However, when writer-directors become the subjects of documentaries, the films are inevitably less intimate. They usually provide glimpses of their subjects\u2019 personal histories, but are more concerned with what they\u2019ve become best-known for. A batch of releases that have bypassed the local cinema circuit and gone direct to the streaming services neatly illustrates a range of ways in which they work. They all focus on major filmmakers, two on Alfred Hitchcock.<\/p>\n
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Steven Spielberg filming The Fabelmans.<\/span>Credit: <\/span>Merie Weismiller Wallace\/Universal Pictures and Amblin Entertainment via AP<\/cite><\/p>\n Directed by Kent Jones, formerly the editor of the prestigious Film Comment<\/em> magazine, Hitchcock\/Truffaut<\/em> (2015, Apple TV+ rental) is by far the better, its title borrowed from the famous book-length interview done with the legendary director in 1962 by French filmmaker Francois Truffaut. As is customary in films of this kind, we\u2019re given a loose overview of Hitchcock\u2019s career, but Jones has shaped his material with a clear purpose in mind.<\/p>\n Extensive use is made of the interview tapes as well as of illuminating comments from other directors (David Fincher, Wes Anderson, Olivier Assayas, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Richard Linklater) about what they\u2019ve discovered in Hitchcock\u2019s work and learned from it. All are interviewed separately, but the result is a lively interaction about what constitutes the art of the cinema, what Hitchcock has brought to it and what he means when he says, \u201cI\u2019m never satisfied with the ordinary.\u201d The points they make, frequently illustrated by carefully chosen clips from Hitchcock\u2019s films, also illuminate their own work.<\/p>\n French New Wave director Francis Truffaut and the master of suspense, Alfred Hitchcock.<\/span><\/p>\n Made by Canada\u2019s Network Entertainment in its ongoing \u201cI am\u201d series about high-profile artists and politicians, I Am Alfred Hitchcock<\/em> (2021, Binge) follows a less interesting route. Citing the director\u2019s explanations of his intentions \u2013 \u201cI believe in putting the horror in the mind of the audience\u201d \u2013 Joel Ashton McCarthy\u2019s film briefly surveys Hitchcock\u2019s career, extracting a few highlights (Rope, Psycho, Vertigo, The Birds<\/em>) but never giving us much insight into them. In the mode of a \u201cHitchcock for beginners\u201d, it\u2019s slick but slight, fleshed out by contributions from contemporary filmmakers, including Spielberg, Eli Roth, Edgar Wright and William Friedkin.<\/p>\n Clara and Julia Kupperberg\u2019s The True Story of Dorothy Arzner<\/em> (2022, Binge) persuasively explains why Hollywood\u2019s first great female director deserves her reputation. Primarily guided by the insights of a couple of very articulate critics, film historian Tony Maietta and academic Shelley Stamp, it looks back to the 1930s and early \u201940s when Arzner was living in an openly gay relationship in the Hollywood Hills with her life partner, choreographer Marion Morgan. She made 16 films before walking away from a hard-earned career, dismayed by the HUAC-inspired blacklistings inflicted on her profession during the post WWII era.<\/p>\n Drawing on concise readings of Arzner\u2019s films and interviews with her, the Kupperberg sisters\u2019 film identifies the reasons for the correspondence between the interest in her work and the rise of women\u2019s movements. As Stamp puts it, \u201cThe films really focus on female communities\u2026 women\u2019s colleges, women\u2019s boarding-houses, women\u2019s dance troupes\u2026 It\u2019s the complicated sometimes conflict-ridden relationships between women that are at the centre of her films.\u201c<\/p>\n Made for the BBC, Louise Osmond\u2019s Versus: The Life and Films of Ken Loach<\/em> (2016, DocPlay) offers a compelling chronicle of the life and times of the now 87-year-old Midlands-born director who, unexpectedly, turns out to be something of a soul-brother to Arzner. According to longtime producer Tony Garnett (who died in 2020), Loach saw his career in film as an opportunity \u201cto stir up a bit of trouble\u201d. Which he has done for more than 50 years, examining the plight of displaced people, championing workers\u2019 rights and, with an heroic consistency, earning the wrath of Tory politicians for controversial TV dramas and feature films, such as Cathy Come Home, Days of Hope, Kes<\/em> and Land of Freedom<\/em>.