Parky at the Pictures (DVD 30/11/2017)

During his 50+ years in the French film industry, Bertrand Tavernier has done a little bit of everything. Starting out as an adolescent fan, he wrote criticism, worked as an on-set assistant and served as a publicist before graduating to directing. He has also done valuable work as an archivist. But his greatest contribution to keeping the memory of old films alive may well come in the form of Journey Through French Cinema, a magnificent three-hour documentary that represents merely the first steps in a trip down memory lane that will eventually be completed in an eight-hour TV series. Taking its cues from Martin Scorsese's A Personal Journey Through American Movies (1995) and My Voyage to Italy (2001), this is essential viewing for all cinéastes and begs the question why someone hasn't thought of taking a similar turn through the highways and byways of British cinema.

Rather fittingly, the odyssey opens with a shot of Philippe Noiret in Tavernier's first feature, The Watchmaker of St Paul (1976), entering the gate of the family home in Lyon where parents René and Geneviève Tavernier has hosted such literary luminaries as poet Louis Aragon while publishing the anti-Vichy journal, Confluences, during the 1940-44 Occupation. This commitment to freedom of expression and resistance to tyranny left its mark on Tavernier as a man and as an artist and he recalls the thrill he felt at seeing the city lit up on the night the first American troops arrived.

In many ways, sitting in a darkened cinema and seeing the screen illuminated continues to remind Tavernier of that sense of exhilaration and excitement. He was five when the family relocated to Paris in 1946 and reflects on the time he spent in a sanatorium in Saint-Gervais being treated for tuberculosis and a problem with his retina. During this period, he saw the first film he remembers and shares the car chase sequence from Jacques Becker's Dernier atout (1942) as a preamble to a discussion of the director who first shaped his artistic sensibilities.

Tavernier considers Becker a genius and uses clips from Casque d'or (1952) to show how deftly he captures the atmosphere of the fin-de-siècle demimonde and builds towards the climactic tragedy. Such was Becker's attention to detail that minor characters were as perfectly delineated as the leads played by Simone Signoret and Serge Reggiani. Tavernier dips into the Modigliani biopic Montparnasse 19 (1958) to extol the elegance of Becker's camera style and into Rendez-vous de juillet (1949) to claim that, as a huge fan of Ernst Lubitsch and Howard Hawks, he was one of the first French directors to introduce American tropes into popular films.

If the jazz played by Rex Stewart in the latter paean to youth caught the postwar mood, Becker captured the rhythms of screwball in Edouard et Caroline (1951) and reclaimed film noir from Hollywood in the gripping prison escape saga, Le Trou (1960). Yet Becker could also be very French in exploring everyday life Falbalas (1945) and Antoine et Antoinette (1947). He also ensure his gangsters were recognisably Gallic and not pale American imitations in Touchez pas au grisbi (1954), in which he dwelt on Jean Gabin's bedtime preparations in his hideaway flat to reinforce his individualism. Such attention to detail was also evident in rustic tales like Goupi mains rouge (1943) and urban parables like Antoine et Antoinette, which turns on a lost lottery ticket.

As the champion of an auteur cinema that countered the verbosity of what he dubbed `the Tradition of Quality', François Truffaut is seen in archive footage hailing Becker's technique and Tavernier employs snippets from his films to show the simplicity of his settings, his surprisingly modern storytelling style and the genuine empathy he felt for his characters. He compares Becker's ordinary decency to that of George Orwell and shows how milieu and character were intertwined to achieve an authenticity that made his work more plausible and potent, none more so than in the scenes in Le Trou designed to demonstrate how difficult breaking through the concrete floor of a cell would be. Sadly, however, Becker died shortly after finishing the film at just 52 and a montage of memorable images from his monochrome masterpieces ends a heartfelt and precisely analytical section on a personal hero.

When he started school. Tavernier developed an obsession with cult cinemas and we see stills of various venues from his youth, as he tells a story about Quentin Tarantino thinking it was cool that there was once a Parisian theatre called The Far West. We see a clip from Luc Moullett's Les Sièges de l'Alcazar (1989) about these much-loved fleapits and the kind of people who used to haunt them, as Tavernier recalls the modern American Westerns and crimes films he used to see, as well as older French films like Jean Delannoy's Macao, l'enfer du jeu (1939). a Sternbergian melodrama about the Sino-Japanese War with Erich von Stroheim, Sessue Hayakawa and Mireille Balin. He remembers liking its honest approach to sex and comments on the Roger Vitrac dialogue and the fact that Delannoy had to replace Von Stroheim with reshot scenes with Pierre Renoir during the Occupation so as not to upset the Nazis.

This refernece brings Tavernier to another hero in Jean Renoir. He recalls being stunned by the Marseillaise sequence at the outbreak of the Great War in La Grande illusion (1937) and being so aware that he was witnessing a new kind of French cinema that he remained in his seat and watched it twice more before reluctantly heading home. Tavernier was also taken by Une Partie de campagne (1936), a much-troubled featurette was only released in a truncated form in 1946, and La Marseillaise (1938), which he claims to have been the first historical film with the people as the heroes. But he was also fascinated by the shooting in depth in La Règle du jeu (1939) and the camera movements in Le Crime de Monsieur Lange (1935), which brought a subtle lyricism to lengthy takes that locked the characters into their environments and allowed Renoir to flit between facial close-ups as the dramatic focus of a scene shifted.

In Toni (1935), Renoir anticipated neo-realism and Tavernier finds echo in its dining-table sequence with one in La Chienne (1931), which starred the incomparable Michel Simon. He notes the contribution made to the latter by editor Marguerite Renoir and to Jacques Prévert's script for Le Crime de Monsieur Lange. But he lingers on Renoir's relationship with Jean Gabin, who was so popular with French audiences in the 1930s that his roles were almost a barometer for national self-esteem. Tavernier recalls meeting Gabin and relates an anecdote about Renoir instructing Curt Courant how to light a footplate sequence in La Bête humaine (1938). He also shows the kitchen scene at the train drivers' digs to contrast the Zolaesque realism with the romanticism he brings to Gabin's scenes with Simone Simon.

According to Tavernier, Renoir respected his Impressionist father's painting style. but had his own approach to framing and composing shots. Yet, as the `Petite Navire' sequence in La Grande illusion and the tenement shooting in Le Crime de Monsieur Lange reveal, Renoir was also a master of improvisation and Tavernier highlights how the camera movements around the windows overlooking the courtyard were inspired by a spur of the moment decision that brought the scene to more vivid life. We see a clip of Renoir explaining his technique and how it used to free actors and cameramen to shoot in long, fluid takes that retained the integrity of the action.

It saddens Tavernier, therefore, that this generous, intelligent and intuitive artist should have written letters of an anti-semitic nature in 1940 and he avers that it's probably a relief for Renoir's reputation that he left for the United States so that he didn't do anything he might later have regretted during the Vichy era. Nevertheless, Gabin never forgave him for his views and perceived bigotry and always qualified acknowledgements of his artistry with blunt assessments of his personality. Screenwriter Charles Spaak supposedly told Tavernier that Renoir had a fondness for Italian Fascism, but he was eventually forgiven and returned to make French Cancan (1955), which saw him reunite with the ever-excellent Gabin and make bracing use of colour during the exuberant dance set-pieces.

Akin to James Cagney and Spencer Tracy in Hollywood, Gabin epitomised working-class machismo in film like Marcel Carné's Le Jour se lève (1939), in which he co-starred with Arletty and Jules Berry. In Julien Duvivier's La Belle équipe (1936), he was the spirit of the Popular Front, while in Jean Grémillon's Remorques (1941) he embodied the embattled wartime soul. Even when he played a deserter in Carné's Le Quai des brumes (1938), Gabin remained a man of the people. Yet he also spent much of the war in Hollywood and told Tavernier that he was more use there than in being manipulated into a false hero during the Occupation.

Eventually, however, Gabin joined the Free French Forces and fought in North African before participating in the Liberation of Paris. Yet he struggled to regain his status, despite films like René Clément's Au-delà des grilles (1949). He later reflected on his wartime adventures in Gilles Grangier's Sous le Signe du taureau (1969), but never shied away in interviews from what he called his black curtain period. Tavernier blames Marlene Dietrich for prolonging this, as their affair kept Gabin from making a potentially triumphal comeback in Carné's Les Portes de la nuit (1946). However, he returned to his trademark everyman roles in the likes of Georges Lacombe's La Nuit est ma royaume (1951), in which he drove another steam train. Tavernier also highlights Grangier's Gas-Oil (1955), Henri Verneuil's Des gens sans importance (1956) and Pierre Granier-Deferre's Le Chat (1971) and declares Gabin's performance in Henri Decoin's La Vérité sur Bébé Donge (1952) to be one of his bravest, as he was cast against type as an anti-hero.

He was only marginally more sympathetic in Becker's Touchez pas au grisbi and Julien Duvivier's Voici le temps des assassins (1956). But, once again, Gabin came to embody a new France in Claude Autant-Lara's En Cas de malheur (1958), in which he resisted the charms of Brigitte Bardot. Getting too old to play the romantic lead, he displayed a gnarled gravity in items like Grangier's Le Désordre et la nuit (1958). in which he play a vice cop who develops a soft spot for drug-addicted prostitute Nadja Tiller. Autant-Lara exploited Gabin's little-used comic gifts in La Traversée de Paris (1956), yet still gave him a scene in which he rails against those who had betrayed France during the war. Around this time, the fiftysomething Gabin moved into grand homme roles in Verneuil's Le Président (1961), while assuming the part of Georges Simenon's great detective in Jean Delannoy's Maigret tends une piège (1958). But Gabin also showed a commendable lack of vanity, as a has been opposite rising star Jean-Paul Belmondo in Verneuil's Un Singe en hiver (1962). Indeed, directors like Henri Decoin were just pleased to have him in thrillers like Razzia sur la chnouf (1955) because he was the consummate professional and knew how to play a scene better than any writer or director. Tavernier recalls Gabin needing to do things his own way, but he remains a fan of the bluff charm that helped define the French cinema of his heyday.

Curiously, Tavernier begins his analysis of Marcel Carné with his penultimate fictional feature, Les Assassins de l'ordre (1971), to suggest that he always managed to create a credible world, in spite of leaving the writing of his films to others. Over clips from Le Jour se lève and Hôtel du Nord (1939), Tavernier recalls scenarist Henri Jeanson declaring that Carné was a difficult man to work with because he was obsessed with creating atmosphere. We see footage of Jeanson complaining about Carné being fussy about casting decisions and initially being unconvinced by the iconic actress, Arletty. But their collaborations on the aforementioned and Les Enfants du paradis (1945) suggest that Carné could mould raw talent, although he was happier working with natural screen actors like Louis Jouvet, who is seen in a scene from Hôtel du Nord. But the cantankerous Carné also fell out with his favoured scriptwriter, Jacques Prévert, when he refused his suggestion of Simone Simon for the lead in Les Portes de la nuit.

