Truffaut called Hitchcock an 'artist of anxiety'. Truffaut was himself anxious enough, and a great admirer of Hitchcock, but his own best films are a mixture of lightness and weight, as Kundera might say, of gaiety and distress; plenty of pain, tragedy even, but nothing as taut, as possessive as anxiety. Truffaut was the artist of a particular kind of restlessness: the wonderful restlessness of his early films - Les 400 Coups (1959), Shoot the pianist (1960), Jules and Jim (1962).

LRB 8 February 1990 | PDF Download