By Julian Wood
Kent Jones is well known in film circles in America. Not only is he a long term contributor to the much-read Film Comment, he is also the director of The New York Film Festival. He is also a film director in his own right, thanks to the cinema history titles, Val Lewton: Man In The Shadows and A Letter To Elia. FilmInk spoke to the multitalented Mr. Jones from his New York abode, and wondered how he handles all these different roles. How would he define himself? “Let’s see, I make films, I write about films, and I am the director of a film festival,” he replies. “And those are three different kinds of activities, and they require different kinds of attention and different kinds of skills. And I like that. I like shifting from one thing to another, which is fortunate, as it is my life. Filmmaking is so different from writing film criticism.”
But isn’t filmmaking a more collaborative enterprise than, say, film writing? Jones sees it slightly differently. The single mindedness is inside the collaborative aspects in a way. “It’s not even that really,” Jones says. “At least, that’s not how I experience it. It’s just that everything that you do as a filmmaker must be subservient to the film. Like when you might want to consider the historical arguments, but you can’t go into that just for its own sake. Everything has to fit the energy and the experience of the film itself. And if that isn’t the case, then I’m not interested, and viewers wouldn’t be either.”
With his latest effort, Hitchcock/Truffaut, Jones has made an intriguing documentary about the famous meeting between two very great but very different directors. In 1962, the legendary Alfred Hitchcock and the much younger Francois Truffaut (a rising talent at the time thanks to his early, highly acclaimed works, The 400 Blows, Shoot The Piano Player, and Jules And Jim) locked themselves away in Hollywood for a week to excavate the secrets behind the mise-en-scène in cinema. Based on the original recordings of this meeting – which were used to produce the famous book, Hitchcock/Truffaut – Jones’ documentary illustrates what is often referred to as “the greatest cinema lesson of all time.” As Jones explains, however, the project came about almost by coincidence. “Somebody called me and said, ‘I have these tapes. Are you interested in making a film about it?’ I said, ‘Hell, yes!’ So as soon as they signed off, I started thinking about what sort of film I wanted to make. And I realised that I was making a film about two directors talking about making films! And that is why I wanted to add more directors to the conversation. And they couldn’t just be any directors; they had to know the book, and they had to be able to think contemporaneously. They had to be into speaking to its themes and they had to understand the issues.”
Jones chose both American and French directors who knew the work, and he didn’t want these directors (who include David Fincher, Wes Anderson, Richard Linklater, James Gray, Paul Schrader, Martin Scorsese, Peter Bogdanovich, Olivier Assayas and Arnaud Desplechin) to talk about their own films and directing approaches. He wanted something else. “When people are called on to talk about their own work, it is a different kind of thing,” Jones says. “You can only talk about your own work to a point, and then you end up with, ‘Well, I made the movie. I don’t need to talk about it.’ But when they talk about other peoples’ work, there is a different dimension. And we ended up with people who had a lot of different perspectives on Hitchcock, and on film history, and on what a film is or can be. I am interested in elucidating what a director does.”
Jones’ own thoroughgoing knowledge of Hitchcock’s oeuvre meant that he could always find examples that illustrated the cinematic points that his interviewees were referring to. “I was thrilled with the stuff that David Fincher said about directing and the dilation of time,” Jones says. “With Hitchcock, there are so many films, and almost all of them are good, so finding an example to illustrate his thesis isn’t as hard for me because I knew the films so well. I was able to say, ‘Oh yes, let’s use Saboteur for that idea.’”
From the glimpses here, the meeting between Hitchcock and Truffaut was a strange affair. The excitable Truffaut approached Hitchcock like an acolyte, and while the great director might have been wary of French intellectual approaches, he agreed to the meetings anyway. The really interesting thing for cineastes is that Truffaut’s’ sharpness and inherent feel for the topic draws out a more thoughtful and even introspective Hitchcock than that which we usually see. Jones’ film reflects this. The meeting takes a while to warm up but, beyond that initial awkwardness, his focus is on how the conversations illuminate filmmaking. That is the core of the project, but of course there have to be other aspects to make the film more rounded out. “The film has to be a lot of things at once,” Jones says. “It is a chronicle, and a justification for his methods, and a reflection on the above by modern filmmakers. It is historical, but it is also an elegy for another time, and one that has gone now. And given the glimpses of Hitchcock wondering about whether he should have been a different kind of artist, there is poignancy there too.”
Hitchcock/Truffaut deals partly with the relationship between French and American cinema. It is often said that Cahiers Du Cinema [the pioneering French film journal that employed both Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard before they went on to direct their own films] re-made Hitchcock in their own image as part of their re-construction of what the American canon was, or should be. Kent Jones recalls that line of argument, but says that it is possible to put it in simpler terms. Hitchcock wasn’t the quintessential American director, “but at least in the way that they discovered him, he was seen as the guy who epitomised American cinema.”
Hitchcock/Truffaut is released in cinemas on July 21.