Ultimately, the part went to Nathalie Nattier, whom Tavernier considers a disaster. But, if Carné wasn't a born writer and didn't always get his casting decisions right, he had an eye for detail and a feel for authentic characters. He was also prepared to discuss proscribed topics like the Spanish Civil War in Hôtel du Nord, which even contained a gay character. Moreover, he appreciated the benefits of studio realism and forged a valuable link with production designer Alexander Trauner, whose street set for Le Jour se lève is shown in construction so that it isolated Gabin's fugitive anti-hero. We also see the scene of Jules Berry tumbling down the staircase after being shot, which is accompanied by the reflections of future director Claude Sautet in a Positif review that extols Carné's virtue as a director of people and places.

While in Poetic Realist territory, Tavernier also explores the work of composer Maurice Jaubert, whom he claims understood the use of a music in cinema better than anyone else. We hear the jaunty folk tune as Gabin strolls along a street in Hôtel du Nord and the ingenious use of accordion and saxophone in Jean Vigo's L'Atalante (1934), with the joke about Michel Simon being able to play a record with his fingernail remaining a gem eight decades later. There's a melancholic melodic sweetness to the soundtrack of René Clair's Quatorze juillet (1933), while, over a scene from Duvivier's Un Carnet du bal (1937), Tavernier notes that Jaubert instinctively felt that music lay at the heart of a film because it could convey emotions without needing words. To prove the point, he contrasts the swelling romance of the ballroom dream sequence with the pulsating percussion used in Le Jour se lève, as Gabin paces his garret room with his fate seemingly sealed before the bullets start to shatter the window.

Tavernier hails the 40 year-old Jaubert's death while fighting for his country a tragedy. But he was glad to be able to talk Truffaut into using some of the music from L'Atalante in L'Histoire d'Adèle H. (1975) and was even more delighted when some of the music from his favourite French composers was finally released on LPs. Moving on, Tavernier discusses the way Hollywood tends to use orchestras, while there is much greater nuance in Narciso Yepes's solo guitar in René Clément's Jeux interdits (1952). Jean Wiener's mournful harmonica in Touchez pas au grisbi and Miles Daviss's soaring trumpet in Louis Malle's Lift to the Scaffold (1958). Tavernier also admires the way Robert Bresson employed a Mozart mass in A Man Escaped (1958) before commending the work of Georges Auric on Jean Cocteau's La Belle et la bête (1946), Georges van Parys on Max Ophüls's Madame de... (1953), Jean-Jacques Grunewald on Bresson's Les Anges du péché (1943) and Jacques Ibert on Maurice Tourneur's Justin de Marseille (1935). He also states that film music is one of the ways in which French and American cultures differ, as French scores owe more to modern composers, while Hollywood's are more rooted in the classical tradition.

We hear a Joseph Kosma harmonica strain playing over a scene in Carné's Les Portes de la Nuit, as Yves Montand begins to sing along. Kosma wrote several songs with Jacques Prévert and Tavernier notes the Berlin influence of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill on his work. The lyricism of his score for Renoir's Une Partie de campagne captures the bliss of a summer day beside the river, while composer Antoine Duhamel suggests that his marches in La Grand illusion managed to be anti-militaristic. The emotion surges as Gabin kisses and nearly throttles Blanchette Brunoy by the trackside in La Bête humaine, while it playfully counterpoints Jean-Louis Barrault's mimed adoration of the statuesque Arletty in Les Enfants du paradis. Ending this section, we see a clip from Henri Calef's lesser-known Bagarres (1948), as the music helps build the tension as Jean Murat climbs the stairs to menace Maria Casares, and Tavernier notes that Kosma only came to film because Prévert wanted him to compose his song in Le Crime de Monsieur Lange and Tavernier is baffled that it isn't better known.

Moving into the realms of commercial cinema, Tavernier alights upon American actor Eddie Constantine, who became a cult figure in France as troubleshooter Lemmy Caution in films like Jean Sacha's Cet Homme est dangereux (1953). Considering him a breath of fresh air n postwar cinema, Tavernier lauds the dialogue of Marcel Duhamel over a scene of Constantine driving a speedboat and urging his female companion to speak French because the public doesn't like subtitles. Tavernier is also a big fan of Sacha, who started out doing distinctive caricatures of Hollywood stars and later edited films for Max Ophüls and Orson Welles and Tavernier sees the latter's influence in Cet Homme est dangereux and credits cinematographer Marcell Weiss for the expressionist lighting and oblique angles in the noirish visuals.

In Bernard Borderie's La Môme vert-de-gris (1946), Constantine escapes from a fire and finds a dead body before the viewpoint shifts to a subjective shot that consciously hommaged a scene in Delmer Daves's Dark Passage (1947). Tavernier also notes the violence of the action, as Lemmy shoots one man, hits another with a hammer and snaps the neck of a third. But the witty voiceover also shows Lemmy talking to himself in order to steel his confidence and thanking himself for his good wishes. You can almost feel Truffaut, Chabrol and Godard hugging themselves in the darkness as they watched such gleeful self-reflexivity.

John Berry also worked with Welles as an actor in the Mercury Theatre, but sought sanctuary in France after coming under HUAC suspicion for directing John Garfield in He Ran All the Way (1951). He made his mark with another Constantine thriller, Ça va barder (1955), which Tavernier considers one of the first great French noirs. Its dialogue was penned by Jacques-Laurent Bost, a lover of Simone de Beauvoir and the brother of the more famous screenwriter Pierre, who forged a partnership with Jean Aurenche that was despised by Truffaut, but admired by Tavernier, who collaborated with the pair on four occasions). He also enthuses about Jacques Lemare's American-influenced imagery and the part played by character actors Jean Carmet, André Versini, Clément Harari, Jean Danet and Roger Saget in keeping the action cracklingly authentic.

Tavernier regrets that Constantine made more formulaic films as time went by, but he enjoyed a revival after Michel Deville's Lucky Jo (1964) and Godard's iconic Alphaville (1965). This mention of the nouvelle vague leads into Truffaut's Les 400 coups (1959) and Tirez sur la pianiste (1961), which Tavernier saw when he was writing reviews and thinking about making films himself with his okl lycée friend, Volker Schlondörff. They spent a lot of time at Henri Langlois's Cinémathèque Française in the Rue d'Ulm and Tavernier recalls having his glasses broken during a demonstration to prevent Langlois's dismissal by culture minister, whose Spanish Civil War classic, L'Espoir (1938), was one of the films that most surprised Tavernier at the Cinémathèque, along with Duvivier's Allo Berlin? Ici Paris! (1932), which made audacious use of skewed point-of-view shots.

It was while he was enjoying Langlois's eclectic programming that Tavernier met Yves Martin and Bernard Martinand, with whom he formed the Nickel-Odeon ciné-club that tried to show new and older films in need to reclamation. Among them were Delannoy's Le Garçon sauvage (1951), which had been written by Jacques Lourcelles and Henri Jeanson, and Jacques Panijel's Octobre à Paris (1962), which was banned by the authorities for its discussion of the Algerian War. Tavernier recalls how handling such marginalised films taught him a lot about the need to preserve nitrate films. But he also recalls the pride the trio took in unearthing obscure titles and in rediscovering Edmond T. Gréville, who worked in both France and Britain.

In Remous (1934), Gréville explored sexual impotency after athlete Maurice Maillot is injured in a car crash and wife Jeanne Boitel drives him to suicide by ogling other men. During one kiss sequence, Gréville resorts to almost avant-garde fast cutting to convey the unleashed passions. In Menaces (1939), he considered the threat posed by Hitler in a story set in a hotel for refugees, with a shot of faces peering accusingly through the clear squares of a glass door being matched by the Janus mask worn by the mysterious Erich von Stroheim, who is torn between peace and war. Unsurprisingly, the film was banned during the Occupation. But when Gréville came to film an epilogue after the Liberation, stars like Ginette Leclerc and Jean Galland had been interned for collaborating with the Nazi film company, Continental (which was the subject of Tavernier's fine 2001 film, Laissez Passer) and he had to use lookalikes.

Gréville produced another brooding study of sexual frustration in Le Diable souffle (1947), which saw cinematographer Henri Alekan make fine use of the Rhône countryside, as Charles Vanel and Spanish fugitive Jean Chevrier fight over Héléna Bossis. We also get a clip from one of Gréville's undervalued British films, Noose (1948), which has a palpable sense of noir menace. However, he died young and the ciné-club contributed towards the cost of his funeral. René Clair (who had directed Sous les toits de Paris, 1929) wrote a letter in praise of Gréville and Tavernier subsequently helped to publish the novel he had written at 19 and his memoirs.

Taking the sophistication level up a notch, Tavernier now moves on to Jean-Pierre Melville. whose Bob le flambeur (1956) he had first saw in a cinema next to a strip club. He recalls the ease with which the opening shifted from Montmartre to Pigalle and the smooth performance of Roger Duchesne in the title role and the sexy innocence of Isabelle Corey. The same air of noirish melodrama informed Deux Hommes dans Manhattan (1959), which Tavernier reviewed with enthusiasm in L'Etrave. This led to him interviewing Melville at Studios Jenner and he remains in awe of the first director he ever met and remembers trembling in his presence.

We see clips from Le Doulos (1963), as we learn that Melville was an insomniac who used to write at night and hear that he sent a letter to Tavernier's parents informing them of his enthusiasm for cinema when offering him a job as an assistant on Léon Morin, prêtre (1961) alongside Volker Schlondörff, whose cameo as a German soldier is shown. We also hear a recording of a row between Melville and Jean-Paul Belmondo on the set of L'aîné des Ferchaux (1963), as the latter disliked the way the director threw his weight around with the crew. During the shooting of L'Armée des ombres (1969), things became so strained that Melville used assistant Georges Pellegrin to pass on instructions to Lino Ventura and his cast mates. But Melville was a meticulous craftsman and Schlondörff explains in an archive interview how he measured precisely when composing images. He also made imaginative use of the Jenner studio, with corridors, offices, staircases and doorways cropping up in various guises in his pictures.

