Hitchcock/Truffaut | Little White Lies

Hitchcock/​Truffaut

02 Mar 2016 / Released: 04 Mar 2016

Words by Adam Cook

Directed by Kent Jones

Starring James Gray, Martin Scorsese, and Wes Anderson

Two men in suits, one seated at a desk and the other standing, in conversation.
Two men in suits, one seated at a desk and the other standing, in conversation.
4

Anticipation.

One of the great critics of our time with a stellar grouping of world-class filmmakers.

3

Enjoyment.

It’s hard not to be infectiously drawn in by the passion on display here.

3

In Retrospect.

More of a beginner’s guide than an invaluable contribution to the subject.

Two grand mas­ters come head to head in this insight­ful doc­u­men­tary from film crit­ic Kent Jones.

François Truffaut’s inter­view com­pendi­um Hitchcock/​Truffaut’ may very well be the most sacred and beloved text in all cinephil­ia, and cer­tain­ly the most sig­nif­i­cant for the cause of the auteur the­o­ry along with Andrew Sar­ris’ The Amer­i­can Cin­e­ma’. Pub­lished in 1967, this sin­gu­lar vol­ume was based on a week-long inter­view Truf­faut con­duct­ed with Alfred Hitch­cock in 1962.

It isn’t just an invalu­able in-depth study of one of cinema’s great­est mas­ters, it’s also an incred­i­ble text about two artists who sim­ply admired each oth­er. As with Peter Bogdanovich’s This is Orson Welles’, many of the book’s most mem­o­rable moments derive not sim­ply from the priv­i­leged insights into a filmmaker’s method, but from the plea­sure and excite­ment of two pas­sion­ate peo­ple bounc­ing ideas across a table.

Now, acclaimed pro­gram­mer, crit­ic and film­mak­er Kent Jones has pulled off the tricky feat of find­ing a way to do jus­tice to the book and bring its pages alive in a new doc­u­men­tary that is less an adap­ta­tion more than it is a trib­ute. It would be dif­fi­cult to bring this con­ver­sa­tion­al dynam­ic to life on film, and it would be too easy to com­pile the book’s great­est hits into a series of sound-bites punched up with behind-the-scenes tid­bits. Instead, in his Hitchcock/​Truffaut, Jones pays homage to the spir­it of his film’s name­sake by min­ing the pas­sion at the book’s core and then choos­ing to expand the con­ver­sa­tion. Enlist­ing a slew of chat­ty cineast­es to offer their own thoughts and feel­ings on the book and Hitchcock’s work, Jones, and co-writer Serge Toubiana have made not so much Hitchcock/​Truffaut as Hitchcock/​Truffaut/​Scorsese
/​Assayas/​Gray/​Desplechin/​Fincher/​Kurosawa. Jones’ film is an endear­ing por­trait of film­mak­er-to-film­mak­er ado­ra­tion that brings Truffaut’s land­mark book into the present, mak­ing its fas­ci­nat­ing dia­logue feel con­tin­u­ous, fresh and alive.

The actor and direc­tor Bob Bal­a­ban nar­rates the film, and while his endear­ing tones make a sound choice for any voiceover gig, it could have per­haps ben­e­fit­ted more from the per­son­al touch of Jones’ con­sid­er­able elo­quence. The doc cir­cles around its sub­ject, only just skim­ming the sur­face of the wealth of insight the source mate­r­i­al offers. One pas­sage on 1958’s Ver­ti­go is the high­light – it seems to draw the whole focus of the movie into its mes­meris­ing vor­tex, and becomes the cen­tral top­ic of dis­cus­sion among the interviewees.

Most mov­ing­ly, Mar­tin Scors­ese speaks about its impact on a per­son­al lev­el. How­ev­er, the bril­liance of Ver­ti­go not with­stand­ing, it seems unfair for one film to hog so much screen time in a piece that is osten­si­bly sup­posed to be about a book as com­pre­hen­sive as Hitchcock/​Truffaut’. The deep analy­sis one may expect from Jones is lack­ing here, and one can find more inci­sive work from him on the very same sub­ject, for exam­ple, in the sup­ple­ments of The Cri­te­ri­on Collection’s release of Truffaut’s The Soft Skin.

There is the feel­ing that he may be using the film to intro­duce the book to a younger gen­er­a­tion of cinephiles. But there’s no deny­ing the plea­sure of wal­low­ing in the pres­ence of such movie love.

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