Word: hitchcock
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...influence of the magnificent Alfred Hitchcock is easily discernible in countless films, and impossible to avoid in those of Francois Truffaut. Soft Skin, Truffaut's best film, integrates into its exhausting spontaneity setups from North by Northwest, and Farenheit 451, Truffaut's worst film, slavishly duplicates shot sequences from all Hitchcock's late work, climaxing in a dreadful track-in/zoom-out shot recreating Hitchcock's Vertigo distortion effect. God knows we can all learn from the Master. Nonetheless, Hitchcock-imitation is not one of Truffaut's more endearing stylistic traits and, light years behind his idol in quality, Truffaut...
...Bride Wore Black would appear a step in the wrong direction, Truffaut having subtitled it unofficially his "hommage a Hitchcock," the film directly after publications of the huge Le Cinema Selon Hitchcock now on everybody's coffee table. But the film pleasantly reveals Truffaut as having learnt more and imitating less. Only the music (by Bernard Herrman, composer of Vertigo and five other Hitchcocks), and a few shots (for example, the early close-up of the suitcase, from Marnie) recall specific Hitchcock films, and Truffaut provides instead a carefully crafted film molded around stylistic devices Truffaut reveres as a result...
...Much of Hitchcock's art relies on point-of-view, the director showing action as seen by the protagonist. When the audience and the characters share a single eye, audiences naturally begin to identify with the person through whose eyes they see; Hitchcock often undermines our complacency by forcing us to identify with a peeping tom (Rear Window) or murderer (Psycho). Halfway into The Bride Wore Black, the camera begins to follow a young mother and her son walking home from school; although we do not see Julie Kohler (Jeanne Moreau) following them, the boy's glances directly into...
...Hitchcock's films often concern individual therapy and emotional redemption through bizarre and indirect encounters with melodrama. In North by Northwest, Thornhill's adventure with the spies almost kills him, finally leaves him a more complete man than in the beginning of the film; Jeffries in Rear Window is more mature for his journey into depravity, as is Marnie after experiencing for a second time the trauma of her youth. Truffaut is too intelligent to afford dramatic consummation only to Julie's desire for revenge, and some indirect therapy does take place in The Bride Wore Black, Truffaut suggesting that...
...regardless of point-of-view and our knowledge of the intensity of her purpose, Julie's killings if understandable, are nonetheless private acts in which we cannot share. Flashback sequences, so purgative and cathartic in Hitchcock, are coldly detached in The Bride Wore Black, existing in a no-man's-land between Julie and the audience; the slow motion sequence is stylistically justifiable only if we interpret Coutard's contemplative panning as emerging from a half-memory of Julie's too personal for us to experience. The last shot of the film also deprives us of the vision...