Documentary examines the extraordinary interview sessions between François Truffaut and Alfred Hitchcock (photo by Philippe Halsman)
HITCHCOCK/TRUFFAUT (Kent Jones, 2015)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
December 2-17
212-727-8110
filmforum.org
cohenmedia.net/films
“In 1962, while in New York to present Jules and Jim, I noticed that every journalist asked me the same question: ‘Why do the critics of Cahiers du Cinéma take Hitchcock so seriously? He’s rich and successful, but his movies have no substance,’” French Nouvelle Vague auteur François Truffaut wrote in the preface to the second edition of what he called “the hitchbook,” the seminal film bible Truffaut/Hitchcock. “In the course of an interview during which I praised Rear Window to the skies, an American critic surprised me by commenting, ‘You love Rear Window because, as a stranger to New York, you know nothing about Greenwich Village.’ To this absurd statement, I replied, ‘Rear Window is not about Greenwich Village, it is a film about cinema, and I do know cinema.’” Truffaut was determined to change the prevailing belief that British director Alfred Hitchcock was a maker of studio fluff. “In examining his films,” Truffaut continued, “it was obvious that he had given more thought to the potential of his art than any of his colleagues. It occurred to me that if he would, for the first time, agree to respond seriously to a systematic questionnaire, the resulting document might modify the American critics’ approach to Hitchcock. That is what this book is all about.” The tome compiled a weeklong series of conversations between the thirty-year-old Truffaut and the sixty-three-year-old Hitchcock — the talks began on Hitch’s birthday — in the latter’s Hollywood studio office, with Helen Scott serving as translator. Although the interviews were recorded for audio, no film was shot; instead, Philippe Halsman took still photos. The story of the unique relationship between Truffaut, who as of 1962 had made only The 400 Blows and Shoot the Piano Player (he was in the midst of finalizing Jules and Jim), and Hitchcock, who was preparing his forty-eighth film, The Birds, is told in the splendid documentary Hitchcock/Truffaut, which cleverly reverses the order of their names from the book it’s based on. Writer-director Kent Jones (head of the New York Film Festival), cowriter Serge Toubiana (former editor in chief of Cahiers du Cinéma) and editor Rachel Reichman lovingly combine Halsman’s pictures, audio clips from the original sessions, scenes from many of Hitchcock’s films (and a few of Truffaut’s), close-ups of dozens of pages from the book, rare archival footage, and new interviews with ten directors from around the world who weigh in on what makes Hitchcock’s work so special, so illuminating, so influential.
Sharing their praise are Martin Scorsese, Wes Anderson, David Fincher, Olivier Assayas, Peter Bogdanovich, Arnaud Desplechin, James Gray, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Richard Linklater, and Paul Schrader, as they shed light on such classic films as Vertigo, Psycho, I Confess, The Wrong Man, Sabotage, Marnie, Rear Window, and others, with detailed shot-by-shot analysis while also praising the importance of “the hitchbook” itself. It all makes for an eye-opening crash course in cinema, and it’s likely to change the way you look and think about motion pictures. “It was a window into the world of cinema that I hadn’t had before, because it was a director simultaneously talking about his own work but doing so in a way that was utterly unpretentious and had no pomposity,” Gray (Little Odessa, Two Lovers) says about the book. “There was starting to be these kind of erudite conversations about the art form, but Truffaut was the first one where you really felt that they were talking about the craft of it,” Schrader (American Gigolo, Mishima) points out. “It’s not just that Truffaut wrote a book about Hitchcock. The book is an essential part of his body of work,” Olivier Assayas (Clouds of Sils Maria, Carlos) explains. “I think it conclusively changed people’s opinions about Hitchcock, and so Hitchcock began to be taken much more seriously,” Bogdanovich (The Last Picture Show, Paper Moon) asserts. And Scorsese (Taxi Driver, Raging Bull) sums up, “It was almost as if somebody had taken a weight off our shoulders and said yes, we can embrace this, we could go.” Of course, the book not only created a critical reassessment of Hitchcock but also helped Truffaut’s budding career. Narrated by Bob Balaban, the film places the work of the two men, who remained good friends until Hitchcock’s death in 1980 at the age of eighty (sadly, Truffaut died four years later at the age of fifty-two), in context of the history of cinema. “Why do these Hitchcock films stand up well? Well, I don’t know the answer,” Hitchcock is heard saying at the beginning of the documentary. By the end of the documentary, you will surely know the answer. Following its recent screening at DOC NYC with Jones and Scorsese present, Hitchcock/Truffaut will be playing at Film Forum December 2-17.
