Day for Night (1973)

Perfect cast and a good story

Entertaining from beginning to end, it maintains the spirit of the franchise while establishing it's own seal with a fun cast

I enjoyed watching this film and would recommend other to give it a try , (as I am) but this movie, although enjoyable to watch due to the better than average acting fails to add anything new to its storyline that is all too familiar to these types of movies.

The acting is good, and the firecracker script has some excellent ideas.

In La Nuit Américaine, François Truffaut plays the role of a film director, Ferrand. This film describes Ferrand faces the ups and downs when he is directing a movie. He needs to arrange the production, actors, design, creative partners, crew staff members, film fans and film critics. This movie depicts the various aspects of the film and life, as well as the professional and creative artists. It also interspersed with life, difficulties, frustrations of art, and the conflicting values of filmmakers and the public. The English name of La Nuit Américaine is Day For Night, which means filming the night's scenes during the daytime. In the meantime, it also implies the wonderful transformation between film and real life. François Truffaut uses this term to describe the busyness of the studio and the dream of a real life. As a world-famous Auteur director, François Truffaut still makes this movie be full of the bright and rhythmic feeling. The most impressive scene is that there is a teenager takes advantage to steal movie poster and stills with an umbrella. This is François Truffaut's childhood memory. At the end of that, the movie poster which he stoled was the most important film in the history, Big Nations. It implied that the love and pursuit of film lead François Truffaut become a film director after he grows up. La Nuit Américaine is a reflection of François Truffaut, especially François Truffaut rarely judges the complicated relationship between male and female by moral standards. François Truffaut usually uses a more tolerant way to show the humanity. Whether it is Two English Girls, Stolen Kisses, The 400 Blows, or Day For Night, they all fully show the French-style view of love and life. Those movies make him become an outstanding Auteur director.

Director Ferrand (François Truffaut) struggles with many challenges to finish shooting his film "Je vous presente Pamela". Julie Baker (Jacqueline Bisset) is a British actress struggling with personal issues. This film follows the many people associated with the production.This is a classic film from iconic French director François Truffaut. He's playing with many modern meta filmmaking ideas. It is a film within a film. It has quasi-documentary techniques. The characters are a little hard to keep track. Other than Bisset and Truffaut, I'm not familiar with any of the other actors. It makes it harder to follow. The most memorable are little filmmaking triumphs like the candle and the cat. This is a movie at the foremost front.

more than a film, it is a window. to a clear image about movies and the role of web for entire universe who create is. the delicacy and the force are basic tools for Truffaut in this case. because it is not a pledge for art or revelation of secrets. only portrait of few people and their ordinary work. a classic for the courage to not be lesson or pledge, for mixture between to make a movie and administrate a world, it is a revelation at every new meeting. for the grace of detail exploration. for the performance of Truffaut himself. for Jacqueline Bisset and Valentina Cortese. or, only for the lost Alphonse, the ex - Antoine by Jean-Pierre Leaud. the basic virtue- precise use of nuances. like each refined thing, its importance remains a problem of seduction.

"Truffaut's films are the product of one man alone and that man looks with an equal eye on the problems of the actors, the sound system, the camera. There are no small problems, no great problems. There is only film. For Hindus the world is one; for Truffaut the film is one." (Jean Renoir)La nuit américaine was François Truffaut's 13th film and his most physic film of all. The title refers to a filmmaking technique, we here in Europe call an American night -- an acted night, day which is turned to night, fake. So it would be quite silly for Americans to call it an American night and therefore, they simply call it Day for Night. Day for Night isn't Truffaut's best or his most intelligent film but it is his most perfect film, for its structure. It is a collection of themes that were important for him. It's a synthesis of his production till that day. It is a tribute to filmmaking, or as Truffaut himself puts it: "After making an ode to books it would've been weird not to make a film about film." A film about a film within a film is, at its heart, ridiculously simple. The story about 15 people who have isolated from the rest of the world, who are free to form temporary relationships and who aren't disturbed by the common boundaries of everyday life and work. However, Truffaut has turned this, normally seen as a cliché, into his benefit because the real theme of the film is the transience of emotions. These intense love and friendly relations are extremely painful because they often tend to end so quickly. It is no wonder that Truffaut, as the romantic of the Nouvelle Vague, took this as his most important theme from the topic of filmmaking.As said, Day for Night is a synthesis of Truffaut's production until the year 1973. The presence of Jean-Pierre Léaud as Alphonse, links it to the Antoine Doinel series. But, in this case, Léaud isn't Truffaut's only alter ego because François plays the role of director Ferrand himself. The presence of him, on the other hand, reminds us of The Wild Child (1970), the dreams of childhood memories The 400 Blows (1959), and the complexity of sexual relationships Jules et Jim (1962). But unlike other films about filmmaking (The Man with a Movie Camera, 8½) Day for Night tries to relay an emotion of the practical pleasure which a filmmaker gets from his or her profession and its concrete reality. Already in the beginning, during the opening credits, Truffaut shows us the sound track as concrete whose beauty the viewer can now, finally, observe.Day for Night is all about the holy matrimony of life and art. If life and the world were perfect there would be no art and vice versa. Throughout the film Alphonse continues his research of women, love and cinema -- and eventually ends up asking whether "film is more important than life?" The thesis or more like the basic realization of the film is that film is life and life is film. Film is an imitation of life and life is an imitation of film. If imitation of life can be even greater than life itself which one is the greater? Day for Night includes authentic moments of joy -- how Truffaut actually loves his work -- but also moments of grief, the feeling of loss reflects to the structure and visual substance of the film. To cut a long story short, for its structure, it has got two kinds of scenes: parody-like, cinematic, dramatic scenes and documentary-like realistic scenes which conduct dialog with each other, and get mixed up when we can no longer distinguish film and reality, life and imitation. Day for Night is an ode to film(making) and it portrays a world where fiction and reality have begun to merge.