IN 1966, Alfred Hitchcock and Francois Truffaut spent a week discussing the art and craft of making movies.

In 2015, Kent Jones, programming director since 2013 of the New York Film Festival, together with Serge Toubiana, former redactor of the influential cinema magazine “Cahiers du Cinema”, wrote this film based on the book “Cinema According to Hitchcock”, Truffaut’s account of the discussion (clips from the filmed record of which links the clips illustrating what the pair were talking about.).

That’s a strong provenance for a film for which the main audience might have been academics, intellectuals, cinema historians and thinkers for whom movies were experiences inviting analytical challenge more than viewers seeking enjoyment, distaste, emotion, escape or other ephemeral responses (that, dear readers, is you and me).

It’s more than a nostalgia trip and it rightly or otherwise barely acknowledges aspects of Hitchcock when he wasn’t planning or masterminding the shoots of his prodigious oeuvre.

Film schools will clamour to get a copy and theses will in time be written about his influence on the work of filmmakers still at grade school. You don’t need to be a Hitchcock groupie to find value in his creative and artistic legacy.

You can turn loose your own cinematic self-esteem absorbing these 80 minutes of technical background to how cinema works. Or you can sit back and feel the warm glow of nostalgia remembering famous screen moments from way back when, or search memory for titles of films or names of characters or of actors. Or you can get a very rewarding response to this film about movies in which a master of manipulation explains how and why we in the audience can do both simultaneously.

At Capitol 6