★★★★
To celebrate the 50th anniversary of Hitchcock/Truffaut, the book that became known as ‘the Bible of Cinema’, director Kent Jones has brought together a high-powered group of famous filmmakers to fanboy obsessively about the book’s impact on their careers and the meticulous genius of Hitchcock.
In the early ’60s, nouvelle vague star François Truffaut wrote a heartfelt letter to one of his greatest heroes, Alfred Hitchcock, asking if the megastar British director would sit down with him to talk through each one of his (then) 48 films. Hitchcock was touched and the pair sat down for a week-long interview, which Truffaut then turned into a book that exhaustively detailed the methods and ideas behind each iconic shot in every Hitchcock movie.
Now, the book has a documentary to accompany it, packed full of iconic scenes from Hitchcock films and rhapsodic commentary from directors like Martin Scorsese, Richard Linklater, David Fincher and Wes Anderson. The high-powered talking heads pay enthusiastic tribute to Hitchcock’s oeuvre – in particular the major critical classics like Vertigo, The Wrong Man and Psycho – as well as the influence of the book Hitchcock/Truffaut, which came out just a few years before the entrenched old-school Hollywood studio system was blown aside by hip, low-budget indie films like Easy Rider. “The book radicalised filmmakers,” Scorsese says. “We realised we can do [whatever we want].”
If you’re coming into this doco as a Truffaut fan, you might be disappointed – the film deals only briefly with his career, touching on his start as a film critic for the influential magazine Cahiers Du Cinéma, his rough childhood with a shitty dad (as documented in the first film of his autobiographical Antoine Doinel series, The 400 Blows), and his search as an adult for alternative father figures like directors Roberto Rossellini, Jean Renoir and Hitchcock.
Instead, the film Hitchcock/Truffaut is an 80-minute tribute to the huge influence the British auteur had on modern cinema, and the way his early training as an engineer and designer influenced his precise, mathematical approach to both plot arcs and the framing of every single shot – the singular style that made him the ‘Master of Suspense’. If you’re a Hitchcock fan or a cinema obsessive, you’ll revel in the meticulous detail of Hitchcock/Truffaut; if you’re not, then you wouldn’t have read this far.
Hitchcock/Truffaut opens in cinemas on Thursday August 11.
