It isn’t enough that Alfred Hitchcock’s “Vertigo” landed at the top spot of the 2012 Sight & Sound poll as the best film of all time; he’s also the most influential director of all time, for reasons good and otherwise. Influence isn’t something that an artist controls. For instance, writing last week about the similarity of Francis Ford Coppola’s first two “Godfather” films to the dominant aesthetic of modern serial TV dramas, what I didn’t mention is that Coppola himself didn’t yield to his own influence. Rather, he tore into his own aesthetic with “Apocalypse Now” and “One from the Heart,” and it’s one of the tragedies of modern cinema that he had such a hard time rescuing his career from the latter film’s catastrophic financial failure—and that he could never again take on such a risk of artistic technique.

Hitchcock, who was born on this day in 1899, stretched his own aesthetic, too—in part as a result of coming to Hollywood in the age of Orson Welles and independent production, the two great liberators of directorial vision in the forties and fifties. But Hitchcock’s sense of perfection achieved through control lends itself to an especially neurotic and self-defeating form of influence. (Stanley Kubrick is an equally controlling director, but his sense of control is built into his movies as a part of his stories, and their denatured chill is one of the prime modes of cinematic modernism. He didn’t have to be copied, because other filmmakers were swimming in the same current at the same time.)

Hitchcock was canonized by the young critics of the early fifties who, by decade’s end, became the filmmakers of the French New Wave. These critics, based at Cahiers du Cinéma, were known as the Hitchcocko-Hawksians; the first of them to write about Hitchcock was the twenty-one-year-old Jean-Luc Godard, in 1952 (the subject was “Strangers on a Train”). But writing in 1958 about Ingmar Bergman, he came up with a sharp riff that put Hitchcock in his place—albeit, an exalted one:

There are, in general, two kinds of filmmakers: those who walk in the street with their head up, and those who walk with their head down. The former, in order to see what’s happening around them, have to raise their head often and suddenly and to turn it left and right, embracing the field of vision with a series of glances. They see. The latter see nothing, they look, fixing their attention on the precise point that interests them. When they shoot a film, the framings of the former will be airy and fluid (Rossellini); those of the latter, tight to the millimeter (Hitchcock) … . Bergman is rather in the first group, that of free cinema; Visconti, in the second, that of rigorous cinema. For my part, I prefer “Summer with Monika” to “Senso,” and the politique des auteurs to that of metteurs en scène.

Being an auteur is a matter of character; being a metteur en scène, a director, is a matter of images. When Godard was interviewed in the mid-sixties about his film “Pierrot le Fou,” he said, “Up until now, when I was making a film and got stuck, I would ask myself, ‘What would Hitchcock do?’ Now, if I asked him, he’d say, ‘Figure it out yourself.’ ” Godard had plenty of character, ideas, inclinations, and temperament, but when he was looking for images he turned to the master director for advice that was, in effect, practical and technical. But with “Pierrot le Fou” Godard sensed that he had gone off an edge. He was not making the kind of film that called for technical or practical or directorial solutions, and he was not taking a script or a story or a plot and realizing it in images; rather, he was leaping into a void and making images in a state of existential creative danger. The result was a state of artistic chaos and confusion that played a role in his withdrawal, for more than a decade, from the movie industry.

Exactly at the moment that Godard had undone himself of any Hitchcockian influence—perhaps more radically than he had sought to do—François Truffaut was completing his vast book of interviews with Hitchcock, and Truffaut’s films (notably “Mississippi Mermaid” and “The Bride Wore Black”) were reflecting an intense, neurotic, and constraining dependence on Hitchcock’s type of story and way of filming. The self-liberation came in the form of what may be both Truffaut’s most and least Hitchcockian film, the wild, comic, melancholy, and personal masterwork “A Gorgeous Girl Like Me,” in which he fused a story of an abused and enraged youth with a story of romantic obsession, literary ambition, and bourgeois sensibility with the crude and tasteless energy of farm villages and provincial towns. There, Truffaut pushed himself outside any system, and unleashed a core of Hitchcockian inspiration from its confining trappings.

There’s no blaming Hitchcock. His own art was self-renewing and self-challenging to the point of alienating the faithful (as with the furious and brilliant “Marnie”). What’s inspiring about Hitchcock is that, to begin with, his films are marked, throughout—in image and sound, in performance, décor, and costume—with his own artistic personality, a style that is entirely his own. (Wes Anderson told me that Hitchcock’s films first gave him the idea that there is a “guy whose thing is making images and sounds to tell the story.”) Hitchcock offers the fundamental idea of directing as creating; he has the prime merit of having become the cinema’s exemplary adjective. The thing is, it’s not an adjective that goes equally well with all filmmakers’ nouns.

Photograph by Fred Palumbo/Library of Congress.