We see clips from Le Samouraï (1967), Le Cercle rouge (1970) and Un Flic (1972), as Schlondörff recalls how literally Melville treated book adaptations and how well he paced dialogue sequences like those involving Emmanuelle Riva and Bemondo and Ventura and Simone Signoret. He was fond of depicting bars and made evocative use of mirrors and used long takes, while also borrowing elements from American noirs like André de Toth's Crime Wave (1953). However, the scene in Le Doulos involving Serge Reggiani and René Lefèvre in the attic by the railway influened Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds (2009).

According to Tavernier, Melville created his own melancholic world in which realism and melodrama overlapped like a cross between Robert Bresson and William Wyler. But his restraint in the big moments made his films seem authentic, especially as he rarely used music to counterpoint them and usually filmed them simply without directorial flourish. He might have been an awkward customer, but Melville had a singular vision and remained rigorously faithful to it Despite proving a poor assistant director, Tavernier made a better impression as a press officer for producer Georges de Beauregard's Rome-Paris Films on titles like Jacques Rozier's Adieu Philippine (1963). This job enabled him to get to know Godard and Chabrol, while also meeting idols like John Ford and promoting landmark features like Agnès Varda's Cleo de 5 à 7 (1962), which he still commends for its insights and freshness. We see clips from Chabrol's Landru (1963) and Godard's Pierrot le fou (1965), on which Tavernier got to watch Raoul Coutard in action and meet the Hollywood maverick Samuel Fuller. He also discovered the effort that composer Antoine Duhamel put into his score. Yet in order to satisfy co-producer Carlo Ponti, the music that Georges Delarue produced for Le Mépris (1963) was replaced in the Italian version by a score by Piero Piccioni.

Tavernier considers one of the best films he promoted for De Beauregard to be Pierre Schoenendorffer's Le 317ème section (1965), which is set in Indochina in the 1950s and among the most unflinchingly gruelling war films ever made. Howver, he admires Claude Sautet in the attic by the railways Classe tous risques (1960), which he ranks among the finest polar crime films. We see a clip of the street robbery with Lino Ventura before moving on to Jean-Paul Rappeneau's La Vie de château (1966) and Maurice Labro's Le Fauve est lâché (1959), which Sautet refine his writing skills. Sautet took his directorial debut from a novel by ex-crook José Giovanni (who also inspired Becker's Le Trou) and took a risk in casting comic actor Dario Moreno (known for lighter fare like John Berry's Oh! Qué mambo, 1959) and turned him into a heavy.

In particular, Tavernier praises the post office scene and the street finale and lauds Sautet's control of his story and actors in Les Choses de la vie (1970) and Max et les ferrailleurs (1971), which both featured Michel Piccoli and Romy Schneider. Tavernier explains that Sautet's scripts seemed rigidly formal, but he liked visual fluidity and also knew his music. Indeed, he co-wrote the theme for the latter with Philippe Sarde. But, at this juncture, Tavernier decides that he has reached journey's end (for now) and we leave him outside the cinema museum in Lyon discussing what native sons Auguste and Louis Lumières would have shouted to start the Cinématographe rolling for the first moving pictures in the 1890s.

This insert running alongside the closing credits could be taken as a covert advertisement for Lumière! (2016), Cannes supremo Thierry Frémaux's portmanteau of restored pioneering flickers, which Tavernier co-produced. But it seem brings proceedings back to the birthplace of both cinema and Bertrand Tavernier and beckons cinephile to embark upon their own exploration of a glorious screen tradition. Sadly, many of the titles cited here and expertly juxtaposed by editors Guy Lecorne and Marie Deroudille are not available on disc in this country and one or two remain rarities in France. But those with deep pockets will be richly rewarded by following Tavernier's 95 recommendations, as he knows his stuff and is not so hung up on trendy critical theories as to limit his selections to art cinema.

Doubtless, some will lament the absence of silent masters like Georges Méliès, Max Linder, Louis Feuillade, Louis Delluc, Germaine Dulac, Jean Epstein and Marcel L'Herbier, as well as such divisive figures as Abel Gance, Sacha Guitry and Marcel Pagnol. But it's to be hoped that they will feature in the tele-sequel, along with Jean Grémillon, Max Ophüls, Robert Bresson, Georges Franju, Jacques Tati, Alain Resnais, Louis Malle. Jacques Demy. Eric Rohmer, Jacques Rivette, Maurice Pialat and Bertrand Blier. It will also be interesting to see whether Tavernier finds room for more women film-makers, as well as middlebrows like Roger Vadim and Claude Lelouch and such broad comics as Fernandel, Bourvil and Luis de Funès. Equally intriguing will be which foreign-born directors he decides to discuss and how up to date he will elect to go, as there is nothing on view here beyond the mid-1960s. However, he has done enough to earn our trust with this splendidly astute and sincerely personal introduction and leave us eagerly awaiting what will surely be his magnum opus.

Chuck Workman revisits more familiar territory in Magician: The Astonishing Life and Work of Orson Welles. But, while this workmanlike tribute leaves a good deal to be desired in its exploration of the iconic actor-director's private life and psychological make-up, it more than atones with the rarity and quality of the clips unearthed from archives across Europe and America. Indeed, this could be described as a cine-archaeological masterclass and it marks Orson Welles's achievement with an affection and an enthusiasm that is refreshing at a time when most biodocs strive to expose their subject's feet of clay.

The facts of an extraordinary life are well enough known for a précis to suffice here. Born in Kenosha, Wisconsin on 6 May 1915, George Orson Welles endured a tough childhood after his parents divorced and his mother died when he was just nine. His alcoholic father refused to settle in one place and Orson's education suffered until he came under the benign influence of Todd School teacher, Roger Hill, who fostered his nascent love of acting and fascination with the possibilities presented by radio. Yet Hill refused to act as his guardian when his father died in 1930 and Welles rebelled against his advice to go to Cornell College and set off for Ireland, instead.

Arriving in Dublin, Welles convinced Gate Theatre manager Hilton Edwards that he was a Broadway star and he cast the upstart as Duke Karl Alexander of Württemberg in an adaptation of Jew Suss in October 1931. However, after he failed to find work in London, Welles returned Stateside, where he joined the repertory company run by actress Katharine Cornell and her director husband, Guthrie McClintic. He also began appearing on radio and made his first film, The Hearts of Age, in 1934. The same year, the 19 year-old Welles married actress Virginia Nicolson and began his fabled partnership with theatre producer John Houseman on Archibald MacLeish's verse play, Panic.

They made their mark, however, within the Federal Theatre Project with such landmark productions as the voodoo version of Macbeth (1935), Marc Blitzstein's political operetta, The Cradle Will Rock (1937), and a bold interpretation of Julius Caesar (1938) set in Fascist Italy. Buoyed by their success, Welles and Houseman formed the Mercury Theatre troupe with actors like Agnes Moorehead, Ray Collins, William Alland, Joseph Cotten, Dolores del Río, Erskine Sanford and Everett Sloane, who would become familiar to millions of listeners through such productions as Les Misérables (1937) and The War of the Worlds, which caused a panic on 31 October 1938 when audiences thought they were listening to a news bulletin describing a Martian invasion.

As was often the case, Welles refused to let the facts stand in the way when rehashing a good story. But the broadcast did bring him to the attention of Hollywood. RKO president George Schaefer promised Welles complete artistic freedom, in spite of the fact that the only prolonged shoot he had been involved in had been for an unused film-within-a-play for a 1938 stage revival of William Gillette's Too Much Johnson. However, he nixed his plans to make a subjective camera version of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness and Welles turned his attention to a film à clef inspired by the life of newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst.

Unsurprisingly, he took offence at Citizen Kane (1941) and did his best to sabotage the release. Its disappointing box office did nothing to reassure the RKO front office, however, and, when Welles went to South America to make It's All True at the behest of US Co-ordinator of Inter-American Affairs Nelson Rockefeller, the studio ordered Robert Wise to make drastic cuts to Welles's ambitious adaptation of Booth Tarkington's The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) and its lukewarm critical reception and poor commercial performance ensured that Welles wasn't entrusted with another picture until Sam Spiegel asked him to step in for John Huston on The Stranger (1946). Welles also played the fugitive Nazi villain in this underrated thriller and Columbia boss Harry Cohn was persuaded to allow Welles to co-star with and direct second wife Rita Hayworth in The Lady From Shanghai (1947). However, the twisting noir failed to find an audience and Welles started acting in pictures like Carol Reed's The Third Man (1949) in order to fund such personal projects as Macbeth (1948), Othello (1952) and Mr Arkadin (1955), which were made during a prolonged period of European exile.

On his return to California, Welles made the short teleplay, The Fountain of Youth (1956), for Lucille Ball's Desilu production company and its warm reception led to Charlton Heston convincing Universal to let the now corpulent Welles direct, as well as co-star in Touch of Evil (1958). We shall revisit this fine film and its shameful treatment by the studio next week. But it did little to improve Welles's standing and he was forced to return to Europe to adapt Franz Kafka's The Trial (1962) and combine several Shakespeare plays into Chimes at Midnight (1966). However, having made The Immortal Story (1968) from a Karen Blixen short story for French television, Welles started to find funding harder to come by and cherished projects like Don Quixote, The Deep, The Merchant of Venice, The Other Side of the Wind and The Dreamers were left in various stages of incompletion.

Now living with Oja Kodar and no longer as prolific as an actor for hire, Welles was as likely to be seen on chat shows or in commercials as he was in one of his own films. But the spellbinding documentary, F For Fake (1973), about art forger Elmyr de Hory and biographer Clifford Irving, proved to be his swan song, even though he lived until 10 October 1985. Ultimately, the Boy Wonder had failed to fulfil the promise he had shown in his early stage and radio performances and there are critics who believe he never found his métier in cinema, despite Citizen Kane being hailed for as the most stylistically ambitious and influential film of all time.

Workman is very much a fan and he is joined cheering on the sidelines by such high-profile devotees as Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, Martin Scorsese, Sydney Pollack, Paul Mazursky, Costa-Gavras, Walter Murch and William Friedkin. It might have helped make Welles more relevant to younger audiences to have had more trendy contributors like Richard Linklater, although the most useful interjections come from the likes of Peter Bogdanovich, Buck Henry and Henry Jaglom, who knew Welles in his later years. The contrasting recollections of Norman Lloyd and Robert Wise are also worth noting.

