Hitchcock's cameos make him a wallflower compared to today's directors

Yes, he was in nearly all his films, and yes, he would have played a sexually-inappropriate deaf-mute if there hadn't been protests. But at least he's not M Night Shyamalan
Alfred Hitchcock's cameo
Slipping into the background ... Alfred Hitchcock Ronald Grant Archive

Artists have been creating self-portraits since ancient times - Jan van Eyck provided the earliest identifiable examples back in the 1430s. Film-makers have similarly been keen to immortalise themselves: Auguste Lumière took the first directorial cameo in Repas de Bébé in 1895.

But Hollywood studios frowned upon directors putting themselves centre stage. So how come Alfred Hitchcock got away with it for so long? And so blatantly? He popped up behind a newsroom desk three seconds into The Lodger (1926). He delayed his entrance until the second minute of his American debut, Rebecca (1940). But, as the gimmick caught on, he began dispensing with it before the plot kicked in to avoid distracting the audience.

The majority of Hitchcock's 37 silent cameos were walk-ons. He evidently had a thing about musical instruments, as he emerged from an elevator with a violin case in Spellbound (1945), lugged a cello off a train in The Paradine Case (1947) and boarded another with a double bass in Strangers on a Train (1951). He also delighted in concealing his appearance. In Lifeboat (1943), he cropped up in the "before" and "after" pictures of a newspaper advertisement for Reduco Obesity Slayer, while he peered out of a class reunion photograph in Dial M for Murder (1954) and stood with his back to the camera while watching some acrobats in The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956),

But while Hitch's cameos were often mischievous, they weren't always random in-jokes. As Michael Walker has suggested in Hitchcock's Motifs, they frequently occurred at significant moments in the action. By drinking champagne at the party in Notorious (1946), for example, he helps necessitate a trip to the cellar that houses the film's Macguffin - the wine bottles filled with uranium.

However, this appearance was. in fact, an afterthought, as Hitchcock had wanted to play a deaf-mute in a street scene, who gets slapped across the face for signing something inappropriate to a pretty girl. News of the gag evidently leaked out and the producers received sufficient complaints for them to drop the idea. It didn't stop Hitchcock from eventually indulging in a little dark humour, however, as in Topaz (1968) he anticipated Little Britain's Lou and Andy by rising from the wheelchair in which he'd been pushed into an airport concourse to shake hands with an acquaintance and walk off into the crowd.

Even though they were often self-deprecating, Hitchcock's cameos were as much a symbol of authorship as Grinling Gibbons's pea pods. He revelled in being Hollywood's most recognisable director and couldn't resist guesting in trailers for his films or introducing his television series. Indeed, his profile became so famous that it did alone the cameoing in Rope (1948) and his last film, Family Plot (1976).

But one suspects there was less overt vanity in Hitchcock's blink and miss 'em moments than in more grandstanding cameos like Francis Ford Coppola's TV director in Apocalypse Now (1979) or Oliver Stone's trader in the split-screen sequence in Wall Street (1987). John Carpenter and Peter Jackson have tended to follow Hitchcock's lead in combining ubiquity with anonymity. But most habitual cameoers are less self-effacing, with M Night Shyamalan conceding "It's important for me to be a part of the film in some way rather than to be an outsider from the independent world of film-making. I would love to play the lead role, but it's physically impossible."

So does the cameo represent an auteur's imprint or an egotist's insecurity? Which are your favourite and most detested directorial cameos - and are there any you've spotted any most people have missed?