The documentary Hitchcock/Truffaut is a Must See for cinéastes. In 1962, Francois Truffaut spent a week in Hollywood interviewing Alfred Hitchcock. These interviews formed the basis of Truffaut’s seminal 1966 book Hitchcock/Truffaut. At this moment, Truffaut was the hottest new thing in international cinema. He was horrified that Hitchcock was viewed in the U.S. as only a genre director and pop celebrity, but not as the master of cinema that influenced Truffaut and the rest of the French New Wave. Vertigo, now rated by many as the greatest of films, had only broken even at the box office four years before.
Filmmaker Kent Jones took the audiotapes and stills from those 1962 interview sessions and adds what Truffaut could not – illustrative clips from the Hitchcock films themselves. Because Truffaut is no longer with us, Jones also provides commentary from directors like martin Scorsese, David Fincher, Peter Bogdanovich and others. The result is an insightful celebration of Hitchcock’s body of work.
I had thought that I had a pretty fair grasp of Hitchcock, especially his love of surprise and the MacGuffin, his subversion of convention in Psycho and obsession with blonde actresses. But Hitchcock/Truffaut gave me a much richer understanding of Hitchcock’s visual sensibilities, his mastery of overhead shots, and his very limited expectations of his actors, as well as his compression and expansion of time.
Hitchcock/Truffaut will be interesting to any audience, but essential to serious movie fans.