But, while Workman proves himself to be an intrepid archive delver and canny editor, there's little new in this strictly chronological survey and it pales beside The Orson Welles Story (1982), which was made for the legendary BBC series, Arena. Serious cineastes will miss some in-depth assessment of Welles's achievement from the likes of actor-biographer Simon Callow, while more might have been done to tone down the taller tales. Welles was a maverick who was always going to find the strictures of the studio system a burden, but he could also be arrogant and headstrong and Workman does him a disservice by adhering too closely to the persecuted genius line. As Roger Hills's daughter Jane confides, Welles was the only person she knew with `absolutely no empathetic skills'. But more is needed on his complex domestic life than a digression on the fact that he fathered director Michael Lindsay-Hogg with actress Geraldine Fitzgerald.

However, Awesome Orson was a phenomenon and Workman amusingly alludes to the impact he has left on American cinema by playfully including clips from films that include Welles as a semi-fictionalised character, including Woody Allen's Radio Days (1987), Peter Jackson's Heavenly Creatures (1994) and Richard Linklater's Me and Orson Welles (2008). As Sir Peter Brook shrewdly puts it: `One thing one can be sure of is that there wasn't before him an Orson and there'll never be a second.'

Samuel Fuller was something of a chip off the Welles block, as he also refused to fit neatly into the Hollywood studio system. But there was also a whiff of Howard Hawks in the way he frequently focused on men doing what they had to do. The director's daughter, Samantha, is clearly proud of his maverick approach and her documentary tribute, A Fuller Life, pays fulsome tribute to both the courageous vigour with which he lived his life and the unflinching vision that characterised his films. However, Ms Fuller is a glass artist rather than a film-maker and, for all her good intentions, this is a disappointingly disjoined profile that places far more emphasis on Fuller's exploits as a journalist and an infantry photographer than it does on the pictures for which he is renowned.

Samantha structures her story around extracts from her father's posthumously published autobiography, A Third Face. Some `chapters' are read with evident affection by such old collaborators as Constance Towers, Bill Duke, Mark Hamill, Perry Lang, Robert Carradine, Kelly Ward and Jennifer Beals, others with reverence by admiring fellow directors like Monte Hellman, William Friedkin, Wim Wenders, Joe Dante and James Toback. But the efforts of outsiders like Tim Roth and the ubiquitous James Franco are less compelling and highlight the fact that there are no film historians or critics in the mix to act as something other than a mouthpiece or a cheerleader. By way of compensation, however, there is previously unseen footage from the Fuller home movie archive and lots of clips from his features. But these are often used to illustrate biographical incidents and, in that context, they are not always seen to the best effect.

Born in Worcester, Massachusetts in 1923, Samuel Fuller didn't speak until he was five years old and lost his father when he was 11. Within a year, he was working as a copy boy for a New York newspaper and became a crime reporter on the New York Evening Graphic when he was just 17. Fuller recalled his experiences in the novel The Dark Page, which was adapted for the screen as Scandal Sheet in 1952 by Phil Karlson. The same year, Fuller made Park Row and his daughter borrows some of its scenes to capture the bustle of the newsroom and the ethos of American news-gathering in the heyday of the daily news. She also slips in snippets of the little-seen 1990 French teleplay, The Madonna and the Dragon, which saw Fuller come full circle by starring Jennifer Beals as a photojournalist.

However, having always been a film fan, the lure of Hollywood proved strong and Fuller spent the latter half of the 1930s writing screenplays for crime films and flinty urban dramas. He also polished dozens of scripts without receiving any credit and he never revealed which ones they were. When America entered the Second World War in 1941, Fuller was assigned to the 16th Infantry Regiment, 1st Infantry Division and saw action in North Africa, Sicily and Normandy before participating in the liberation of Czechoslovakia. He even managed to bump into Marlene Dietrich at a USO show. Samantha makes telling use throughout this segment of the 16mm footage that Fuller recorded as part of a newsreel brief and the scenes included here of the Falkenau concentration camp are every bit as harrowing as those André Singer selected for his 2014 documentary, Night Will Fall. These primary sources are supplemented by clips from The Big Red One (1980), which took its title from the 1st Infantry Division's nickname.

But Samantha seems more interested in the man than the artist. Consequently, even though Fuller became an iconoclastic crusader, who challenged American attitudes to inner-city poverty, crime, race, war, and issues relating to mental health, this part of his life is almost glossed over, as though standing behind a camera was somehow a less noble calling than being a news reporter or a uniformed witness to history. This is a shame, as the fact that Fuller broke down thematic barriers and challenged the conventions of studio casting is worth noting. Thus, while they will be grateful for the glimpses into the backstory, many cineastes will be frustrated by the cursory consideration of the screen career and the lack of insight into the preoccupations and techniques that made Fuller such a distinctive voice in the Cold War era. They will also be dismayed by the cavalier attitude that editor Tyler Purcell takes to the extracts, which often appear to have been tossed in with little finesse. The same, sadly, is true of the irksome score by Paul-Alexander Fuller.

There are powerful moments, most notably the `Freelance' chapter, in which Bill Duke rendition of Fuller's account of coming face to face with the Ku Klux Klan at the height of the Depression is counterpointed by the scene in Shock Corridor (1963) in which African-American student Hari Rhodes coerces his fellow asylum inmates into attacking a harmless black janitor. Yet, while Fuller produced several films containing scenes of equal gut-wrenching intensity, his daughter tends to waste them by employing them merely as illustrative elements in a glorified show and tell exercise. As a result, there is no discussion of the socio-political, as well as the cine-dramatic significance of such trademark Fuller outings as Pickup on South Street (1953), Forty Guns (1957). The Naked Kiss (1964) and White Dog (1982) and how critical opinion of Fuller's oeuvre has changed since his death in 1997.

There is also little or nothing on the reasons why Fuller only made one feature (Shark!, 1969) in the 16 years to 1980. Mika Kaurismäki explored one of the failed projects from this period in Tigrero: A Film That Was Never Made (1994). Now it is up to someone else to complete the triptych by producing a documentary about Fuller the film-maker.

Published to mark the 30th anniversary of a landmark picture in the history of both Hollywood and genre cinema, Stephen Rebello's Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho (1990) remains one of the best single-movie studies in print. Now, Alexandre O. Philippe has ventured into the same territory for 78/52, which takes its title from the number of camera set-ups and edit points that Alfred Hitchcock required to kill off his main character in the infamous shower scene. The tone here is one of cineastic celebration. But, as director Karyn Kusama points out, this defiant challenge to the Production Code that determined the permissible content of American films was also `the first modern expression of the female body under assault'. Therefore, its release against the backdrop of a scandal centring on notions of male entitlement within the entertainment industry could not be more timely.

The name Marli Renfro won't mean much to non-aficionados of Playboy Bunnies. But, as Janet Leigh's stand-in for much of the week-long shooting of the shower murder in Psycho (1960), she found herself playing a crucial part in one of the most iconic and influential sequences in the history of motion pictures. Following an Edgar Allan Poe quote about the death of a beautiful woman being the most poetic topic of them all and a recreation of the moment that fugitive Marion Crane pulls into the Bates Motel during a rainstorm, we are introduced to Renfro, who recalls that she had to strip down to her underwear for both Hitchcock and Leigh as part of her audition.

She was hired for two days, but wound up working seven and Hitchcock's granddaughter, Tere Carrubba, marvels that Universal allowed him to devote so long to such a short scene. Alan Barnette, the producer of Sacha Gervasi's Hitchcock (2012), and director Richard Stanley concur, while Elijah Wood, Josh C. Waller and Daniel Noah sit together on a sofa to declare that such dedication has to denote obsession.

Over footage of Hitchcock wandering around the Bates sets, novelist Bret Easton Ellis suggests that he set out to film the scene in order to make murder an acceptable part of entertainment. As clips from Roger Corman's A Bucket of Blood (1959) and Robert Day's The Haunted Strangler (1958) testify, there had been violence on screen before. But Saw writer Leigh Whannell asserts that Hitchcock realised that he had an opportunity to go further than had previously been attempted by making this sequence crucial to the entire picture. At this juncture, as trailer footage of Hitch tutting at the amount of blood that had been shed during the murder, Karyn Kusama makes her point about the female form under assault and director Peter Bogdanovich reinforces it by declaring this the moment that women - who had been the focus of the majority of films in the silent and early talkie eras - became subservient to men in terms of their narrative and commercial significance. But Scott Spiegel and Daniel Noah avow that Hitchcock was more concerned with breaking away from the glossy escapism of North By Northwest (1959) and the cosy quirkiness of his TV series, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, and felt the best way was to play a prank on Hollywood by making a B movie.

In a 1965 interview with Huw Weldon for Monitor, Hitchcock himself had insisted that Psycho was a joke designed to make people scream as on a funfair ride and that he had been hugely disappointed by the number of people who had taken it seriously. Mike Garris (who directed Psycho IV: The Beginning, 1990) agrees that it was not a tuxedo film, while critic Stephen Rebello notes that it was a conscious effort to stray outside Hitchcock's comfort zone and attempt something along the lines of Henri-George Clouzot's Les Diaboliques (1955), which had combined artistry and the macabre in a manner that made Hitck envious. Noah even opines that it was an act of aggression towards the fans and critics who had caused him to become complacent, while academic Marco Calavita more speculatively claims that it reflected the fury shown in wartime features like Foreign Correspondent (1940), Saboteur (1942), Shadow of a Doubt (1943) and Lifeboat (1944) that Britain and the United States had been insufficiently prepared for the threat posed by the Axis.

Horror specialist Eli Roth states that Psycho and The Birds (1963) were dissertations on the randomness of life and Calavita continues that these films were reminders that America could no longer be isolationist, as the threats posed by the modern world were so grave that no one was even safe in their shower. Rebello hails the picture as a precursor to a decade of assassinations and civil strife and he intimates that Hitchcock felt something was in the air that meant lavish adventures with landmark settings were no longer appropriate. Critic Howie Movshovitz agrees that Hitch had become bored peddling Technicolor romps when Billy Wilder's Some Like It Hot, Joseph L. Mankiewicz's Suddenly, Last Summer and Otto Preminger's Anatomy of a Murder (all 1959) were taking greater creative and thematic risks. But Roth figures that Hitchcock was also keen to alert audiences to the shocking reality of carnage at a time when science-fiction and horror movies were offering far-fetched doomsday scenarios.

