Film-maker and writer whose theories on cinema influenced Truffaut, Godard and ChabrolThe writer and film director Alexandre Astruc, who has died aged 92, personified the gap between theory and practice. In his crucial and influential 1948 essay La Caméra-Stylo (The Camera-Pen) in L’Ecran Français, he wrote of the cinema becoming “a means of writing as supple and as subtle as that of written language”.He called for an end to institutional cinema and for a new style that would be both personal and malleable.