While each of the interviews Jones’ conducts pulls out different themes, a consensus is reached: all of these films feel directed. In it, Jones assembles the audio recordings from the interview along with his own interviews of contemporary directors-10 in all-in an attempt to understand what attracted Truffaut to Hitchcock and why that attraction continues to stand decades later. Why this book was so monumental and endearing is the subject of Kent Jones’ latest documentary of the same name. The interview took place over five days, and from it, Truffaut penned one of the most important critical studies, a staple of every film student’s upbringing, Hitchcock/Truffaut. In hopes of establishing Hitchcock as a director par excellence, Truffaut proposed a book-length interview with the master, discussing his career and body of work and solidifying him, once and for all, as a true auteur.

While the auteur theory is not without its detractors or controversies, it makes for a compelling case when one considers the directors that Truffaut singled out as auteurs, one being the Master of Suspense himself, Alfred Hitchcock.īy 1962, Truffaut had graduated from critic to world-renowned director with The 400 Blows, Shoot the Piano Player, and Jules and Jim. Hitchcock was between two monumental works, Psycho and The Birds, but most knew him as the rotund host of his weekly TV show. As Orson Welles said, “A writer needs a pen, an artist needs a brush, but a filmmaker needs an army.” To whom then does a movie belong? In his 1954 essay, “A certain tendency in French cinema,” the young critic, François Truffaut, coined the phrase, “la politique des Auteurs,” and gave credence to the notion that the director-not the writer, producer, or stars-was the true author of a movie. By its very nature, cinema is a collaborative art.

Hitchcock truffaut françois truffaut