As the shoutily insistent Calavita recalls, the Clutter murders that inspired Truman Capote's In Cold Blood (1966) occurred just as Psycho began shooting. More spuriously, he cites the opening of the first Playboy club, the introduction of the birth control pill and the divorce of Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, Jr. as being equally seismic indicators that America was about to change forever. Nobody thinks to mention the Cuban Revolution or the nouvelle vague, but Roth concludes that the shower scene felt like the lancing of the tensions and restrictions that had been boiling up in the US during Dwight D. Eisenhower's presidency. Bogdanovich was a critic in New York when Psycho previewed at the Loews State in Times Square and he remembers Hitchcock's voice booming through the speakers at the start of the press show warning against giving away the plot twists. Editor Walter Murch also comments on the fact that Hitch insisted on barring admissions once the film had started rolling to stop those who missed the opening wondering where Janet Leigh was. This gambit changed the way in which pictures were exhibited, as continuous shows at which people could come and go as they pleased became a thing of the past. Ever the showman, he had also led people down the wrong path in the trailer, as Vera Miles was shown screaming behind the shower curtain and not Janet Leigh. But Bogdanovich remembers the audience emitting a deafening scream when the knife first struck and Belgian composer Pepijn Caudron (aka Kreng) rejoices at how manic it must have been at a screening that left Bogdanovich so shaken he felt as if he had been raped.

For some reason, it requires both critic David Thomson and director Neil Marshall to take us back to the Lumière short, The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat (1895), to show how audiences had loved being scared since the new artform's first flickerings. Composer Danny Elfman recalls it being the only film his mother wouldn't let him see, while editor Bob Murawski admits that he initially thought it was about a killer on a motorcycle until he got a Super8 copy and ran it constantly.

Calavita returns to squeal that nobody expected a relatable character played by a star of the magnitude of Janet Leigh would bite the dust so early in proceedings and especially not at the hands of an old lady who is obscured by the shower curtain. Director Guillermo Del Toro and Jamie Lee Curtis (who is, of course, Leigh's daughter) agree it was a grand coup de cinéma, but Rebello goes further to declare it a moment that changed the direction of film-making worldwide. Wood, Waller and Noah slap themselves on the back as they wonder whether an obscure Czech picture pipped Hitch to the post in killing off a protagonist in such a brutal way, while Kusama likens the cultural impact to the beheading of a key character in Game of Thrones.

Editor Chris Innis muses on the opening scenes holding up a mirror to contemporary society and notes that the freeways that had made it so easy to travel between big cities had killed off small towns like Fairvale and businesses like the Bates Motel. Calavita also points out the irony of the fact that, by heading west, Marion was following the Manifest Destiny that had provided the country's founding mantra. But, rather than pursue these intriguing avenues, Philippe veers off at a tangent to examine how the depictions of the shower scene differed between Robert Bloch's source novel and Joseph Stefano's screenplay. We see Philippe's own version of the action over Murawski's reading of the book text before we digress again to the theory that Hitchcock recognised the importance of this sequence and hired credits specialist Saul Bass to help him storyboard the action.

An unidentified voice reads Stefano's stage directions (written at a time when Leigh's character still had the Bloch name of Mary), as we see Bass's pencil sketches detailing the hideous crime. But, no sooner has Waller gushed that this is the scene that transformed film forever, Philippe whisks us out of the cabin and back to the hotel room where Marion had enjoyed some afternoon delight with boyfriend Sam Loomis (John Gavin). We then get samples from scenes on the road and in the motel office, as various talking-heads coo over Hitchcock's bleakly humorous eye for details, such as the glimpse of the shower head in Marion's apartment as she packs her case after having stolen $40,000 from her employer.

Anthony Perkins's son, Osgood, reflects on how the movement of the windscreen wiper blades during the downpour anticipates the slashing of the kitchen knife, while Stanley speculates over clips of a shower in The Lodger (1926), a bread knife in Blackmail (1929) and bathroom tiles being cleaned in Rear Window (1954) that Hitchcock had been working towards this scene his entire career.

Such sweeping statements are common in a film in which just about everyone delivers their pronouncements with a gravity and intensity that suggests they are straining to ensure they make the final cut. But Philippe seems intent on preventing the audience from developing a logical train of thought, as he flits away to the significance of the conversation between Marion and Norman Bates (Perkins) in the parlour, as it establishes a rapport between the pair that makes the ensuing slaughter all the more shocking. Yet, while this is a crucial moment, Philippe opts to view it through Wood, Waller and Noah doing a Beavis and Butt-Head impression, as they sniggeringly comment on the change in mood after Marion suggests that Norman could reclaim his life if he put Mrs Bates in a home.

During his guided tour around the motel, Hitchcock pointed out the Baroque painting in the parlour and museum curator Timothy Standring reveals that it is Frans Van Mieris, le Vieux's `Suzanne et les Viellards', which depicts a scene from the Book of Daniel in which a woman is spied upon while cleansing herself after committing adultery. Earlier in the day, Marion (or Mary, as he calls her, suggesting that he doesn't know the film particularly well) had been copulating with her married lover and Strandring applauds Hitchcock's choice, as Norman removes this voyeuristic scene from the wall in order to become a peeping Tom through the spyhole looking into Cabin No.1.

A number of contributors ponder the number of shots depicting eyes looking out of the screen, as well as God's eye views gazing down on to this scene of murderous mayhem (to which Hitchcock would return in The Birds). Academic Jim Hosney notes the angle of the knife as it rips into Marion's flesh and posits that the blade appears to be coming toward the audience, as though Hitchcock had intended them to be his victims. However, as Hitch tells François Truffaut during their celebrated interview, he had often relied on the fact that people tend to rubberneck rather than turn away from awful or suspicious sights and, thus (over a montage of staring eyes from various Hitchcock pictures), we learn that he tapped into the ghoulish curiosity that is common to us all, whether we care to admit it or not.

As we listen to Hitchcock revealing during an American Film Institute masterclass the importance of building suspense rather than providing short, sharp jolts, Innis comments on how the instances of voyeurism during Psycho clue the audience that something unsettling is about to occur without giving the game away when the knife will strike. But, even though the suggestion that this is a film about fragmentation and not letting the audience settle is wholly valid, it doesn't quite justify Philippe's decision to make his analysis as skittish as possible.

Nonetheless, he is already off on the next tangent, as Bill Krohn, the author of Hitchcock at Work, draws our attention to the ghastly mothers in such Hitchcock outings as Easy Virtue (1928), Notorious (1946), Strangers on a Train (1951) and North By Northwest (1959). But, as Calavita reveals, the apple pie view of American motherhood had been called into question during the 1950s by the rising tide of juvenile delinquency. He claims that there was a prevailing concern that moms were going to mollycoddle their kids to death, as they did in sitcoms like Father Knows Best and The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet. Hosney chimes in that Douglas Sirk had dissected the myth of the all-American family in melodramas like All That Heaven Allows (1955). But Psycho literally turned mom into a monster.

We see Hitchcock telling chat show host Dick Cavett in 1972 that his mother had given him a fright when he was three months old by saying `boo' before Hosney highlights the number of references to the malign influence of mothers during Marion's scenes with Sam and a co-worker (who is played by Hitckcock and Alma Reville's daughter, Patricia). But Calavita bursts in to declare that many would have watched the film with a growing conviction that Mrs Bates was a malign influence and would have drawn the conclusion that mom really was going to be the death of them all.

This speciously reasoned argument is quickly laid to one side, as we go in search of Hitch's Victorian obsession with bathrooms with bright white tiles. Over shots of such décor in The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934), Mr & Mrs Smith (1941), Spellbound (1945) and North By Northwest, we are informed by Garris and Stanley that the sight of the first flushing toilet in American film history tips us the wink that a major taboo is about to be shattered. Rebello even goes so far as to suggest that by setting such a grisly scene in a room synonymous with sanitary civility was tantamount to desecration. Murch recalls editing a bathroom sequence in Francis Ford Coppola's The Conversation (1974), which paid homage to Psycho and the screen splits to compare them.

However, the suggestion of Janet Leigh's nudity would have been a much bigger deal with audiences in 1960 than a flushing loo. Rebello and Garris ruminate on how red-blooded males might have reacted to being teased in such a way and Hitchcock informs Granada's Cinema programme during a 1969 interview that it's always better to retain a sense of mystery than be too graphic. Osgood Perkins questions whether anyone would get into a shower without letting it run first, but sound designers Gary Rydstrom and Shannon Mills are less cynical, as they discuss the hiss and whoosh of the water that reinforces the idea that Marion is enjoying the sensual sensation of being cleansed.

Yet, after a brief pause to show us scenes from Rear Window and The Birds in which Hitchcock made effective use of silence, academic Norman Hollyn pulls us away to consider the fact that Marion doesn't smile naturally once before she steps into the shower. But, while she experiences a release of tension as the water hits her body, Stanley suggests that Hitchcock enjoyed the greater sense of liberation, as he was finally able to get one of his ice-cool blondes in the altogether. But Del Toro reckons that the scene reveals the depth of Hitchcock's Roman Catholicism, as, even though Marion has repented of her crime and has vowed to return and face the consequences, she cannot be shriven by water alone and must pay her debt in blood. However, actress Illeana Douglas shrewdly avers that Marion's gravest folly was not the theft of some money, but the arousal of Norman Bates.

Rather than take this further than a throwback reference to the strangling of another loose woman in Strangers on a Train (who was played by Patricia Hitchcock), Philippe has Innis describe how the angle of the shots and their assembly places the viewer in the shower with Marion. Fellow editor Jeffrey Ford picks up on this, as the screen quarters to contrast Norman's spyhole with the plughole of the bath and Marian's vulnerability in her robe under his flustered gaze and in the water unaware of his imminent approach while dressed in his mother's clothes. These images shift to compare Norman's eye pressed against the holed plasterboard and Marion's glassy stare, as she slumps out of the tub. But Philippe isn't content with splitting the screen. He also wants to put a timecode on the images of Marion in the shower and use the rewind button so that the audience can fully appreciate the nuances that Ford and Murch have identified in Hitchcock's use of diegetic space and the breaches of the 180° axis of action that shift the focus and, in the process, disconcert the viewer by opening up spaces that will be filled by the looming outline of the rampaging Norman.

Editor John Venzon opines that Norman's appearance in the blurred background defines the difference between suspense and surprise, while, over clips from The Lodger, Rebecca (1940) and Suspicion (1941), Douglas suggests that Hitchcock clearly had a fear of figures lurking in the shadows and she declares that the pent-up dread was unleashed in Psycho. In fact, Anthony Perkins was in New York that day rehearsing a play and Margo Epper attacked Leigh with her face blackened to disguise the identity of the assailant. According to Rebello, Leigh told him that she pictured Norman bearing down on her, so she conveyed the shock of being betrayed by someone she had tried to befriend.

