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Red Blood on White Bread: Hitchcock, Chabrol, and French Cinema
- University of Texas Press
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Red Blood on White Bread Hitchcock, Chabrol, and French Cinema Richard Neupert Hitchcock and the French N o British or American director has been more important to French critics and theorists than Alfred Hitchcock. Since the 1940s, Hitchcock has been at the center of every major debate and every critical movement in French theory, from auteurism to structuralism, psychoanalysis, feminism, and beyond. Moreover, Hitchcock’s highly structured narratives and manipulative cinematic techniques inspired several generations of French filmmakers to offer pastiches of shots, scenes, and even whole movies “à la Hitchcock.” Thus, there is no more fertile ground for evaluating the impact of Alfred Hitchcock on world cinema than testing his ties to French film criticism and practice. This chapter reminds us how crucial Hitchcock’s movies were for the formation of the French politique des auteurs in the 1950s, but also how fundamental his narrative strategies proved for a variety of directors ever since, and especially for, Claude Chabrol. Just what “Alfred Hitchcock” means to French critics, however, is not necessarily the same as for many American and British scholars. It was not so much his label as “master of suspense” that initially intrigued French critics , so much as his formal rigor and narrative strategies. During the 1950s, much of the critical interest in Hitchcock involved having to excuse his work in genre filmmaking, while trying to provide evidence of thematic concerns that went deeper than the surface of his technically polished suspense films. However, not all French critics were willing to look beyond the façade. French leftists in particular have long attacked his brand of apolitical, manipulative 128 found in translation filmmaking. Two firm camps were quickly entrenched in France. At the same time in the 1950s that Cahiers du cinéma was devoting great praise and attention to Hitchcock, their rival, Positif, attacked his “neo-Nazi” themes and failure to connect with social reality. A Hitchcock movie was too much like a roller-coaster ride, a well-constructed studio product.1 Regardless of which side of the Hitchcock debate one was on, there was no denying that he played a vital role in the formation of cinema criticism. The heated disagreements over Hitchcock’s movies often forced his biggest supporters to make bold claims about hidden themes and personal symbolism as they tried to counter complaints of his shallow conservatism. Many of these passionate defenses came from a new generation of reviewers who staked their careers on proving that Hitchcock was a central figure in the modern cinema. Alfred Hitchcock and the young French critics of Cahiers du cinéma both benefited from this unparalleled association in the 1950s and 60s. Alfred Hitchcock was interested in France long before French critics became so interested in him. As James M. Vest points out, Hitchcock was a Francophile all his life. For him, France was the place of temptation, deception , and the appealing, passionate sides of life. French culture, including its language, wines, literature, and foods, was intriguing to him, and by Vest’s calculations, one fourth of all Hitchcock films “included substantial allusions to France or sequences in French.”2 Not surprisingly, it was during the 1950s that Hitchcock’s love of France became more and more pronounced, including frequent visits to Paris for the premieres of his films, at the very moment when French critics, and Cahiers du cinéma in particular, were valiantly championing his artistry. Not only did he revel in the very rewarding experience of being the center of attention at French press conferences, but he began to carry issues of Cahiers around the globe with him as a marker of his new status in world cinema. But that auteur ranking was the result of a slow and often controversial process initiated by a handful of particularly adept and fanatical young critics in Paris. During the 1940s there were only a few sporadic attempts to elevate Alfred Hitchcock as a major auteur, and certainly one factor that delayed his ascendance in France was that his American movies were not readily available until after the war. But soon Hitchcock’s more recent movies, along with the newly discovered American films noirs, swept across French screens and prompted widespread discussion. According to Vest, twenty-four Hitchcock films played in Paris between 1945 and 1954. The new prevalence and power of ciné-clubs, film journals, and review columns in the popular press guaranteed that a great [44.210.78.150] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 07...