Hitchcock/Truffaut

Not the usual kind of biographical stuff about the celebrity's childhood and how he "rose to prominence" before he "fell from grace." In other words it's not an episode of "Biography." The object of attention is the book, "Cinema According to Hitchcock" by an admirer and fellow director Francois Truffaut, published in 1966.

The film is roughly (but only roughly) chronological and the biographical material is limited but covers both Hitchcock and his interviewer. What makes it more interesting than it might be is that Truffaut was about half Hitchcock's age. They came from different traditions -- Hitch from the silents, when everything needed to be spelled out visually, and Truffaut from the French "New Wave" cinema of the early 1960s, when the rules were thrown out the window.

Despite their different styles, they never clash. Truffaut is too good natured for that, and Hitch too distantly polite in his British way. Only once, in the book, not in the film, is there any sign of friction, when Truffaut suggests a different way Hitch might have handled a scene and he replies, "It seems you want me to write for an art house audience." Lots of excerpts from Hitch's movies and several from Truffaut's as well. A good deal of attention is paid to cinematic techniques -- the position of the camera, the lighting, the pattern of the images themselves. Some of the talking heads, and Hitchcock himself, come up with implications that to me seem questionable. I can't manage to convince myself that, while waiting for Kim Novack to emerge fully transformed from the bathroom, Jimmy Stewart is "getting an erection." In fact, I can't imagine Jimmy Stewart getting an erection at all.

I suspect the program might disappoint some viewers who don't want to listen to the interlocutors making polite jokes. (Twice, Hitch is about to tell an anecdote and asks for the recorder to be turned off.) Nothing in the movie is critical of either Truffaut or Hitchock, who became an alcoholic during his last years.

There are photos from the interview and excerpts from the recording, as well as a description of the surprising friendship that developed between the two. I thought it was all fascinating.

I would encourage anyone who viewed this film to get a copy of the book. For it is in the book that we learn about the master and what he did and how he thought. This was Truffaut's baby and it is incredible that this is left for us. The strength of the film is in the commentaries of the participants. We get a picture of the admiration shared by the two directors. That said, despite the limitations of 85 or so minutes, we are made privy to techniques employed. The focus is really on two films, "Vertigo" and "Psycho." That is enough in some respects because most of Hitchcock's dazzle is employed here. The lesson learned is that Hitchcock as a stylist and a sort of visual tyrant made him what he was. One interesting point made was what would have happened if he had been forced to work with egos like Marlon Brando, James Dean, or Dustin Hoffman, who certainly would have tried to manipulate Hitchcock. Montgomery Clift tried and failed; so we get a sense of that thing. All in all, this is decent, but it is more the observation of the director who attempted to produce a summation of the book. It only works in bits and pieces. Still, I'm glad I got a chance to see it.

HITCHCOCK/TRUFFAUT (2015) offers a documentary treatment of the relationship between the veteran English-born Hollywood director Alfred Hitchcock and the much younger French filmmaker Francois Truffaut and the ambitious series of interviews conducted by Truffaut in 1962 at the Beverly Hills Hotel that resulted in Truffaut's pioneering book, "Hitchcock/Truffaut." (Truffaut asked questions in French, with Helen Scott supplying the translation.) We hear a number of excerpts from the audio recordings of the interviews, usually accompanied by clips from the Hitchcock films under discussion. To supplement all this, director Kent Jones has added archival footage of both Hitchcock and Truffaut and photos of them at work, as well as other archival interviews, including one with Truffaut where he talks about these interviews. In addition, we get new interviews with a number of other Hollywood directors, some of whom were Young Turks when Hitchcock was in the final stages of his career, e.g. Martin Scorsese, Peter Bogdanovich and Paul Schrader, who are all now older than Hitchcock was at the time of the interviews, and some of whom are flourishing today, e.g. David Fincher, Richard Linklater, James Gray and Wes Anderson. There is a lot of rich material here that should engage film students, Hitchcock fans, and film buffs in general.

In many ways, the film plays like excerpts from a master class on Hitchcock's career. Often we hear Hitchcock's voice describing how he approached a particular scene as the film shows us the scene he's talking about. For instance, we see the overhead long shot from THE BIRDS showing the burning of the gas station and the spreading of the fire to the rest of the town while Hitchcock explains his decision to shoot it that way. He describes the trouble he had convincing Montgomery Clift to look up from the crowd in a scene in I CONFESS in order to justify a cut to something happening above the crowd. We see the famous shower murder in PSYCHO while he is heard describing in detail his approach to composing the scene. Some of the interviewees devote this kind of attention as well, as when Scorsese describes the components of the scene in THE WRONG MAN when the wrongfully accused Henry Fonda first adjusts to his prison cell and we see the scene unfold. The most screen time is devoted to VERTIGO and PSYCHO. Not only do we get Hitchcock's revelations about his working methods and aesthetic decisions on these films, but we get expert commentators such as Scorsese, Bogdanovich, Fincher and Gray.

