Who takes the train?

Michael Wood

  • Letters by François Truffaut, edited by Gilles Jocob, Claude de Givray and Gilbert Adair
    Faber, 589 pp, £17.50, November 1989, ISBN 0 571 14121 8

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).

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