What Hitchcock represents is a mischievous uncle-someone who liked to revel in, and encouraged others to revel in, audacious and often disreputable fun, both as viewers and as practitioners. The pantheon of cinematic greats contains many a revered patriarch of the sort that can freeze admirers into cowed reverence. You can’t imagine some of Jones’s interviewees getting quite as excited or as voluble about, say, Ingmar Bergman or Jean Renoir-or at least, having as much fun talking about them. That’s partly because the English maestro is not really a father figure in the classic sense. It’s a film that reminds us that filmmakers, whether or not they’re expert at discussing their own work, really let their critical and analytical imaginations flow when they get talking about the work of a director they really admire.

Directed by NYFF director and FILM COMMENT deputy editor Kent Jones, and written by him and French critic, scholar, and Truffaut biographer Serge Toubiana, this documentary could just as aptly have been titled Hitchcock/Truffaut/Scorsese/Fincher/Assayas/Linklater/etc. Hitchcock/Truffaut is, as you might imagine, a film about Alfred Hitchcock and François Truffaut, and specifically about the interviews that Truffaut conducted with his idol in August 1962-resulting in the book originally published in 1966 as Le Cinéma selon Alfred Hitchcock and best known in English under the same title as this documentary.

Alfred hitchcock and francois truffaut