If the film Hitchcock/Truffaut does nothing other than alert people to the book of the same name (Simon and Schuster, 1967) it will have proven useful. The book came out at a time when Americans had begun to appreciate the artistry of Hitchcock's films as well as their entertainment value, though some of us have always found movies, books et al. not to be entertaining if they are meretricious, i.e., entertainment does not exist without artistry.. In any case, the full-length book came out at a propitious time, the same time (late 60's) as Robin Wood's important Hitchcock's Films (A.S. Barnes and Company, 1965) and Andrew Sarris's The American Cinema (The University of Chicago Press, 1968) appeared with detailed appreciations of Hitchcock's films. The French were somewhat ahead of us, but Chabrol and Rohmer's book about Hitchcock, though published in 1957, was not translated until 1992.
Kent Jones's film, like Truffaut's book, concentrates mostly on the technical aspects of Hitchcock's work and the all-male commentators (Martin Scorsese, Peter Bogdanovich et al.) do not address the misogyny of Hitchcock's films, which I have always found to appeal more to men than women, or the complex issues surrounding the manipulation of his audience. It's interesting looking at the excerpts in Jones's film and see how Hitchcock changed the roles of women from his British films, such as The Lady Vanishes (1938), to American films such as Vertigo (1958).
One can get a much deeper and better understanding and appreciation of Hitchcock simply by watching his films (which reveal more each time one sees them) and reading Truffaut's and Wood's books.
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