Truffaut’s editing was crucial to the shape of the finished book, after all it wasn’t just Hitchcock who wanted the campaign to succeed. There was a constant, and increasingly fraught, back and forth between Truffaut and his translator Helen Scott frantically editing and revising, with Hitchcock himself having oversight over drafts and the final editions. The size of the book compared to the fact that Truffaut claimed to have gathered 50 hours of conversation shows pretty plainly the extent to which it was edited over the course of four years. When you compare the book to the original interview tapes it becomes pretty clear quite how much of a propaganda tool Hitchcock really was. The timing was therefore perfect when one of France’s foremost critics came forward to offer him an extensive platform from which he could plug his new film under his revised guise of Hitchcock The Artist. Whilst his mainstream reputation was soaring high following several years of the popular TV show Alfred Hitchcock Presents, his critical reputation among serious critics was in danger of stagnating just as The Birds was due to be released. Some 35 years later Hitchcock needed to harness this spirit of self-promotion more than ever. As if having his own personal logo wasn’t enough, Hitchcock felt the need to literally post it through people’s doors - and he was only 28. In 1927, after the success of his first hit, The Lodger, he had his famous profile sketch printed onto small wooden jigsaw pieces, packaged into bags and sent to family, friends and influential industry people. Robert Kapsis points out in Hitchcock: The Making Of A Reputation that the polishing and upkeep of his public image had been a constant concern throughout Hitchcock’s entire career. Whilst he was enthusiastic about the popularity of his films, this dismissal of them as being somewhat low-brow hurt Hitchcock and was something he was keen to remedy. Influential British critics like Penelope Houston and Lindsay Anderson at Sight & Sound were dismissive of Hitchcock’s artistry, not least because of his enormous mainstream popularity. This wasn’t a view shared by many elsewhere in Europe and America. He passionately believed that Hitchcock was a superb ‘realist’, in the sense that he was able to capture emotions and project them onto a screen creating sensations which felt genuinely and completely real. ![]() In his invitation letter he explained his motive for wanting to conduct the interviews: "the propaganda we initiated in the Cahiers Du Cinéma, while effective in France, carried no weight in America because the arguments were over-intellectual." In the pages of the prominent French film journal referred to, Cahiers Du Cinéma, Truffaut and others had long argued that Alfred Hitchcock was a great artist and not merely a director of popular thrillers. Rather than being a great meeting of minds indulging in Kuleshov and Murnau between lunches and witticisms, the whole thing was in fact probably one of the most successful publicity campaigns of the 20th century. Rear Window was "a purely cinematic film" because it is entirely about the act of watching in that "you have an immobilized man looking out…The second part shows what he sees and the third part shows how he reacts."Īs a result of the near mythical status that the interviews took on, their importance has been overblown and the more cynical back story of how the interviews were used as a crude marketing tool is rarely told. They lament the passing of the silent film era as this was "the purest form of cinema", according to Hitchcock, since it "told the story in a cinematic way, through a succession of shots", as opposed to "photographs of people talking". The French avant-garde idea of "pure cinema" is key to much of the discussion, with Hitchcock and Truffaut discussing how the best, or most "pure", films should use the camera and sound design to tell a story. A textbook explanation of the mechanics of eliciting emotion from the editing together of moving images. It has since been cherished as a rare moment where the secrets of film were prised from the great Buddha of suspense by one of his most dedicated followers. ![]() The book of the interviews was published four years later in France and five years later in America under the original title of Hitchcock. ![]() What followed has been heralded as one of the most important encounters in the history of cinema. Hitchcock eagerly accepted and in August of that year the pair met in Hollywood for a week long discussion of every single one of Hitchcock’s films. In it he requested an extended interview of 500 questions to run over the course of a week and to be recorded on tape. In 1962 the accomplished French New Wave director and film critic Francois Truffaut wrote a letter to Alfred Hitchcock.
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