In a rather self-consciously decorated room, Roth remarks upon the wallpaper in the bedroom behind Mother and notes that Stanley Kubrick went for a similar effect in The Shining (1980). But Murawski lets slip that he had always been disappointed by the mushroom-shaped wig that diluted some of the terror. However, Carrubba also reveals that her grandfather had been so underwhelmed by the rough cut that he was about to trim it down for an hour for inclusion in his television show when Bernard Herrmann played him the music he had composed for the shower scene.

Caudron shows off the tattoo on his forearm showing the wave pattern created by the shrieking strings and Noah tells his pals that his seven year-old daughter is aware of the cultural significance of that sound. Roth compares it to the steady drone of John Williams's music for Steven Spielberg's Jaws (1975), but Caudron and Elfman set it alongside the theremin and brass sound that Herrmann devised for Robert Wise's The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) and the eerie `Living Doll' score for The Twilight Zone (1963). Moreover, Caudron praises the precision of the spotting of the musical cues, as ambient sound dominates until the curtain is pulled back and the strings symbolise Marion's heartbeat at the realisation that she is in danger. The music slows and the strings move into a lower register, as her hand slides down the wall and silence returns as she slips out of consciousness and all we hear are the rattle of the curtain rings and the shush of the shower.

Ann E. Duddleston, who edited Gus Van Sant's 1990 remake, states that Elfman re-recorded the original score. But he reveals that he was under pressure to give it the full-orchestral treatment and had to plead with the producers not to force him to tinker with such a revered passage. Yet, while Herrmann helped immortalise the shower scene, it would not have become so iconic without the speed of the cross-cutting achieved by editor George Tomasini. Del Toro compares the sequence to a stainless steel trap snapping shut and trapping the viewer and compelling them to watch an act of unspeakable savagery. Amidst a gaggle of admiring voices, Garris and Ford comment on the ingenuity of the splicing at a time when this was a physical process involving celluloid and cement rather than something that happened at the push of a computer key.

Murch takes us back to Edwin S. Porter's Life of an American Fireman (1903), which was one of the first films to use editing as a dramatic device, as he explains how audiences had to learn how to make associational leaps between transitions for the cross-cuts between parallel actions to make narrative sense. But Hitchcock, Bass and Tomasini bombarded the viewer with images that had vanished before their complete information could be absorbed. This introduced supposition into the equation and represented a major leap away from the classical forms of Hollywood editing. Wood pipes up that it resembles a magic act, as people left the cinema convinced that they had seen things that had not appeared on screen.

Editor Fred Raskin draws attention to the sound effects used to simulate the knife piercing flesh and Rebello describes how Hitchcock sent prop man Robert Bone to find as many kinds of melon as he could. He eventually decided upon casabas, although he also had sound men Waldon O. Watson and William Russel plunge a blade into a large sirloin steak to add into the audio mix and Rebello delights in revealing that one of the unnamed duo took the meat home for his supper. Rydstrom and Mills extol the less is more authenticity of the effects and Venzon and Innis similarly laud the three swift cuts that take the action from Marion turning to a close-up of her open mouth. But Murawski recalls a similar three-cut effect in closing in on Boris Karloff's face in James Whale's Frankenstein (1931) and we see how he employed the gambit in Sam Raimi's Army of Darkness (1993), Spider-Man 3 (2007) and Drag Me to Hell (2009).

In pointing out how Hitchcock slipped non-subjective perspectives into the scene to reinforce the sense of threat, Murch also notes the various crossings of the stageline in a bid to convey the sense of struggle. He reveals how he used a similar technique in cutting the love scenes in Jerry Zucker's Ghost (1990) to suggest a sense of passion. But, as Innis confirms, such visual breaches also have famous precedents and the screen quarters to compare shots from Psycho with those from such Expressionist masterpieces as FW Murnau's Nosferatu (1922) and Sunrise (1927). Murawski also singles out a blurred image of a cowering Marion and he laments that modern producers would insist on its removal, even though it works so well within the overall illusion.

This latter word is key for, as Venzon and Roth explain, viewers watching the shower scene become convinced that they actually see the blade touch the skin. Hitch told Bogdanovich that he avoided any direct contact after rejecting an ingenious body rubber that spurted blood on impact and trusted instead in the suggestive power of montage that Sergei Eisenstein had employed on Battleship Potemkin (1925). Yet, Renfro insists that Hitchcock placed a real knife against her torso and rapidly pulled it away so that it appeared as though it was stabbing her for real when the film was reversed. She is also proud of the fact that Hitch managed to smuggle in a shot of her bare belly button, at a time when Annette Funicello had to cover up even while wearing a bikini in teenpics like William Asher's Muscle Beach Party (1964).

Hitchcock had spent much of his career battling the guardians of the Production Code and Wood and pals giggle like schoolboys at the closing shot of North By Northwest depicting a train entering a tunnel, as Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint settle down for the night. Carrubba and Calavito reveal how he invited officials to watch him filming the shower scene and then accused them of seeing offensive content that didn't exist when then demanded changes to the scene. Thus, he called their bluff and preserved the dramatic integrity of a sequence that was crucial to making Psycho the phenomenon it would become.

But it wasn't the only picture released in 1960 to push the boundaries, as Michael Powell's Peeping Tom also seemed graphically to present the violent deaths of women. Yet. Like Hitchcock, Powell allowed the viewer to join the dots and Noah compares this teasing approach to depiction with the way producer Val Lewton left things the audience imagination in classic horrors like Jacques Tourneur's Cat People (1942) and The Leopard Man (1943). Waller cites a modern example in the rape scene in Gaspar Noé's Irreversible (2002), which contrasts with the shower sequence, as it was filmed slowly at a remove from the action. However, while Hitchcock could promise a Telescope interviewer in 1964 that the shooting of the naked abdomen had been utterly discreet, Murawski points out that flashes of breast are visible in a frame-by-frame breakdown.

Murch notes the brevity of the shots towards the end of the assault and reminds us that audiences in 1960 would have seen nothing like this before. The sight of the blood splashing into the water would also have been shocking and directors Aaron Moorhead and Justin Benson refer to the fact that chocolate sauce was used to show up better in black and white. Renfro confirms that she was splattered with Hershey's syrup, while Hitchcock confides that he opted for monochrome because the sight of red gore swirling around Marion's feet would have been too grotesque.

Roth, Venzon and Murawski debate the efficacy of Norman's swift retreat without waiting to check that Marion dies, while Garris latches on to the fact that the focus switches to her hand during her final moments. Moorhead compares this to the way that Steven Spielberg filmed the first death in Jurassic Park (1993). But what was so significant about Hitchcock lingering over Marion's last breaths is that the deaths in standard fare like Max Nosseck's Dillinger (1945), Richard Fleischer's The Narrow Margin (1952) and Lewis Allen's A Bullet for Joey (1955) were relatively speedy. Yet Hitchcock would continue to show that killing someone could be a slow and messy process in Torn Curtain (1966) and Frenzy (1972).

Comparing the opening and closing shots of Marion against large expanses of white tiles, Venzon applauds Hitchcock's use of negative space in these bookending shots, while Ford recognises the emotional potency of the shot of Marion grasping the shower curtain before she collapses. Renfro reveals that this is her hand and points out the slight disfigurement of the ring finger, which came about when it was cut off when she was helping her brother with a lawnmower when she was three years old. Yet, while this is a hugely effective shot, it wasn't original, as Nita Naldi had also pulled on a shower curtain during the modern story segment of Cecil B. DeMille's The Ten Commandments (1923). Moreover, as Joseph Stefano reveals, the censors refused to let Hitchcock use a top shot of Marion slumping forward across the rim of the bathtub, even though it was storyboarded. But, as Duddleston explains, Van Sant was able to include the image in his remake and we see Anne Heche's lacerated form lurch forward in disturbing colour.

As Venzon shows, Hitchcock repeated the up shot into the shower head to contrast the hope of a fresh start as Marion begins to wash and the draining away of her existence. Stanley compares the close-up of the lifelessly staring eye with the eddy of a celestial formation and references a similar plughole shot in Joel and Ethan Coen's Barton Fink (1991). But Ellis detects a deeply personal element to this image, as Hitchcock confronted the increasing inevitability of his own demise, as he had done in Vertigo (1958), which is also replete with swirling symbolism.

However, Krohn is keen to point out how remarkably intimate these shots are, as cinematographer John L. Russell was using a cumbersome Mitchell camera. While others enthuse over the seamless effects shot used in the slow pull away from Marion's eyeball, Duddleston reveals that Van Sant used a robotic camera to shoot in real time. However, when she came to edit the sequence, she discovered that the shot-for-shot approach was not working and they had to interpolate images to make it feel less like a pastiche and more like a Van Sant variation on the theme. But Hitchcock and Tomasini also had problems with the last shots of Marion, as Janet Leigh found it impossible to remain motionless and numerous takes were ruined by her eye twitching or her inhaling being too blatant. Indeed, as Rebello recalls, Alma Reville spotted a breath during a test screening and Hitch had to cut back to the shower head to disguise the flaw, while sustaining the rhythm of the edit.

Always one for a sly gag, Hitchcock exposed the redundancy of the MacGuffin by concluding the sequence with a pan out of the bathroom to the stolen money wrapped in a newspaper with the word `okay' in its banner headline. Clearly, everything is far from fine and Movshovitz sees this as a reinforcement of the concept of the uncaring universe. It pains Murawski that this epochal sequence is followed by such a clumsy piece of exposition, as Norman wails off screen about Mother returning to the house covered in blood. But the ensuing cleaning sequence is vital to the success of what has gone before, as we now enter Norman's world and have to deal with the consequences of the deed. On first viewing, we don't know that he is the killer, but we have a pretty good idea and Kusama suggests that Hitchcock is implicating the viewer in Norman's delusion by showing him tidying so methodically. Douglas claims that cleaning is always a sign of sexual guilt, but it's also noted that this ordeal is designed to coax the audience into feeling sympathy with Norman, who is living this nightmare and evidently seems practiced at protecting Mother by removing all traces of her madness.

Stanley and Calavita declare Psycho the progenitor of the slasher genre, although Roth points out that Mario Bava had been edging in this direction before he made The Girl Who Knew Too Much (1963) and A Bay of Blood (1971). However, he was less hindered by strict censorship and Dario Argento was equally free to take giallo into dangerous new territory in depicting the murder of female victims in the likes of The Bird With the Crystal Plumage (1970), Suspiria (1977) and Tenebrae (1982). The success of these pictures fed back into American cinema with Tobe Hooper's The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), John Carpenter's Halloween (1978) and Robert Hiltzik's Sleepaway Camp (1983), although Stanley is right to indicate that Hitchcock started the trend for having female victims undress before their murder.

