In The Company Of Masters. Kent Jones’ Hitchcock/Truffaut.
A well-worn copy of Francois Truffaut’s book-length interview with Alfred Hitchcock has long been a staple of any aspiring cinephile’s personal library. On the one hand, it’s an accessible and informative book that offers an invaluable insight into the working practices of its subject, while on the other it’s a how-to guide to film criticism, such is Truffaut’s ability to delve in to the psychology of his subject. Kent Jones, America’s greatest living writer on film has once again turned to filmmaking with Hitchcock/Truffaut, a film charting the story behind, and influence of, Truffaut’s book.
Jones is an accomplished filmmaker in his own right, having co-directed A Letter To Elia with Scorsese, having previously co-written My Voyage To Italy with the filmmaker. Hitchcock/Truffaut follows suit, and is a well-made, very accessible piece of work. Jones’ film is filled with familiar faces (all of them men: the film’s lone failing), with the likes of Peter Bogdanovich, James Gray and Martin Scorsese keen to discuss the book’s influence on their own lives and work. Bob Balaban, who worked with Truffaut on Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters Of The Third Kind, and who himself wrote a book about his own experiences with the directors (the wonderful Spielberg, Truffaut and Me: An Actor’s Diary
) narrates the documentary. The film’s behind the scenes credentials are just as impressive, with Serge Toubiana, who until last year was the long-running director of the Cinémathèque française and is considered one of the world’s great authorities on Truffaut having co-written the movie.
Ultimately Hitchcock/Truffaut serves as a wonderful examination of the relationship between cinema and film criticism. In the age of the digital the written word is becoming something of a fall guy; the democratisation afforded by the internet is a wonderful thing, that has offered up a platform to anyone willing and able to string together a sentence on any subject they deem themselves worthy of opinion of, for better or worse. So often is the focus on the negative side of film criticism, with much of it written off as the angry, ill-informed ramblings of somebody with too much time on their hands (just this week the filmmaker Alex Proyas lashed out at the “deranged idiots” in the wake of the poor reviews that have plagued his latest feature, Gods Of Egypt). Kent Jones’ film reminds us how rich and valuable film criticism can be, and how the discourse generated can help to reshape and confirm legacies.
