Hitchcock, Truffaut and the book that burnished a master's reputation

David Fincher got it from his dad when he was 12. Wes Anderson thumbed through it so obsessively it became more a pile of papers than a bound book. Martin Scorsese saw it as an antidote to the bullying of elitist critical standards.

They're all on hand to testify in Hitchcock/Truffaut, a movie about a book about movies. If that sounds like too many layers, consider the treasures wrapped within. The film opens at the Texas Theatre Thursday night.

"I got that book when I was 12," says Hitchcock/Truffaut director Kent Jones in an interview at the Toronto International Film Festival, where the film showed in September. "I went through several copies of it. My ex-wife had it when I met her. Everybody had that book. It was just there."

When the French New Wave director François Truffaut sat with Alfred Hitchcock for 50 hours of interviews in 1962, he had a definite purpose in mind: to convince the world, especially American movie buffs, that Hitchcock was the greatest filmmaker of them all. Long considered a master entertainer, Hitchcock was still widely seen as less than a great artist. Truffaut, who as a critic for Cahiers du Cinéma had long extolled his idol, felt compelled to change this perception.

The resulting book, published in 1966, became a sacred object for filmmakers and cinephiles alike. It spotlighted and demystified Hitchcock's genius, and helped burnish his reputation as something more than a mere showman.

"Hitchcock and Truffaut were talking about the nuts and bolts of storytelling," Jones says. "But as they were talking about the nuts and bolts, they were also talking about the poetry. They're talking shop, but then they inevitably get into how the poetry is created."

Jones, who is also the director of the New York Film Festival, conjures his own kind of poetry with the documentary. He interweaves audio recordings and stills of the interviews with close readings of Hitchcock's films and commentary from some of today's best filmmakers. Hitchcock/Truffaut captures a moment in film history and buttresses the ideas explored in the book. Like all great documentaries about film, it has the power to make you look at cinema with greater alertness and joy.

Pure cinema, an idea often invoked in Hitchcock discussions, is key here. Given a choice between words and images to advance his stories, Hitchcock always chose images. Austin's Richard Linklater points out in the film that you could watch a Hitchcock movie with the sound down and still understand most of the story. Hitchcock wrote with the camera.

As Scorsese says of Vertigo, which the British film magazine Sight and Sound named the greatest film of all time in its 2012 international critics' poll, "the plot is just a line that you can hang things on."

The book itself is a visual delight, with its oversize pages and carefully selected black-and-white photos. In many instances the images are laid out in sequence, an appropriate choice in looking at a filmmaker who never wasted a shot. Hitchcock didn't shoot extra footage for the film editor to piece together. Producer David O. Selznick decried Hitchcock's "jigsaw cutting," his practice of arranging and assembling shots in his head and then shooting what he saw in his mind's eye. He had film reels in his brain.

The book went a ways in elevating Hitchcock's stateside reputation to a level matching his international acclaim. The documentary furthers the case, and its timing is superb. Four years ago The Girl caused a stir by dramatizing Hitchcock's abusive behavior toward his Marnie and The Birds star Tippi Hedren, and Hitchcock highlighted his struggle to get Psycho made. Hitchcock/Truffaut refocuses the attention where it belongs: Up on the screen.