Hosney also mentions that Martin Scorsese based the Sugar Ray Robinson fight in Raging Bull (1980) on the shower scene and we see a montage of copycat clips from William Castle's I Saw What You Did (1965), Mel Brooks's High Anxiety (1977), Brian De Palma's Dressed to Kill (1980), Tobe Hoopers The Funhouse (1981), Stephen Chiodo's Killer Klowns From Outer Space (1988), Lucio Fulci's A Cat in the Brain, Richard Stanley's Hardware, The Simpsons (all 1990), Scott Spiegel's From Dusk Till Dawn 2: Texas Blood Money (1999), That 70s Show (2000), Kirby: Right Back At Ya! (2002), Joe Dante's Looney Tunes: Back in Action (2003), Bricktease's LEGO Psycho (2015), Gina Otalvaro's Black & White [Psycho] and Scream Queens (both 2016). The last is perhaps the most self-referential of them all, as it features Jamie Lee Curtis escaping an attack by a red devil because her character had seen Psycho around 50 times.

Following her week with Hitchcock, Renfro went to work in the Playboy Mansion and featured on the cover of the September 1960 edition. But she told nobody about the film and smiles as she recalls Anthony Perkins hauling her out of the bath and dragging her along the floor before picking her up wrapped in plastic and lugging her out to the car. A tracking shot takes us towards the house on the hill and we creep up behind Mother rocking in her chair. But this seems a rather abrupt end, as though the documentary has shot its bolt and finally run out of things to say just when a terse summation of Psycho and its mystique is needed.

Having already directed The People vs. George Lucas (2010) and Doc of the Dead (2014), Philippe clearly has a penchant for screen history. The problem here is that this ground has been more than adequately covered before in Laurent Bouzereau's The Making of `Psycho' (1997) and Robert V. Galluzzo's The Psycho Legacy (2010), while Christophe Girardet and Matthias Müller pipped him to the idea of linking images by theme in their masterly Phoenix Tapes (1999). This would matter less if the talking heads had a surfeit of fresh revelations and insights. But much will be familiar to serious film students, who will be more than a little irked by the excessive amount of inaccurate dating throughout the film. Hitchcock's The Lodger and Foreign Correspondent are respectively dated wrongly as 1928 and 1942, while similar slips are made in the cases of Battleship Potemkin (which is given as 1926), The Girl Who Knew Too Much (1964) and Tenebrae (1987). Even more glaringly and sloppily, Sergio Martino's Your Vice Is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key (1972) is cited as an example of the kind of American film that was influenced by giallo when it's actually an Italian release.

This may seem like nitpicking, but such errors undermine the picture's claim to be an authoritative analysis of the making and legacy of Hitchcock's final undisputed masterpiece. The laddish interjections of Elijah Wood and his buddies also have a deleterious effect, even though Daniel Noah and Josh Waller do occasionally come up with a worthwhile observation, while the excitable Marco Calavita feels like a media don on a British TV clips`n'quotes show straining to seize his chance of coming across as a bit of a character. But he is not alone, as a good number of the more hyperbolic remarks feel sweepingly generalised and/or calculatingly sound bitey. As a consequence, this can sometimes feel more like a Film Studies 101 powerpoint or a DVD extra than a work of serious cinematic scholarship.

Yet, even though it can seem haphazard in its organisation (in spite of the redoubtable efforts of editor Chad Herschberger) and often feels as though it has been hijacked by fanboys, this contains plenty of thought-provoking reminders of what an inspired director Hitchcock could be. The likes of Stephen Rebello and Walter Murch wear their expertise lightly, while it's nice to see Marli Renfro getting a moment in the spotlight. But Margo Epper is also still alive and it might have been useful to garner her recollections. More might also have been made of the parts played by Joseph Stefano and Saul Bass and it seems odd that neither the cinematographer nor the sound engineers should be mentioned by name. But this is an affectionate and effective overview that should send viewers back to the original with a new perspective and that, surely, is the whole point.

There have been several incarnations of Stanley Kubrick's take on The Shining since it first appeared in 1980. Indeed, British and American audiences saw markedly different versions of Stephen King's bestselling novel about a blocked writer slowly losing his mind while working as a caretaker at a remote hotel. However, a restored edition containing all 24 minutes of the footage that has been excised at various times is due for theatrical release in a couple of weeks and there is nothing better to whet the appetite of fans than Rodney Ascher's riveting documentary, Room 237: Being an Inquiry into The Shining in 9 Parts, which considers the different interpretations that have been placed on the film over the past three decades.

Journalist Bill Blakemore recalls seeing The Shining in a plush venue on Leicester Square and being immediately intrigued by the notion that Kubrick had used King's tale to decry the genocide of the Native American population. He was first taken by the wording of the poster, which alluded to `the wave of terror that swept across America'. But he was finally convinced by the placement in the dry goods store of a jar of Calumet baking soda, as this not only bore an image of a `Red Indian' on the label, but also took its name from the French word for a `peace pipe'.

Playwright Juli Kearns also noticed the diverse references to Native American culture, but drew completely different conclusions from them. However, at this stage of the documentary, she is merely content to say that she disagreed with the critics who had branded the picture a disappointment, as she had realised from the outset that it was a treasure trove of provocative ideas on a par with Kubrick's science-fiction masterpiece, 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968).

Conspiracy hunter Jay Weidner claims to have had his first religious experience while watching 2001, which had persuaded him that cinema was far from the inferior artform he had always supposed. Indeed, he now recognised that it was a medium capable of conveying complex theses and images of extraordinary power and beauty and he knew from that instant that he had to dedicate his life to studying and making films.

Academic Geoffrey Cocks admits that he didn't get The Shining on first viewing, but was sufficiently intrigued to pay a second visit. This time, he noticed that Jack (Jack Nicholson) used an Adler Eagle typewriter and the coincidence of this German make and the copious references to (19)42 meant, to his mind, that Kubrick's subtext was the Shoah. He was further convinced when he discovered that Kubrick has corresponded with Raul Hilberg about his 1961 book The Destruction of the European Jews and had always been frustrated by his inability to realise his long-planned film about the Holocaust (The Aryan Papers), as the subject was too daunting.

By contrast, musician John Fell Ryan is certain that Kubrick had other things on his mind when he made The Shining. Thus, he harks back to the time when he worked in a film archive and learned that much of the action seen in wartime newsreels was shot in safe zones and then cut into authentic battlefield footage. As a master of filling the screen with visual allusions and in-jokes, Kubrick would have been fully aware that he could slip confessional details into the mise-en-scène that would enable him to salve his conscience and alert sharp-eyed viewers to his involvement in one of the most infamous pieces of screen chicanery in history.

Having introduced his experts, Ascher allows them to expand upon their themes in a segment headed `Boiling Down'. Unfortunately, as he opts not to label the unseen speakers, it's not always clear who is making which point. But it seems to be Blakemore who claims that Kubrick was so bored after finishing his adaptation of Thackeray's Barry Lyndon (1975) that he decided to challenge the conventions of mainstream film-making by following the lead set by contemporary advertisers (and chronicled in Wilson Bryan Key's book Subliminal Seduction) by strewing the imagery with sexual references that imply the Overlook Inn is populated by spirits who attract humans in order to feed off them. This rather far-fetched theory is supported by a slow-motion clip from the office encounter between Jack and manager Stuart Ullman (Barry Nelson) that makes smuttily phallic use of a paper tray strut close to the latter's groin and raises the worrying concern that the entire documentary may be heading deep into sniggering fanboy country.

Cocks and Kearns do little to counter this impression with discussions of dissolves being used to alter the size of figures and buildings and the impossibility of an interior office in production designer Ken Adam's ground plan having an outside window. But, even though the examination of the layout descends into the realms of minutiae while pointing out the significance of the food store, the Gold Room and the grand staircase, the pair salvage the segment by suggesting that Kubrick deliberately used infeasible geography to parody horror clichés, just as he disappeared a chair behind Jack during a lobby conversation with his wife Wendy (Shelley Duval) and then removed a door sticker of Dopey the Dwarf from the bedroom door of their son Danny (Jake Lloyd) after he passes from a child's to a grown-up's understanding of the hotel's sinister secrets.

Blakemore takes up the commentary again to reveal that Kubrick spent hours on the phone to the manager of the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, Colorado that had inspired King to write his novel and that he even dispatched a team to spend three months taking photographs and notes and researching the history of the state so he could distil it to make to a universal statement about humanity. There is no question that the past plays a crucial role in the picture and Danny wisely realises that retracing steps can help us avoid repeating mistakes and embark upon a new course. Yet, while the references to TS Eliot and the `nightmare of history' are cogent, it seems to be pushing things too far to aver that because Kubrick had an IQ of 200, he was a superbrain who was striving to re-educate the entire species through dream imagery and logic.

Ascher dubs the next section `Navigating the Labyrinth' and opens it with Kairns linking the fact that Kubrick released Killer's Kiss (1953) through Minotaur Productions with a skiing poster, a picture of a cowboy on a bucking bronco and a bull head-dress to deduce that Jack is a latterday minotaur trapped at the centre of his own labyrinth. This is followed by a lengthy retracing of the routes taken by Danny on his Big Wheel, which culminates in a supposition that by trundling past the family living quarters and the place where Jack betrays Wendy with a stranger he is exploring his parents' head space.

Weidner has his own notions about Room 237, however, which date back to July 1969 when Kubrick was supposedly hired to fake footage from the surface of the Moon following the landing of Apollo 11. He states that anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of the front projection process should have noticed the blurs and blotches caused by blemishes in the screen, but the guilt of perpetrating a ruse that he was not even allowed to divulge to his wife Christianne prompted Kubrick to use Jack's indiscretion with the naked woman he discovers in the bathtub (Lia Beldam) to own up to his deception. One of the many myths surrounding The Shining is that the owners of the Timberlake Lodge in Mount Hood, Oregon (which doubled as the Overlook) asked Kubrick to switch from King's Room 217 to Room 237 to stop guests from refusing to sleep in a `haunted' suite. But the Timberlake doesn't have a Room 217 and Ryan contends that Kubrick alighted on the chosen number because he shot the lunar scenes on Soundstage 237 and because the distance between the Earth and the Moon is 237,000 miles. Just in case anybody missed the reference, he dressed Danny in an Apollo 11 sweater as he plays with his trucks on the corridor carpet. But not all of his imputations were as playful, as Kubrick changed the colour of the Torrance Volkswagen from red to yellow and then included a shot of a roadside smash involving a red VW (representing King's creation) and a giant truck (denoting his own more potent vehicle).

