Catnip for film buffs, Hitchcock/Truffaut is director and film critic Kent Jones’ companion piece to the hugely influential 1966 interview book between Alfred Hitchcock and Francois Truffaut. Jones has assembled an impressive lineup of directors to sit down for the camera — David Fincher, Martin Scorsese, Richard Linklater, Wes Anderson — but they mostly discuss Hitchcock’s legacy rather than the book itself. (Perhaps unsurprisingly, the French are the most perceptive, with Olivier Assayas and Arnaud Desplechin noting the formal resemblance Hitchcock’s films have to dreams and the way so many of them explore a transfer of guilt.) The documentary more directly references the book by using original audio recordings of the interview sessions, as well as sequences in which an observation about Hitchcock’s work is made while we watch a scene from a Truffaut film. Revealing how the same cinematic principles can be used by different filmmakers in different ways, Hitchcock/Truffaut rises above an archival exercise to become a piece of criticism itself.
