Midtown Blogger/Manhattan Valley Follies: Prague Post: Movie Review, "Hitchcock/Truffaut"

Movie review: Hitchcock/Truffaut

Category: Cinema

Published: 24 September 2015

Written by André Crous

Hits: 85

In control. In 1962, Alfred Hitchcock sat down for an eight-day interview with fellow filmmaker François Truffaut. The upshot was a lengthy booklength transcription; the downside was this film. Courtesy photo.

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Documentary chases shiny objects, shows little insight into work or character of one of cinema’s most influential directors

Review filed from the 2015 San Sebastián International Film Festival.

It may share a title with one of the most accessible studies of a filmmaker ever, but in his documentary Hitchcock/Truffaut, director Kent Jones forgot to take a page from the book at least one of his interviewees professes to admire, namely a thorough investigation of the facts. What we end up with is a messy assortment of thoughts and reflections on the Master of Suspense, countless extracts from his films (none of which is indicated to the uninitiated) and a mish-mash of audio taken from the eight-day interview between the young but ultimately immensely influential French film critic/director François Truffaut and the aging sage that had thrilled the masses for many decades with his tales of murder, Alfred Hitchcock.

In the film, we meet 10 directors, among whom only David Fincher announces his personal connection — a fascination that dates to his childhood — with the book, first published in 1967, which contains a wide-ranging discussion between the two cinephiles of all of Hitchcock’s films up to that point. The conversation, which sadly was not filmed but only recorded, was facilitated by the bilingual Helen Scott, who gets only one shout-out here without any further information about her. Truffaut spoke no English, and Hitchcock spoke no French, so Scott interpreted back and forth between them from morning till late afternoon every day for more than a week.

Rating: **
Directed by Kent Jones
With David Fincher, Arnaud Despleschin, Olivier Assayas and others

Besides Fincher, some of the most loquacious speakers here are French directors Arnaud Desplechin and Olivier Assayas, with speed talker Martin Scorsese also called upon to share his views of Hitchcock’s most famous works. It is wholly unclear why these particular filmmakers and their ilk, which also includes Wes Anderson, Richard Linklater, Paul Schrader, Peter Bogdanovich, Kiyoshi Kurosawa and the little-known James Grey, are recounting their impressions. Had we listened to someone like Brian de Palma, or Steven Spielberg, perhaps we could have learned something about tension, art and entertainment, but while these particular filmmakers are amiable enough, it remains a mystery why they were chosen to share their opinions of Hitchcock. To paraphrase Lloyd Bentsen, they’re no François Truffaut.

Time and again, we return to the question of whether Hitchcock was an entertainer or an artist, and predictably the film leans very heavily toward the latter, as was the intention of Truffaut at the time, who along with his colleagues at the Cahiers du cinéma film monthly extolled the Hollywood-based British director for being the force that drives every one of his films, in other words for being an “auteur.” In the words of Truffaut, the work of an auteur might not always be good, but it is always better than the work of a non-auteur (he used the examples of French filmmakers Jean Renoir and Jean Delannoy as representatives of these two respective kinds of directors).

The entire endeavor that is this film turns toward armchair psychoanalysis, as the directors, most of whom are too young to have met Hitchcock, speculate about the fetish objects in his films. Fortunately, we are spared any significant amount of discussion about the blonde actresses he employed, but the topic of dreams does come up, and it is truly puzzling that there is no mention of Spellbound, which was Hitchcock’s big “dream” film and also dealt very cynically with psychoanalysis.

Perhaps coming on the heels of Sight and Sound’s 2012 poll that saw the film leaping to the top of the list of the best films ever made, Hitchcock/Truffaut spends an inordinate amount of time on an analysis of Vertigo. We learn precious little during this sequence, except that the film works not because of its narrative, which is deeply flawed and more than a little silly, but because it is, in the words of Scorsese, “poetry.” Such bland statements about art bring absolutely nothing to our understanding of Hitchcock’s undeniable appeal, and the film would have benefited much more from looking at his most successful (Rear Window, Psycho, Spellbound and North by Northwest) rather than his least successful features, such as The Wrong Man.

What would seem to be the most important point of discussion is one that is mentioned all too briefly: Hitchcock’s problem with realism. Even Scorsese admits that Vertigo has a “spirit of realism,” but that the film cannot possibly be described as realistic. This is in fact a larger problem in the director’s works and ultimately led to his excommunication from the world of entertainment because of his stubborn refusal to renounce outdated techniques such as rear projection. This gimmick, often utilized in studio pictures during the age of black-and-white cinema, made Marnie — released in 1964 in between the French New Wave and in the middle of the British New Wave, both of which focused on the lives of people in the middle or the bottom half of society and whose films were shot on location — look downright laughable.

Truffaut, who was just 30 years of age at the time he conducted the interview in 1962, is always a magnetic speaker, his enthusiasm for Hitchcock palpable, and it is a shame Jones only very superficially compares an incident in the Frenchman’s début feature, The 400 Blows (les 400 Coups) with a famous story Hitchcock often told. But he fails to share with the audience, for example, that Truffaut asked himself “What would Hitch do?” when he shot the suspenseful scene in which the mother of the main character, a rebellious schoolboy named Antoine, shows up at school to confront him about his lies.

It is all well and good to assemble a few friends to talk about a man who was a giant in the industry before they came along, but this film does not contribute to a deeper understanding of the man, his life or his films. At best, it may serve as a starting point for students who need to write a film review for their high-school English class. Those who did not know anything about Hitchcock or Truffaut before watching the film might very well learn the basics, but for everyone else, this film offers less than the bare minimum. Go out and buy the book instead.

André Crous can be reached at acrous@praguepost.com

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About the Author

ANDRÉ CROUS

Hailing from the Cape Winelands in South Africa, André spent his student years at home and all over France before making the move to Prague in 2011. He has worked as a film critic and copy editor, and is a member of the renowned international association of film critics, FIPRESCI.