Under the heading `Elevator to the Graveyard', Cocks espouses his theories about The Shining and the Shoah. He intriguingly connects Jack Nicholson's ad lib from The Three Little Pigs with clips from Disney's Oscar-winning 1933 version, in which the Wolf adopts a Jewish disguise to get inside one of the houses. This, he intimates is both a denunciation of Walt Disney's shameful anti-Semitism and an astute nod to the way in which the phrase `a wolf at the door' lost its Depression association with poverty once various Nazi units adopted lupine insignia during the war.

According to Cocks, Kubrick studied Bruno Bettelheim's The Uses of Enchantment before making the film and incorporated lots of Freudian insights into fairytales like Hansel and Gretel. However, he also borrowed from indigenous fable by revealing that the Overlook was built in 1907 on an Indian burial ground and that, because all nations are founded on blood, the torrent of gore that engulfs the upper corridor comes directly from the wounded heart of conquered peoples, whose suffering is emblematised by the elevator doors that remain closed because subsequent generations have chosen to repress the truth.

Cocks concludes by highlighting the recurring uses of the number 42 throughout the film: on a car number plate; in the fact that there are 42 vehicles parked in front of the hotel in an aerial shot; in the showing of Richard Mulligan's Summer of ’42 on the television; and in the fact that 2x3x7 equals 42. He also refers to the fact that Thomas Mann dwelt on the same numeral in The Magic Mountain, which also centred on an isolated individual witnessing events that relate to the decline of Western civilisation, and it is easy to accept, as we see the opening helicopter swoop over the lake to the accompaniment of Hector Berlioz's Dies Irae, that the film has been consciously constructed to force audiences into confronting the sins of the past and accepting their share in the burden of history.

But, having delivered such a coup de grâce, Ascher pads out proceedings with musings on the significance of Stuart Ullman and Bill Watson (JFK and his CIA handler), the reassurance intended by Dick Halloran (Scatman Crothers) when he tells Danny not to be afraid of the awful things he will see because they are merely pictures in a book, and the assertion by online theorist Mstrmnd (who refused to participate in the documentary) that curious things happen if a print of The Shining playing forwards is superimposed on one playing in reverse. More enticing are cogitations on the hexagonal pattern of the landing carpet (and its similarity to Launch Pad 37A at Cape Kennedy) and the fact that the line along which the ball rolls disappears after a cutaway, thus trapping him inside the world of the Grady twins (Lisa and Louise Burns).

The journey ends disappointingly with some smugly valedictory reminiscences by the five speakers and a throwaway admission that postmodernist criticism allows almost any meaning to be ascribed to a piece of art regardless of the creator's intentions. But this should not be allowed to detract from an otherwise engrossing exercise in film dissection that may have its specious moments, but provides plenty of food for thought for avid Kubrickians and conspiracy theorists alike.

What makes this all the more impressive, however, is Ascher's droll use (in imitation of Mark Rappaport's equally acute reverie Rock Hudson's Home Movies, 1992) of extracts from Kubrick's back catalogue, as well as the following features: Edward B. Curtis's In the Land of War Canoes (1914); FW Murnau's Faust (1925); Robert N. Brady's Sitting Bull at the Spirit Lake Massacre (1927); John Ford's Drums Along the Mohawk (1939); Ludwig Berger, Michael Powell and Tim Whelan's The Thief of Baghdad (1940); Alfred Hitchcock's Spellbound (1945); Roger Corman's The Terror (1953); George Sherman's The Battle of Apache Pass (1953); Nathan Juran's The Brain from Planet Arous (1957); George Cukor's My Fair Lady (1964); Richard Fleischer's Doctor Dolittle (1967); Federico Fellini's Satyricon (1969); Norman Jewison's Jesus Christ Superstar (1973); John Hough's The Legend of Hell House (1973); Luigi Matzella's The Heart in Heat (1975); Alan J. Pakula's All the President's Men (1976); Peter Hyams's Capricorn One (1977); J. Lee Thompson's The White Buffalo (1977); George Kaczender's Agency (1980); Michael Crichton's Looker (1981); John Landis's An American Werewolf in London (1981); Hans W. Geissendorfer's The Magic Mountain (1982); George A. Romero's Creepshow (1982); Uli Lommel's Brainwaves (1983); Joseph Ruben's Dreamscape (1984); Lamberto Bava's Demons (1985) and Demons 2 (1986); Mick Garris's The Shining (1987); Ted Lowry's The Eagle Has Landed (1989); Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List (1993); Mike Nichols's Wolf (1994) and Mel Gibson's Apocalypto (2006).

Robert Kennedy proves equally adept at marshalling the audio and visual items that make Ron Mann's profile Altman so slick. Anyone familiar with excellent tomes like Patrick McGilligan's Robert Altman: Jumping Off the Cliff (1989) or Mitchell Zuckoff's Robert Altman: The Oral Biography (2009) may find the saving grace of a study that has not only been sanitised to ensure family co-operation, but which is also patchily incomplete in its overview of the life and times that shaped the cinema of a New Hollywood titan, who refused to the last to play by the rules of the game.

Skirting his 1930s Kansas childhood, the picture keeps its focus firmly fixed on Altman's professional life, which began with the Calvin Company in Kansas City after he returned from war service as a bomber pilot. Thus, while we learn about his first attempt to make it in Hollywood as the co-writer of Richard Fleischer's Bodyguard (1948) and his direction of industrial shorts like How to Run a Filling Station (1953), there is no information about his failed marriages to LaVonne Elmer and Lotus Corelli, who respectively bore him his daughter Christine and sons Michael and Stephen. Similarly, little is divulged about how he made ends meet before he was offered a chance to direct `The Young One', a 1957 episode of the popular TV series, Alfred Hitchcock Presents.

The same year saw Altman make his feature bow with The Delinquents, which chronicled the misdemeanours of a Kansas City punk played by Tom Laughlin. However, it failed to make an impression and Altman spent the next decade working on such shows as Whirlybirds, The Millionaire, US Marshal, Troubleshooter, Bonanza and Bus Stop. However, he alienated his employees when he used handheld camera, low-key lighting and overlapping dialogue on the `Survival' episode of Combat! (1963) and was fired, even though Vic Morrow earned an Emmy nomination for his performance. He ruffled more feathers when he resigned from Kraft Suspense Theatre in 1964 after the sponsor refused to sanction the casting of a black actor. But was having two character talk at the same time also seemed to annoy studio boss Jack Warner, who removed Altman from the moon saga, Countdown (1967), and another two years passed before he could raise the funds to mount his own adaptation of the Peter Miles novel That Cold Day in the Park.

But everything changed with M*A*S*H (1970), a farce set in a Korean War field hospital that was adapted by Ring Larnder, Jr. from a novel by Richard Hooker and caught the back end of the counterculture boom that had followed the collapse of the Production Code. With its irreverent approach to conflict, authority and death, this anti-war classic transformed Altman into the 45 year-old new kid on the Hollywood block. However, he had no intention of becoming a studio lackey and he embarked upon a series of acute pictures that introduced the phrase `genre revisionism' into the film studies lexicon. But, while Brewster McCloud (1970), McCabe & Mrs Miller (1971), The Long Goodbye (1973), Thieves Like Us, California Split (both 1974) and Nashville (1975) were all acclaimed as modern American masterpieces, the likes of 3 Women (1977) and A Wedding (1978) were dismissed as disappointments and Images (1972), Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull's History Lesson (1976), Quintet, A Perfect Couple (both 1979) and HealtH (1980) were rounded upon as disasters.

The calamitous misfire of Popeye (1980) virtually made Altman a pariah and he had to endure a difficult decade, in which he almost made as many TV-movies as features and few of Come Back to the 5 & Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean (1982), Streamers (1983), Secret Honour (1984), OC and Stiggs, Fool for Love (both 1985), and Beyond Therapy (1987) found much critical favour. The beacon was re-lit, however, with the HBO political satire, Tanner `88, which ran for 11 episodes around the presidential election that saw George Bush, Sr. beat Michael Dukakis to the White House. Following the rare period biography, Vincent & Theo (1990), Altman was welcomed back to the auteur fold with The Player (1992) and Short Cuts (1993) before he missed his step again with the haut couture satire, Prêt-à-Porter (1994).

Following a heart transplant that was hushed up to avoid insurance complications, Altman remained wildly inconsistent until his death at 81 in November 2006 (a few months after he received an Honorary Academy Award from an industry he viewed with deep suspicion). For every Gosford Park (2001) and A Prairie Home Companion (2006), there was a Kansas City (1996), The Gingerbread Man (1998), Cookie's Fortune (1999), Dr T and the Women (2000) and The Company (2003). But Altman was now enshrined as a national treasure, whose maverick ways were indulged by adoring critics grateful that someone was still prepared to defy the Tinseltown machine that now resided in the portfolios of multinational conglomerates. It's become a cliché to discuss Altman's achievement in terms of triumphs, struggles and comebacks, but his career was so full of peaks and troughs that it is hard to see how easily Mann and screenwriter Len Blum have managed so successfully to smooth them away.

Part of the explanation lies in Mann's heavy dependence upon the good graces of Altman's widow, Kathryn Reed, who acts as his narrator, alongside the splendid clips of her husband holding for everything from ensembles and improvisation to aesthetics and studio politics. But there are many acolytes willing to be associated with this exercise in cinematic hagiography and Paul Thomas Anderson, James Caan, Keith Carradine, Elliott Gould, Philip Baker Hall, Sally Kellerman, Lyle Lovett, Julianne Moore, Michael Murphy, Lily Tomlin, Robin Williams and Bruce Willis all provide sound byte answers to the request to define the meaning of the word `Altmanesque'.

It's a nice gimmick and the responses form into a patchwork that is laudably sincere and apposite, in spite of the odd instance of fulsome pomposity. Yet, one cannot help wishing this delved a little deeper in a lot more places and that a couple of non-fawning critics had been invited to provide a bit of desperately needed qualitative analysis. But, for all its superficiality (especially where Altman the husband, father and friend is concerned), this is a decent beginner's guide to Altman's idiosyncratic and iconoclastic oeuvre and it will have fulfilled its purpose if it sends people back to the best and the worst of his gleefully eclectic output or prompts newcomers to seek them out for the first time.