Recalling Rossellini on movement and emotion i

It's mathematical:
change a rhythm, 
immediately you have
an emotion.

It follows ineluctably: change content without movement, and you have non sequitur, a species of shock. With this simple technique, a fine and "soldiering" performance by Judith Anderson was intensified in Rebecca (1938), manipulating audiences toward greater empathy with the heroine and discernibly closer to each other in their seats. This motion picture, cited in one's profile as a favourite, adopted Rossellini's law before it was even drafted.

Mrs Danvers was almost never seen walking and was rarely shown in mo-tion. If she entered a room in which the heroine was, what happened is that the girl suddenly heard a sound and there was the ever-present Mrs Danvers, standing per-fectly still by her side. To have shown Mrs Danvers walking would have been to humanize her. 


Hitchcock tells us this in a finer study of his films than we have the right to expect, in which several days of the director's inter-views with François Truffaut in 1962 were transcribed, published and subsequently revised. The cruelest director of women, interviewed by one of their very best. Truffaut proves himself to be a master of analytical interrogation, with Hitchcock only too glad to confess. 


It was one's pleasure to study their works simultaneously and repeatedly, in 16mm reels shipped to one's college eating club by two clubmates majoring in French. We would screen them in the library on weekends, party or no party. Everybody I knew, admired Hitchcock without reservation. But we loved François Truffaut. If static Danny Danvers stands extremely well for the manipula-tions of Alfred Hitchcock, then Truffaut's directing of himself, directing "Julie's" folding of her hands on a balcony, reveals layers in manipulation which few have ever touched.






Alfred Hitchcock, director
Rebecca
Selznick Studio, 1940©
United Artists


François Truffaut
  Helen G. Scott, translation
Hitchcock
Éditions Ramsay [and]
Simon & Schuster, 1983©


François Truffaut, director, co-writer, producer
Day For Night [and]
La nuit américaine
Les Filmes du Carrosse, 1973©


François Truffaut
  Sam Flores, translation
Day for Night
  The Complete Script of the Film 
Grove Press, 1975©