Kent Jones on François Truffaut and His Influences

Critics love to talk about modern auteurs in terms of their influences, and François Truffaut has never been an exception. For our release of The Soft Skin, out next week in Blu-ray and DVD editions, critic and filmmaker Kent Jones created a new video essay exploring Truffaut’s influences, from literary to cinematic. In this excerpt from the longer piece, Jones talks about three crucial figures for Truffaut: André Bazin, Jean Renoir, and, especially, Alfred Hitchcock. It was while working on The Soft Skin that Truffaut really began to obsess over Hitchcock’s films, and, as Jones explains, the French filmmaker would soon after be instrumental in Hitchcock’s starting to be taken seriously as an artist in America.