Kent Jones is not the first film critic to turn filmmaker. But as director of the New York Film Festival, a role he has held since late 2012, Jones’s increasingly prolific output behind the camera can, on occasion, put him in an awkward position. He has already had to recuse himself from the selection process due to his creative involvement on one film under consideration—Arnaud Desplechin’s Jimmy P, on which Jones shared a screenplay credit. But with his new film, Hitchcock / Truffaut, Jones took the matter out of the selection committee’s hands. As he told me last summer, between announcements of the festival’s main slate, “This film can’t get near this festival. It’s just that simple. How can I possibly look a documentary filmmaker, or any filmmaker, in the face and say ‘Sorry, I’m going to show my movie but yours isn’t good enough?’”
Given the film’s subject matter—the meeting of Alfred Hitchcock and Francois Truffaut in 1962 that yielded one of the great books about cinema—this might seem harsh on New York’s committed cinefile audiences. But Jones’s integrity as a programmer is consistent with his modesty as a critic, a modesty which in no way negates his passionately held positions. (He took Tarantino to task for slighting John Ford.) As a critic, Jones, to paraphrase James Wood, does not show a lot of plumage towards his subject: he is not in competition with the film under discussion. In this he follows in the footsteps of two film critics whose names crop up several times during our conversation, Andre Bazin and Manny Farber.
It was Bazin, founder of Cahiers du Cinema, who provided a stage for the most notable critics-turned-filmmakers in the history of cinema, and a rare moment, says Jones, of a critical fraternity with Bazin framed as “this genius dying of leukaemia surrounded by these younger men…on their way to taking their writing and using it as a declaration.” Those young men—Francois Truffaut, Jean-Luc Goddard, Claude Chabrol, Eric Rohmer, and Jacques Rivette—were instrumental in elevating the artistic reputations of Hollywood directors who had previously been considered light entertainers, Hitchcock being a case in point.
Manny Farber had been doing much the same thing: writing about the unseen merits of American filmmakers, though long before La politiques des auteurs made its way across the Atlantic in the guise of Andrew Sarris’s Notes On the Auteur Theory. Jones, who was born in 1960, was a teenager when he discovered both Sarris’s The American Cinema and Farber’s Negative Space, books that would affect him in different ways. “With Andrew the impact was immediate. It was [his] hierarchies and categories that got me. Because the whole idea what is a director—that’s interesting, you know. And then [Negative Space], that’s something else. For years I would crack it open every once in a while and look at it. I had no idea what the fuck this guy was talking about. But I am intrigued. At a certain point it clicked. If you understand that writing is a matter of rhythm, and that a writer is engaged in rhythm and not just the translation of thoughts into language then you’re dealing with writing. With Manny as opposed to 90% of other critics—Pauline Kael being an exception—you’re thrust into the deep-end of rhythm right away. I related to him much more than Pauline Kael.”
The lone wolf of American film criticism, Farber emerged out of one tradition of American critical prose—he replaced Otis Ferguson at the New Republic and James Agee at Time respectively—but ended up in an altogether different place. Susan Sontag called him “the liveliest, smartest, most original film critic [America] ever produced”, and in her landmark essay Against Interpretation praised him for his ability to describe films in terms of their surface and texture. But then Farber was a terrific painter who came at movies with an innate sense of the visual, and an understanding of how something is put together. If Jones has sought to emulate (though never imitate) anyone, it is Farber, as much for his approach (detail-oriented and exhaustive) as well as his style.
Jones is not a weekly reviewer as such, so he is spared from having to write about everything he sees. At Film Comment, where he is also deputy editor, he is blessed with a long lead-in time and given ample space to cover the ground of a given film or filmmaker. (And covering the ground was a Farber imperative.) His pieces are rigorous, serious without being dry, and often richly conceived. He can evoke a film’s mood or a director’s style in a sentence, which in the case of Sofia Coppola amounts to the same thing:
“Sofia Coppola is uncommonly gifted at the articulation of something so fleeting and ephemeral that it seems to be on the verge of evaporating on contact with her hovering, deadpan, infinitely patient camera eye.”
One can see that Jones has also been rigorous about his choice of subject matter: critical appreciations of leading contemporary filmmakers (Hou Hsiao-hsien, Claire Denis, Wong Kar-wei, Abbas Kiarostami, and Lucretia Martel) account for over half the pieces in Physical Evidence, his debut collection. When he began writing for Film Comment, in 1996, articles about ‘the death of cinema’ were very much in the air. But as far as Jones is concerned, the medium is still in its infancy, still vital. The writer Phillip Lopate, who included one of Jones’s essays in the Library of America’s American Movie Critics anthology, calls him “…the film critic most alive to this moment”. Physical Evidence, published in 2007, was proof enough, but in the years since Jones’s writing has grown in authority, while his newly divergent path as a filmmaker (he co-wrote Martin Scorsese’s My Voyage to Italy and A Letter to Elia) has perhaps permanently marked his approach to writing criticism. “Making films has changed my criticism in the sense that—and I really started to think this a long time ago, and my opinion has only grown stronger as the years have gone by—that 90% of film criticism is just divorced from the actual practice of making movies.”
