Hitchcock/Truffaut
HITCHCOCK/TRUFFAUT, documentary, rated PG-13, Center for Contemporary Arts, 3.5 chiles
In 1962, François Truffaut had completed only a handful of feature-length movies, including the semi-autobiographical drama The 400
Blows (1959). Truffaut’s hero was Alfred Hitchcock, a celebrated director who is sometimes judged by critics as a purveyor of “light” entertainment because he primarily worked in the thriller, horror, and mystery genres. But not only was Hitchcock an artist first and an entertainer second, he was an auteur, and one of the first to bear that designation courtesy of Truffaut, who popularized the term. Following the success of Jules and Jim (1962), Truffaut met with Hitchcock in Hollywood and, via an interpreter, the two began a week-long series of interviews where they discussed the technical and conceptual aspects of making movies. Truffaut turned the interviews into a 1966 book, also called Hitchcock/Truffaut, an indispensable read for the serious cinéaste. The documentary that encapsulates these iconic conversations is by Kent Jones, whose previous directorial efforts include A Letter to Elia (2010), on director Elia Kazan, Val Lewton: The Man in the Shadows (2007), and
My Voyage to Italy (2001), co-director Martin Scorsese’s subjective look at Italian cinema. Jones knows the silver screen.
Scorsese is interviewed in Hitchcock/Truffaut. He discusses the camera angles used by the master of suspense, many of which were groundbreaking when Hitchcock first tried them, such as the sweeping tracking shot in the British talkie Young and Innocent (1937), and a similar shot that’s used in a mind-bogglingly expert way in Notorious (1946). Scorsese points to a scene in The Birds (1963), shot high above the town, just after an explosion at a gas station engulfs a man in flames. The shot suggests the point of view of an omnipresent being, as if to say that the horror wrought by the birds is God’s judgment. Several other directors discuss what is innovative or inspirational to them in Hitchcock’s work — Wes Anderson, David Fincher, and Peter Bogdanovich among them — but the insight of Truffaut highlights that Hitchcock was an artist firmly committed to a particular vision. Truffaut recognized that Hitchcock’s films were a medium for exploring themes of guilt, sin, and the innocent man who is wrongly accused. Truffaut wrote film criticism in the 1950s for
Cahiers du Cinéma, a French publication that helped to elevate the status of film to an art form. His contemporaries also honed their love for the movies at Cahiers, including Éric Rohmer, Jean-Luc Godard, and Claude Chabrol (Chabrol and Rohmer also penned a book on Hitchcock together).
That the leaders of the French New Wave were so enamored of Hitchcock speaks volumes about the director’s influence. Truffaut and Hitchcock became lifelong friends after the interviews, frequently wrote one another, and screened each other’s films. But Hitchcock was nearing the end of his career when he met Truffaut, and he would only go on to make a handful of movies before his death in 1980. Truffaut died four years after Hitchcock, at the age of fifty-two. The chance to hear two of 20th-century cinema’s greats engaged in a deep discussion of their craft is a treat in itself — but add in the poignancy of their friendship, insights into their differences as filmmakers, and a staggering number of pertinent film clips from both directors’ oeuvres — and you have a documentary every film lover should see. — Michael Abatemarco