Of the interviewees, the most screen time is given to Scorsese (Jones's mentor) and Fincher, but they all offer significant insights and clearly speak not only from respect and admiration, but a great love for Hitchcock. We also hear from three foreign filmmakers, the French directors Olivier Assayas and Arnaud Desplechin, and, from Japan, Kiyoshi Kurosawa. They speak in their own languages, with English subtitles.

Having said all this, I am troubled by certain omissions and questions I had that were never answered in the film. For one thing, we are never told whether Hitchcock knew any French at all. He appears to understand Truffaut's questions at times in the audio recordings and answers in English without waiting for a translation. Numerous letters that he wrote to Truffaut are shown and two of them, including the very first one, are in French. Did he write it in French or did he have someone translate it? I needed this spelled out. Which also begs the question of why there's no discussion of Helen Scott and what her background was and why she undertook this task. Truffaut refers to her in a filmed interview as "my collaborator," but that's the only mention she gets in the entire film.

Also, Peter Bogdanovich had a friendship with Hitchcock beginning back then and even interviewed the master himself around the same time. Why was this parallel relationship not mentioned? Bogdanovich is in the film and probably talked about it, but only a hint of it remains in his brief clips. And speaking of young directors who worshiped Hitchcock, why is there no discussion of Hitchcock's influence on these filmmakers? Truffaut himself was influenced by Hitchcock (see THE SOFT SKIN and THE BRIDE WORE BLACK), but this is not explored in any detail. Paul Schrader is interviewed and he even wrote the screenplay for Brian De Palma's OBSESSION (1976), a film that owes a great deal to VERTIGO, yet there's no mention of this film nor of De Palma himself, whose films were frequently cited for the debts they owed to Hitchcock. Scorsese's TAXI DRIVER (also 1976 and also written by Schrader) has more than a few Hitchcockian touches yet neither Scorsese nor Schrader bring it up. And both OBSESSION and TAXI DRIVER featured the very last scores by Hitchcock's frequent composer, Bernard Herrmann. Truffaut used Herrmann for two scores himself (THE BRIDE WORE BLACK and FAHRENHEIT 451).

Which brings up the film's most egregious omission. Herrmann scored six of the films excerpted in this documentary, with music playing an especially prominent role in the clips from VERTIGO and PSYCHO, yet no one refers to the music or mentions Herrmann by name. I have to assume that his name came up in the interviews, so I wonder why no mention of him made the final cut.

I was also bothered by the fact that film clips went unidentified. I can understand that they didn't want to disrupt the flow of the film by having text constantly pop up, but I can't be the only one who couldn't identify the various silent Hitchcock films excerpted. Also, while varying degrees of attention are paid to numerous Hitchcock films not mentioned in this review so far, e.g. SABOTAGE, SABOTEUR, NOTORIOUS, and MARNIE, I am curious as to why the following masterpieces receive little or no mention: REBECCA, SHADOW OF A DOUBT, STRANGERS ON A TRAIN, and REAR WINDOW.

The title plays like a clever nod to "Frost/Nixon" but in this case, the interviewee's name is put first, a matter of respect that even Truffaut would have acknowledged. Look at the poster, Truffaut is like a disciple totally enthralled by the humorously pedantic look the Master is deigning to give him. In reality they were just having fun together, having earned a few minutes of relaxation after having provided so many hours of valuable insights not only on Hitchcock's movies but on his vision of film-making, and if anyone was entitled to say what film-making was about, no doubt it was the director with the iconic shadowy silhouette.

Indeed, even when he wasn't making great movies, Alfred Hitchcock was still the greatest director to have ever graced the screen. He reconciled two generally conflicting approaches: the artistic and the technical, he could indulge to symbolism, to hyperbolic visuals, to innovative dilatation or accelerations of time, to juxtaposition of shots or the use of specific leitmotiv but he never, never improvised: every frame, every moment was sketched, planned and studied with a meticulous attention to small (and pervert) details and a unique sense of anticipation. You can see this pattern even in that distinctively slow voice he had, as if he had to think before, set up his mind, before announcing a subject. And yet he could sound witty and funny on the spot. Hitchcock was a man of paradoxes, but he was himself a paradox, an artist, a technician and a natural.