In terms of the position Jones presently occupies within contemporary film culture, he reminds me of Mark Cousins: wearers of multiple hats, both have run major festivals; each are quick to challenge critical orthodoxy and / or received wisdom; and while they are devoted students of film history, they are always making the case for cinema now. And as with Cousins, it’s clear that each activity—writing, programming, and making films—feeds the other. “There’s rhetoric about keeping stuff alive and making sure that people remember the past, or that they get to experience a film that they wouldn’t be able to see elsewhere. But really, it’s not about that in terms of the [programming] choices or in terms of the writing. If it were then it would make for a very dull film festival; it would make for very dull writing. I wouldn’t want to read it. I can’t stand it when people say to me: ‘I support this film for these reasons.’ Why bother?”
This uncompromising and passionate approach informs Hitchcock / Truffaut, which like Jones’s criticism, is deeply engaged and carries no extraneous weight. Jones is neither seen nor heard—there’s that modesty again—but then he doesn’t need to be. His material is gold, and he knows it. Truffaut’s book was the culmination of a kind of pursuit and an artistic debt repaid, with Hitchcock flattered and bemused, as well as moved, by the younger man’s ardour and attention. What strange path led Truffaut to Hitchcock? Well, Jones answers that too. And through the use of the original audio tapes, their voices can now be heard. Nuance, lost to the inevitable limitations of translation and transcription, is restored. We hear for ourselves how Hitchcock’s curiosity about Truffaut’s comfort with actors and improvisation led to his famous remark “actors are cattle”. It sounds far more benign on tape than it looks in print. Hitchcock, in effect, is rescued again.
But Jones opens up—extends—the conversation in another way. By turning to those filmmakers who devoured and absorbed its contents as though it were a sacred text, the film reveals the extent of the book’s (ongoing) impact—on Hitchcock’s reputation and those who followed in his wake. As you’d expect, Jones’s long-time collaborator Scorsese is on hand to talk about the book’s radicalising effect on his generation. But no less illuminating are Peter Bogdanovich, himself a great critic, Paul Schrader (ditto), Olivier Assayas, David Fincher, Richard Linklater, and Wes Anderson. Fincher is particularly good on Hitchcock’s mastery of time and space. He also mischievously wonders how a DeNiro, Pacino, or Hoffman might have flourished under Hitchcock’s “iron umbrella”.
Jones, who writes with great insight about actors and acting, believes that Hitchcock was aware of the shifts that had taken place in American film post-Brando and “the Method”, or as Jones puts it—“the exultation of acting as an event in and of itself.” But like many of Hollywood’s old-guard, Hitchcock struggled to accommodate the modern actor’s quest for authenticity: directorial design trumped motivation; his process trumped theirs. And the struggle made for an interesting tension in Hitchcock’s films, particularly in the era of arguably his greatest work.
Says Jones: “Hitchcock arrived at this moment—and how did he deal with it? By taking an actress who was involved in that kind of thing, Eve Marie Saint, but making her into something else; by finding Tippi Hedren. Taking Bruce Dern and not really doing much with him that was that adventurous. And I think that when the younger generation—Marty, Paul Schrader, Spielberg—came along, what made their films feel different was that they responded to that reality. It’s like when the Velvet Underground came along and they mixed the drums up front, and the guitars in the background. Suddenly the acting occupied a different position in the film.”
I get the impression that Jones could talk about cinema all day, and probably does. But he has a festival to run, and I have a plane to catch. Before I leave, I quote a passage from Randall Jarrell’s essay The Age of Criticism:
“Remember that you can never be more than the staircase to the monument, the guide to the gallery, the telescope through which the children see the stars. At your best you make people see what they might never have seen without you; but they must always forget you in what they see.”
Jones agrees. “I think that that’s generally true. I think it’s true of criticism in a very particular way. When the critic becomes the central event, they’re not writing criticism any more. So Manny—and I’ve quoted this many times—he said the idea is to get yourself out of it so that the object itself takes on religious awe. It also rhymes with Bazin—prolonging the original shock of the work of art.”
And this is where Hitchcock/Truffaut succeeds—as both a movie and as an example of criticism in action. As the film builds towards the peaks of Vertigo and Psycho, the conversation stops, and Jones returns to those images and moments that have lost none of their power. Kim Novak, say, emerging remade before James Stewart’s eyes, her appearance filtered through that strange, vertical shaft of aqua green light. A moment that best explains, but never quite reveals, itself. And we forget we are watching a documentary ostensibly about a book, a movie about cinema, but one that effortlessly, passionately—and modestly—achieve Bazin and Farber’s critical objectives.
—Mick McAloon
To read the full interview go to http://anosamoursblog.weebly.com/blog/june-08th-2016
Running From The Reels 