 1984 edition, Truffaut makes the claim that Hitchcock was an explorer of metaphysical anxieties on a par with Kafka, Dostoevsky, and Poe, and that his works became more complex and profound as his career progressed.2 Hitchcock continues to be the subject of numerous scholarly books and articles. Entire courses in colleges and universities are devoted to the study of his work. In this chapter I consider why Alfred Hitchcock, who devoted most of his career in Hollywood to making films in the popular genre of the suspense thriller, is considered a serious film artist, a quintessential auteur.