In 1966, the young French filmmaker François Truffaut wrote Cinema According To Hitchcock (and I’m embarrassed to admit I’ve not read it). Truffaut’s career was about to bloom (he had already made The 400 Blows), and his homage to the great director Alfred Hitchcock was to become a one of the most acclaimed works of its kind. As a tribute to both men, Kent Jones’s riveting documentary is compiled of tapes and photographs from their conversations, as well as clips from the movies and commentaries by current prominent directors (Martin Scorcese, Wes Anderson, David Fincher et al). Perhaps not quite enough time is given to Truffaut’s output, but it is beautifully put together, building to climactic moments when Hitchcock speaks so candidly and without a skerrick of pretension about what he was aiming to achieve and how he went about doing it in Vertigo (which I MUST watch again) and Psycho. There is such food for thought in being reminded that the essential crafts of filmmaking – ie telling the story in pictures – had already been established in the silent era; such confrontation in hearing Hitchcock casually state that ‘all actors are cattle’; such comfort in knowing that, contrary to the modern idea of the ‘auteur’ indulging in the esoteric, Hitchcock believed that a film ‘should be designed for 2,000 seats, not one’. And it is entirely show-stopping when he observes that James Stewart’s character ‘has an erection when Kim Novak comes out of the shower’ – doubtless. Truffaut asks about ‘the sense of guilt in your work’, and Hitchcock turns off the tape when his Catholicism is about to be discussed, but just as insightful are the words of Fincher, ‘ Vertigo is so perverted’, and the scholarly Scorsese’s reference to Hitch’s weirdness being in tune with ‘the spirit of realism’. Cinema has proven itself to be the most popular art form of the last hundred years. This is a film not to be missed by anybody interested in one of its most creative, innovative and influential artists. Fab.
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