ABSTRACT
This chapter recapitulates the book's main points, and summarizes the main theoretical assumptions underlying Rohmer's early film criticism. Ultimately, those assumptions would decisively influence the younger critics who later established the politique des auteurs, as shown in Chabrol's and Rohmer's monograph on Alfred Hitchcock, customarily regarded as the politique’s ripest fruit. Indeed, that book (also extensively tackled in this chapter) portrays Hitchcock's cinéma as one that epitomizes (through the recurring ‘transfer of guilt’ theme running through most of his films) the externality of consciousness that Sartre never quite managed to properly theorize in his philosophy. In Rohmer's and Chabrol's eyes, Hitchcock's films thus stood for an utter negation of Sartre's all too literary approach, which they (and by extension the politique des auteurs overall) perceived as inadequate to account for cinéma's specificities.
