Kent Jones (2015)

The trailer includes clips of several of the present-day directors who will appear in this documentary – Wes Anderson, Peter Bogdanovich, David Fincher, James Gray, Paul Schrader, Martin Scorsese.  The primary emphasis of the clips is on the great importance to these men of François Truffaut’s 1966 book, Le Cinéma selon Alfred Hitchcock, and its influence on their approaches to cinema.  But the impact on a generation or three of movie-makers of Truffaut’s book – published in the English-speaking world as Hitchcock/Truffaut – turns out to be no more than the starting point of Kent Jones’s film of the same name.  The talking heads go on to express their thoughts about Hitchcock on the basis of having seen his pictures and largely without reference to Truffaut or his book.  This makes for a mostly entertaining and sometimes absorbing ninety minutes but Hitchcock/Truffaut has a less distinctive angle than its trailer implies.

Truffaut’s interviews with Hitchcock in 1962, on which the book was based, are a larger part of Jones’s narrative framework.  He puts on screen, as well as numerous excerpts from Hitchcock films and many fewer examples of Truffaut’s work, black-and-white photographs of the interviews.  On the soundtrack, there are some fascinating audio clips from these conversations, which also involve an interpreter, Helen Scott.  It’s remarkable how strongly Hitchcock’s personal warmth towards Truffaut – they became lasting friends in the light of the interviews – comes through.  Remarkable too that, when he says he’s much more nervous than Hitchcock about doing the interviews, Truffaut evidently isn’t faking.  He’d already made The Four Hundred Blows, Shoot the Pianist and Jules and Jim but he’s audibly in awe of the older director and occasionally tongue-tied.  There is, for example, an interesting discussion of suspense.  Truffaut begins this by saying that people wrongly equate suspense with fear.  Your immediate reaction is to think that, in the Hitchcock oeuvre, suspense does usually include an element of fear – but Hitchcock accepts what Truffaut says and obligingly comes up with an example of suspense in his work that doesn’t.  (Kent Jones shows this example, as Hitchcock talks.)  The Master of Suspense then concludes, politely but authoritatively, that suspense doesn’t necessarily relate to fear.  Yes, that’s right, says Truffaut almost sheepishly, not necessarily …   It’s worth noting that the two men’s need of an interpreter and Helen Scott’s contributions regularly introduce an element of suspense (without fear) into the conversations themselves.

Kent Jones and Serge Toubiana, who wrote the screenplay with him, can’t decide whether Truffaut, as well as Hitchcock, is part of their subject.  Biographical sketches of both men point up their shared, traumatic experience of spending time as children in police detention (even if, in Hitchcock’s case, it was for only a few minutes).   But, as Hitchcock/Truffaut acknowledges, there’s not much scope for narrative traction between them as directors:  Truffaut’s cinema exhibits relatively little interest in form; Hitchcock is no one’s idea of a humanist film-maker.   It’s an odd comment on film’s ability to speak an international language, however, that the only two among Jones’s interviewees who have anything at all to say about Truffaut are his two compatriots, Olivier Assayas and Arnaud Desplechin.  Each of the directors Jones talks to is identified on his first appearance (they are all men) by his name and the names of two of his films, although the choice of films doesn’t seem to reflect a particular debt to Hitchcock.  (The choices include, for instance, The Last Picture Show, The Royal Tenenbaums and The Wolf of Wall Street.)  The next time the director appears his name comes up again, without the film titles, in case we’ve already forgotten who he is (if we didn’t already know).  The other interviewees not already mentioned are Kiyoshi Kurosawa (no relation to Akira) and Richard Linklater.  A few of the contributions are very minor, Wes Anderson’s especially.

The voiceover narration, read by Bob Balaban, is patchy too – in terms of both content and how irregularly it features.  The adjective ‘great’ is used without explanation in relation to Philippe Halsman (who photographed the Hitchcock-Truffaut interviews), André Bazin, Cahiers du cinéma, and so on.  I’m not disputing these assessments but it would have been good to be given a brief idea of what conferred greatness on all concerned.  It was probably the whiff of the lecture hall in Bob Balaban’s voice that made these ex cathedra pronouncements irritating – I probably shouldn’t complain that Jones, after giving us a lot of the voiceover early on, drops it entirely until a brief resumption near the end.

The gold in Hitchcock/Truffaut is the selection of excerpts from Hitchcock’s films, even if Kent Jones concentrates on Vertigo and Psycho at the expense of the early post-war pictures which got a lukewarm reception from American and British critics but which formed the basis of the sustained attempts made by the Cahiers du cinéma critics (who became the major directors of the French New Wave) to have Hitchcock recognised as a supreme film artist.   Henry K Miller’s fine piece in this month’s Sight & Sound about Jones’s documentary and the larger Hitchcock/Truffaut story notes that the essential Hitchcock films for the Cahiers writers in the late 1950s were Under Capricorn, I Confess and The Wrong Man.  Although the last two of these get some coverage in Jones’s narrative, I Confess features only as an illustration of Hitchcock’s impatience with actors who didn’t simply carry out his instructions.  Miller notes that none of these three works is ‘widely seen in the same light [in which the Cahiers critics saw them] today’ but the lack of attention Jones pays to them is curious, nevertheless.  Truffaut’s interviews with Hitchcock and the subsequent book were the culmination of efforts spanning the best part of a decade to ‘free Hitchcock from his reputation as a light entertainer’, and this trio of movies was an important part of those efforts.

I enjoyed Hitchcock/Truffaut without thinking it any great shakes.  Henry K Miller’s Sight & Sound piece is much more informative, as well as better organised.  I didn’t mind that François Truffaut was increasingly sidelined by Kent Jones; but only because, of the two auteurs (or ‘oo-too-ers’, as Bob Balaban pronounces it), I’m more interested in Hitchcock’s films than I am in Truffaut’s.  By the same token, it was fine by me to hear Hitchcock’s outrageous (and designed to outrage) views about actors; and for Jones to focus on Vertigo and Psycho, because they’re Hitchcock films I know relatively well.  Martin Scorsese, who gets the most screen time from Jones, is very interesting on both movies although I was surprised to hear that Vertigo, a few years after its release, became virtually a ‘lost film’ (it was certainly shown on British television in the late 1960s).  And I was once again puzzled that no one shattered by what happens to Janet Leigh in Psycho suspected anything from her name appearing where it does on the theatrical release poster for the film.

7 March 2016