<\/p>\n David Bradley in the film Ken Loach\u2019s Kes.<\/span>Credit: <\/span>PA<\/cite><\/p>\n Following Loach\u2019s life back and forth across the years, Osmond interviews him, members of his supportive family and his collaborators (primarily Garnett but also writers Nell Dunn and Paul Laverty and actors Gabriel Byrne and Cillian Murphy). The result is the portrait of an artist who appears self-effacing but is fiercely uncompromising. \u201cI had expected a more Oliver Stone kind of presence,\u201d Byrne explains, adding that he quickly discovered that he didn\u2019t ever want to cross him.<\/p>\n Along similar lines, Matthew Miele\u2019s appreciative Alan Pakula: Going for Truth<\/em> (2019, Apple TV+ rental) is a study of a major American filmmaker seen largely through the eyes of those who worked with him. It\u2019s part biographical but more concerned to probe his personality. For second wife, historian Hannah Boorstin, his so-called \u201cparanoid trilogy\u201d \u2013 Klute, The Parallax View<\/em> and All the President\u2019s Men<\/em> \u2013 suggested a filmmaker with a mission. \u201cIt wasn\u2019t done by a dark man,\u201d she says, \u201c(but) by a man who was reaching for the truth.\u201d Pakula himself retrospectively likens the recurring concerns in his films to \u201cunderground rivers that keep pulling you into things\u201d.<\/p>\n Robert Redford, right, and Dustin Hoffman in Alan Pakula\u2019s All the President\u2019s Men.<\/span>Credit: <\/span>AP<\/cite><\/p>\n Collaborators including Jane Fonda, Meryl Streep, Robert Redford, Dustin Hoffman, Candice Bergen and James L. Brooks are unanimous in their admiration, praising Pakula as \u201can intellectual\u201d (Hoffman) and \u201ca feminist\u201d (Fonda), enthusing about his \u201cmethodical curiosity\u201d (Streep), reminiscing about his \u201cendearing quirks\u201d (Bergen), and remembering being overwhelmed by \u201chis everpresent intelligence and everpresent grace\u201d (Brooks).<\/p>\n Robert Mann\u2019s Altman<\/em> (2014, Apple TV+ rental), a profile of Pakula-contemporary Robert Altman, suffers from haste as it skims across the surface of the Hollywood maverick\u2019s life, featuring abundant film clips (in immaculate condition) and a voice-over narration largely gleaned from interviews with him and his wife, Kathryn Reed.<\/p>\n The film\u2019s structuring principle is smart. Actors who worked with the director (Michael Murphy, James Caan, Sally Kellerman, Elliot Gould, Keith Carradine, Lily Tomlin, Robin Williams, Bruce Willis, Philip Baker Hall and Julianne Moore) are asked to define from the word \u201cAltmanesque\u201d means to them. Their answers \u2013 \u201cShowing Americans who we are\u201d (Carradine), \u201cCreating a family\u201d (Tomlin), \u201cKicking Hollywood\u2019s ass\u201d (Willis) \u2013 serve as headings for the film\u2019s chapter-like consideration of his artistic inclinations.<\/p>\n Of his time in Hollywood, Altman says it best: \u201cI make gloves and they sell shoes.\u201d But that there was also a less rebellious, much mellower side to him is evident in Let\u2019s Begin Again<\/em>, the song he composed, which is used at the start of the film and over the closing credits, and which could easily have come straight out of The Great American Songbook<\/em>.<\/p>\n Perhaps the most formally ambitious of all is David Lynch: The Art Life<\/em> (2016, DocPlay), directed by Jon Nguyen, Rick Barnes and editor Olivia Neergard-Holm. And, one suspects, Lynch, who spends a large part of the film, wordlessly posing for the camera, chain-smoking, wandering through his house, smearing paint on his canvas and other works in progress, while reflecting in voice-over about the significant moments in his life (like reading Robert Henri\u2019s The Art Spirit<\/em>), and the course it took up to when he began pre-production on his first feature, Eraserhead<\/em>.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
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