Wednesday 23 March 2016

Film: 'Hitchcock/Truffaut'


I found this a fascinating documentary, as I suspect most cineastes will - most especially, those admirers of Alfred Hitchcock films. 
It's based on interviews over several occasions which the then 30-year old French film director Francois Truffaut made with the then 63-year old Hitch in 1962, and which Truffaut then used as material for his 1966 publication 'The Cinema According to Hitchcock'. 
We see stills from the interview sessions, with interpreter on hand, while we listen to part of the audio tapes, each of the two speaking in his own native language.
My sole disappointment was that the conversations are very desultory, covering a range of aspects of Hitchcock's techniques though hardly ever going into significant depth on any of them. These discussions are punctuated by comments from several notable present-day directors (Scorsese, Bogdanovich, Wes Anderson, plus others) who are remarking on thoughts thrown up by their reading of Truffaut's book. 
Right through this film we are shown clips from quite a number of Hitchcock films (some very brief indeed), including the few he made subsequent to the interviews. There are also a few short excerpts of the handful of films that Truffaut had made up to that point. 
The two Hitchcock films discussed the most are 'Vertigo' and 'Psycho', though even these are not gone into with the searching profundity for which I'd been hoping. It was just beginning to get interesting when Hitch (and Scorsese) remark on how the story of 'Vertigo' doesn't hang together, despite Hitchcock considering it as one of his better films, but then this aspect is curtailed. In fact, quite frequently it became regularly exasperating in that whenever I felt that something searchingly illuminating was going to be said, the subject was switched.
(A sad footnote is that Truffaut, despite being 33 years younger than Hitchcock, survived him by just four years).

Nevertheless, despite my reservations, I found it totally absorbing, and - very rare for me this - I only wish its 83 minutes had been double the length................................7.

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