In 2010, French actor-director Mathieu Amalric was commissioned by la Comédie-Française to make a television version of one of the plays the legendary company had recently staged. The rules were both limiting and freeing: He had to use the same cast, could not add any words to the script (but could make cuts), and had to shoot the film in twelve days without using the theater itself. Amalric had the credentials for such a daunting assignment; he had previously starred in such films as Munich, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, and Kings and Queen and directed Mange ta soupe and On Tour, in which he also starred and for which he won the Best Director prize at Cannes. He decided to adapt Pierre Corneille’s 1636 play, L’Illusion comique, a melodrama written just as the Baroque style was shifting into the Classical period. The film takes place in and around a hotel in 2011, where concierge/sorcerer/detective Alcandre (Hervé Pierre) is showing surveillance video to Pridamant (Alain Lenglet), who is searching for his long-missing son, Clindor (Loïc Corbery). Clindor is working for video-game executive Matamore (Denis Podalydès); both men, as well as Adraste (Adrien Gamba-Gontard), are vying for the attention of the lovely but cold Isabelle (Suliane Brahim), daughter of corporation head Géronte (Jean-Baptiste Malartre). Meanwhile, Adraste’s coworker, Lyse (Julie Sicard), is desperately in love with Clindor. It all comes to a head one night following a dinner party, when a fierce battle takes place on a rooftop. “When all hope is gone, one has nothing more to fear,” Isabelle says.
In 1975, a comedy troupe consisting of five Oxford and Cambridge grads and an American animator, the six best known for their absurdist sketches, teamed up to make the most quotable, and perhaps all-time-funniest, film to ever come from across the pond, and you can join in the fun on November 28 as Videology in Williamsburg hosts the Monty Python and the Holy Grail Quote-a-Long. In the relentlessly hysterical film, King Arthur (Graham Chapman) leads his ne’er-do-well Knights of the Round Table — Sir Lancelot the Brave (John Cleese), Sir Robin-the-Not-Quite-So-Brave-as-Sir-Lancelot (Eric Idle), Sir Bedevere the Wise (Terry Jones), and Sir Galahad the Pure (Michael Palin) — on a quest to find the Holy Grail, as ordered by God himself (voice of Chapman, cartoon of cricket legend W. G. Grace). So off they go, visiting strange castles with even stranger knights, answering silly questions to get across a bridge, seeking advice from a mad wizard, battling a cute little killer rabbit, and searching for shrubbery. The wild romp, in which the Pythons never meet a joke too high-brow or low-brow, helped warp the minds of several generations and continues to result in much rejoicing in living rooms and movie theaters around the world. 
Douglas Sirk and Thomas Mann would be proud. In Todd Haynes’s wonderfully retro Far from Heaven, Oscar-nominated Julianne Moore is amazing as 1950s housewife Cathy Whitaker, who thinks she has the perfect idyllic suburban life — until she discovers that her husband (Dennis Quaid) has a secret that dare not speak its name. Mr. & Mrs. Magnatech they are not after all. When she starts getting all chummy with the black gardener (Dennis Haysbert), people start talking, of course. Part Imitation of Life and All That Heaven Allows, part Death in Venice, and oh-so-original, Haynes’s awesome achievement will have you believing you’re watching a film made in the 1950s, propelled by Elmer Bernstein’s excellent music, Edward Lachman’s remarkable photography, and Mark Friedberg’s terrific production design. Far from Heaven is screening at the Walter Reade Theater on November 27 at 2:00 and November 29 at 6:30 in the Film Society of Lincoln Center series “Todd Haynes: The Other Side of Dreams,” with DP Lachman on hand for a Q&A following the latter show. The series, being held in conjunction with the release of Haynes’s latest film, Carol, continues through November 29 with Haynes pairing his films with works that directly influenced him, bringing together thematically (but not as double features) Safe and Douglas Sirk’s Imitation of Life, his Mildred Pierce miniseries and Alan J. Pakula’s Klute, Poison and Rainer Werner Fassbender’s Fox and His Friends, Velvet Goldmine and Nicolas Roeg’s Performance, and Far from Heaven and Max Ophüls’s The Reckless Moment, among other duos.
When I was a kid in school, one of the first movies I ever reviewed was Heaven’s Gate, Michael Cimino’s brazenly overbudget famous Hollywood disaster. Incensed that professional film critics were obsessed with the meta surrounding the making of the epic Western instead of simply taking it for what it was, I was determined to treat it like any other movie, forgetting about all the behind-the-scenes gossip and tales of financial gluttony. And what I found back then was that it was a noble failure, a bold exercise in genre that had its share of strong moments but ultimately fell apart, leaving me dissatisfied and disappointed but glad I had seen it; I did not want my three-plus hours back. In fact, I probably would have checked out the rumored five-hour version if it had been shown, hoping it would fill in the many gaps that plagued the official theatrical release. More than thirty years later, Cimino’s follow-up to his Oscar-winning sophomore effort, The Deer Hunter, has returned in a 216-minute digital restoration supervised by Cimino, and it does indeed shed new light on the unfairly ridiculed work, which is still, after all this time, a noble failure. Inspired by the 1882 Johnson County War in Wyoming, the film stars Kris Kristofferson as Jim Averill, a Harvard-educated lawman hired by a group of immigrants, called “citizens,” whose livelihood — and lives — are being threatened by a wealthy cattlemen’s association run by the elitist Frank Canton (Sam Waterston). The association has come up with a kill list of 125 citizens, offering fifty dollars for each murder, a plan that has been authorized all the way up to the president of the United States. Leading the way for the cattlemen is hired killer Nate Champion (Christopher Walken), who has a particularly fierce aversion to the foreign-speaking immigrants. With a major battle on the horizon, Averill and Champion also fight for the love of the same woman, the luminous Ella Watson (Isabelle Huppert), a successful madam who soon finds herself in the middle of the controversy.