As for Hitch, you’re points are spot on as always. In fact I would say Rear Window is possibly his greatest film, very much for the reasons you locate above. It’s the film where the audience feels most complicit in the obsession.

For me, Hitch’s great arthouse experiment – though it obviously played well beyond the art house circuit – is Vertigo, which is extraordinarily dreamy and dark (no wonder Lynch cites it as his favourite film and riffs upon the central motifs so often). It even begs the audience to empathise with an obsessive man who dresses up a woman as his dead ex. Terrifyingly they do.

HOWEVER, I think that reading the two directors in those terms may be down to a self-fulfilling prophecy. I think that Chabrol’s reputation is much more grounded in art house than Hitchcock’s and as a result, I think it’s possible to sit in a Hitchcock film and JUST look at the technical stuff. For example, I watched Rear Window a little while ago and while I adore the technical aspects of the film (the set especially) and the way that Hitchcock fills the lives of these little people with real depth but I also think that there’s some real psychological depth there.

For example, the way that the film suggests that speculating about the lives of others (the backbone of gossip) is universally attractive but at the same time, we are all too reticent to subject our own motivations and beliefs to the same levels of scrutiny. Plus there’s all the stuff about how looking at life through a lens and framing up the perfect shot might also make you reticent to emotionally immerse yourself in something real.

So while I haven’t seen enough of either directors’ works to form a full conclusion, I think that Hitchcock might well have been short-changed as a dramatist while Chabrol’s technical skills might also have been down-played.

Elsewhere, an interesting comparison between Hollywood and Chabrol can be made if we consider ‘Un Femme Infidele’. In Chabrol’s hands it’s a masterpiece, a subtle and chilling study of jealousy and how a decadent middle-class can admonish themselves of guilt if it suits them. The remake ‘Unfaithful’ by Adrian Lyne, is simply a functional thriller, devoid of the touches Chabrol brings. It has no atmopshere nor real objective. A very useful illuminator then on what distinguishes a great director from an average one.

As for style… Hitchcock is a lot more noisy and flashy I agree. I’m not sure about his being darker… Hitchcock is pretty perverse beneath the veneer of commercialism.

> Dialogue, character and plot ; in cinematic terms, all of these are just long-winded ways of communicating what a great director can say with visuals alone.

Absolutely, and as I contest the fundmental difference between Television and Film. If more British directors were able to abandon dialogue in favour of the sort of visuals Chabrol so masters in the example above the charges of being ‘TV writ large’ wouldn’t be so readily made by critics.

There remains though a myth about Chabrol that I cannot help questioning and that is this presumption that he’s ‘the French Hitchock’. I have never seen sufficient evidence of this in the actual work itself. Hitchcock was flashy, there was a ghoulish wit at work, he thrilled. Chabrol is darker, more meditative, poetic even. He exploits silences where Hitchcock embraces screams and bursts of cacophonic strings. The problem I have with the idea that he’s the ‘French Hitchock’ is it implies he’s living in a shadow. When Chabrol is as complete and accomplished as any director I can think of.

Have you see ‘The Girl Cut In Two’? They say it’s a return to form.