Someone made a doc of HITCHCOCK/TRUFFAUT, and got a whole mess of filmmakers, including Martin Scorsese, David Fincher, Wes Anderson, Paul Schraders, Richard Linklater, James Gray, and Peter Bogdanovich, to appear in it.
Kent Jones’ film is a visualization of the conversation (originally published in 1967) between the world-renowned British maestro and the then-youthful former film critic (already a big noise for 400 BLOWS and JULES ET JIM), using clips from Hitch’s work to demonstrate his various points about the nitty gritty of filmmaking. As several of the filmmakers mention, the published version has served as a sort of “film school in a book” for half a century, letting scores of aspiring filmmakers in on how Hitch conceived, shot, and cut his films for maximum impact. Laying the legend’s thoughts over visual examples of his various theories in action has a decided impact, and bring his points home better than ever. If that is enough to warrant a feature-film celebration (or wankfest) of his work, then that’s fine.
It’s easy to call out Hitch’s sometimes mannered style and outdated reliance on immaculately beautiful blonde starlets to sell his spectacles, but it’s unquestionable that young viewers are constantly latching onto the director’s work all the time due to the universality of his visual language. His best films strike the perfect balance between digging at the subconscious with ominous dramatic undertones and pleasing the audience with grand, old-fashioned movie pizzazz, and his mastership perservers both through the artists he’s influenced and the constant, successful re-releases of his work (Universal is quite cognizant of his catalogue’s worth to the studio). This doc should help cinephiles and Hitch fans alike break down the choices he made that rendered his work so effective, and just how devoted of a flim lover Truffaut was even while he was influencing a new generation with his own films.
This probably won’t supplant the original publication from its position of esteem among film students, but it could be a loving, informative, and entertaining look at the old giant via the eyes of one of his most accomplished fans. Color me intrigued.
HITCHCOCK/TRUFFAUT finally gives Scorsese the chance to talk about film in front of a camera on December 2nd.
