Review of Day for Night (1973) by Emanuele C — 09 Jul 2016

Committed film director struggles to complete his movie while coping with a myriad of crises, personal and professional, among the cast and crew.

I find it interesting that in French the term "American night" means the same as our term "day for night", wherein scenes filmed during the day appear to be shot at night (although discerning eyes can still tell the difference). Why "American night"? Interesting.

One of the film's themes is whether or not films are more important than life for those who make them, its many allusions both to film-making and to movies themselves (perhaps unsurprising given that Truffaut began his career as a film critic who championed cinema as an art form). The film opens with a picture of Lillian and Dorothy Gish, to whom it is dedicated. In one scene, Ferrand opens a package of books he had ordered: they are books on directors he admires such as Luis Buñuel, Carl Theodor Dreyer, Ingmar Bergman, Alfred Hitchcock, Jean-Luc Godard, Ernst Lubitsch, Roberto Rossellini and Robert Bresson. Also Francois Truffaut's Day for Night is a movie that tells the interesting way that how movies were made back then.

It tells the story of a dedicated film director named Ferrand (played by Francois Truffaut) who is trying so hard to finish a movie that is based on a true story called Meet Pamela, but however Ferrand has difficulty trying to finish his movie due to an overwhelming amount of crises for example, accidents, trying to give up on the movie, and death. The movie that Ferrand makes has sort of an It Happened One Night (1934) type of story, about an English wife who is falling in love and running away with the father of her husband. One thing that I found to be a coincidence while watching this movie is that Truffaut was the director of this movie, and he plays a director who is making the movie and I thought to myself (weren't the actors confused while making this movie and as well as it's story?, maybe or maybe not). but in the end it was just a wonderful movie about film-making in my undying movie loving opinion.