That's the genius of Hitchcock. And that's how he became the true Master of Suspense; he had to get in control of every single element: the timing, the use of particular objects or plot device (his McGuffin darlings) as props, of even his characters as the props of his own creativity. His infamous "treat actors like cattle" takes its full meaning once you hear him talk about the attention for characterization and his fascination for human paradoxes: having a totally innocent man being mistaken from a dangerous criminal, a lovable family uncle being a serial killer or a sophisticated blonde have a volcanic libido in privacy. Hitchcock was like a Master Puppeteer, he didn't belong to the Elia Kazan or method acting of school, he pulled the strings himself and it's only fitting that his trademark theme was Gounod's "Funeral March of a Marionette". Basically, many of his movies can be looked at as a macabre march (or chase) of a puppet-like character.

But we were his puppets as well. Hitchcock could toy with our emotions like no other director, making it an instant signature, probably what made him recognized by 'Cahiers du Cinéma' as an auteur director. When then critic François Truffaut, along with New Wave icons to be (Chabrol, Brialy and Godard), started to re-evaluated the history of cinema, they defined the auteur as a director whose unique vision and sense of narrative and style shaped most of the movie. The idea wasn't to dismiss any movie from a non auteur but to say that even the lesser movie from an auteur will be more interesting than the other director's main work. In the documentary, Scorsese mentions that the art of directing is so reliant on contributions: from the actors, the editors, the writers, the musicians that you can't just make the director the sole 'maker' of the film what would "Psycho" be without Bernard Herrmann or Anthony Perkins.

Still, Hitchcock can get away with it. Even his lesser movies, with casting choices he ended up regretting, had a Hitchcockian quality. It started in the 30's, became widely known in the 40's and then culminated in the 50's. In 1962, he had just finished "Psycho" and was working on his "Birds" when Truffaut was only starting with three movies that met with international acclaim. Truffaut was like a critic, a journalist, a fan and a fellow director and on these four levels, he seemed to know more about Hitchcock than Hitchcock himself. From the interview, he released a book that became a Bible for cinema, a frame-by-frame study of Hitchcock's most creative film sequences on which David Fincher said to have been a huge influence on his future work.

Say what you want about Truffaut's movies but he shared at least with Hitchcock the passion for the art and the craft, the two really meant business. Now, there are many juicy facts to gather from the documentary, and they're punctuated by some neat interventions from directors such as Scorsese, Fincher or Anderson. But the biggest favor the documentary does is to encourage you to listen to the interview between Truffaut and Hitchcock and that's just an offer no film-maker can refuse. Hitchcock goes through every major film he made and provides his own insights, even criticism toward movies we generally praise. Hitchcock was a practical man believing a movie that didn't met the public has faulted in a way or another, and listening to him criticizing even Joan Fontaine in "Suspicion" is one of these 'a-ha' moments you're begging for. A director praising Hitchcock, what's new? Hitchcock criticizing his work, now, that's even better. The documentary isn't just about retrospective analysis, it also allows us to understand the elements that made Hitchcock such an iconic director.

It's Truffaut who said that Hitchcock never made movies that belonged to a time, he never followed trends and fashion, his movies belonged to himself and that way, end up being eternally modern. Hitchcock was obviously flattered by the compliment (coming in the first interview if I remember correctly) and could see that Truffaut wasn't an ordinary. You could feel the bond growing between the two men and the friendship would go on till Hitchcock's death. The interview is the real thing, this documentary is just an appetizer.

The success of documentary is usually based on how much you already know and how much you learn about the main subject of the film. I knew a bit about Hitchcock, but I never dug deep into his archival footage or books written about him to understand the full psychology of the master of suspense. Hitchcock/Truffaut is a fascinating look into several of Hitch's films, and even some of Truffaut's, even if it is a little too short to call it a full exploration. Director Kent Jones gathers several of Hollywood's greatest filmmakers, including Martin Scorsese, Richard Linklater, Peter Bogdanovich, and David Fincher, to discuss Hitchcock's influence on the art of cinema and some of his most effective features. These commentators are certainly insightful, but you don't get enough from each of them to get full satisfaction. The film is based around a conversation between Hitchcock and Truffaut that took place in 1962. Truffaut, an up and coming filmmaker at the time, provides the viewer (or reader) a glimpse into what it would be like to interview the legendary filmmaker yourself. In many ways, Truffaut gets to ask all the questions any fan of Hitchcock has always wanted to ask. Whether it's addressing his catholic roots, sexual undertones in many of his features, his transition from silent film to talkies, the dreamlike quality to the films, or his iconic use of "god's eye" camera angles, it's all covered. As a film junkie, this type of coverage on one filmmaker is a dream come true. Again, the one thing I think the film could have improved upon was just giving more of everything and spending even more time on his expansive filmography. Spending a good chunk of time on Vertigo and Psycho was definitely needed, but I would love a more in-depth look at plenty of other films of his as well. However, overall, this documentary is a joy to watch, especially considering it's brilliant filmmakers commenting on Hitchcock, who is one of the greatest.

8.5/10