ALFRED HITCHCOCK AND JEAN-LUC GODARD: THE CRITICALITY OF THE AUTEUR IN POST WAR FRENCH CINEMA

“What twist of fate could take the quite soul of a simple man and wring it into a shape like this".

–Alfred Hitchcock,"The Wrong Man"(1956)

Alfred Hitchcock’s 1956 film The Wrong Man, is fictional documentary based on the true story of Christopher Emmanuel Balestrero, an innocent man charged with a crime he did not commit. Hichcock’s film inspired one of Jean-Luc Godard's longest pieces of written criticism. In his essay, Godard on Godard, Godard addresses the content of Hitchcock’s film positing that the subject matter is the probability of events rather than the unexpected. Although Hitchcock was an American film-maker, Godard’s analysis considers Hitchcock’s directing style by framing his critique in the context of the concept known as the auteur, a stance taken by directors in the French New Wave movement, to deconstruct sociological, philosophical and political, issues at play during that time. Godard discuses the film, breaking it down into 5 acts. He relates two common film techniques known as mise-en-scène¹ and coup de théâtre² and what he refers to as epidemic effect,³ to suggest correlations in his critique of the films style to that of the director’s personal style. In revealing the common threads between actors, and film crew, Godard also address the films form by suggesting that this film noir creates a paradox by its embodiment and critique of the ideology of freedom, in a closed system.

Godard states, “To look around oneself is to live free. So the Cinema, which reproduces life, must film characters who look around them”⁴. The tragedy of Christopher Emmanuel Balestrero is that he can no longer look around. This definitive statement also serves as a critique of Hitchcock role as director. Because he has supposedly infiltrated all aspect of interior and exterior spaces in the film production, by his own constrains, Hitchcock is not afforded an objective perspective, because he can no longer look outside of the outside, just as the main character in the film, Manny, can no longer function outside of the supposed, true-to-life, narrative he represents outside of the film. This conflation of the truth of the original story of Christopher Emmanuel Balestrero, the truth of Manny, the main character that plays his role, and the truth of Alfred Hitchcock’s role of Auteur, expressed in a documentation style film, contrast to the ultimate fallacy that the original story, the story told in the film and Hitchcock’s personal story reflected through his directing style, is all based on a mistaken identity and a broken system.

Hitchcock’s, The Wrong Man, demonstrates how the control of moral and sociological practices function in society by reflecting them in both the film’s narrative composition and in the logistics of how the film was produced. This is an example of the directors role know as the Auteur. The French word, auteur, represents the concept in which the director encompasses all aspects of film such as the production the industrial process, choice of actors, as well as, screen writing and on-set commands. The auteur overwrites all of roles in film production and gives a personal perspective in such a heavy handed way that all unique processes represented by individuals in film production loose their identity—assimilating all creative choices to the directors personal vision. Although this method and theory was later criticized, it was a crucial part in defining French new wave film and was thought to be an integral part in challenging mass-culture filmmaking because at that time it functioned as a critique. American director Hitchcock appropriated this method of authorship to critically address class structure in society. Though Godard writes, “Hitchcock does the only thing possible for the rather paradoxical but compelling reason that he could do anything he like”⁵, through the appropriation of auteur methodologies, Hitchcock took a satirical stance and demonstrated its own imbedded fallacies to the point of the absurd. What appears is a contrast of the logical and reasonable to the fluxus and ambiguity of the biographical story of mistaken identity of Christopher Balestrero. It is a mimetic re-telling through Hitchcock’s main character, Manny, that dramatizes on a personal and public level the inherent fallacies and uncertainties embedded in these philosophical ideologies. And in effect, undermines their validity. By creating uncertainty in the plot in what the audience assumes is a logical system, he politicizes the idea of what Rohmer refers to as the interchangeable guilt of all mankind. (Rohmer 149) Godard speaks to the idea of interchangeable guilt by analyzing Hitchcock’s character relations between Manny and his wife Rose, stating,

“Transference no longer resides in the innocent man’s assumptions of the real murder’s crime but in the exchange of Manny’s liberty against Rose’s. As the accusation is false, the transference is false or rather, a transference of innocence. The wrong man becomes the wrong woman.”⁶

Throughout Godard’s review of "The Wrong Man" he shifts between the sociological, the philosophical, and the political, to revel the uncertainty of all of these underlying themes, while at the same time, critiques their inherent fixed nature. Because Hitchcock is using a documentary style film to relay the truth of Balestrero experience in the “real world” Godard fails to point out that the social, political and philosophical structures that frame this event to reveal its flawed nature are also fixing them in place in terms of Hitchcock’s long and successful career in filmmaking. Despite Godard’s view, that Hitchcock’s form dose not create new content, it creates a departure point to critique his material by means of undoing the role of Auteur in a radical sense. By raising two questions, Who can and cannot take on the role of auteur? And what qualifications allow one to assume and practice the privilege of this role?

End Notes

1 mise-en-scène refers to everything that appears before the camera.

2 coup de theater—a dramatic turn of events.

3When the camera movement expresses a physical trait.

4 Godard, Jean-Luc. Godard on Godard. Edited by Jean Narboni and Tom Milne. Translated by Martin Secker and Warburg Limited. Boston, Massachusetts: Da Capo Press, 1972. (51.

5 Godard, 48.

6 Godard, 53.