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La Nuit américaine is a 1973 French film directed by François Truffaut. It stars Jacqueline Bisset and Jean-Pierre Léaud. It was released in English speaking countries as Day for Night. Day for Night is also the name of a technical process whereby sequences shot during the daytime are made to appear as if they are taking place at night. The equivalent French expression is La Nuit Américaine (The American Night). Often considered one of Truffaut's greatest films, it's regarded by many critics as the definitive film on film-making and was one of the two films directed by Truffaut which featured on Time Magazine's list of 100 best films of the century along with The 400 Blows.
Synopsis La Nuit Americaine chronicles the production of Je Vous Presente, Pamela (Meet Pamela), a cliched melodrama starring aging screen icon, Alexandre (Jean-Pierre Aumont), former diva Severine (Valentina Cortese), young heart-throb Alphonse (Jean-Pierre Léaud) and an American actress, Julie Baker (Jacqueline Bisset) who's recovering from both a nervous breakdown and the controversy leading to her marriage with her much older doctor. In between are several small vignettes chronicling the stories of the crew-members and the director, Ferrand's (Truffaut himself) tangles with the practical problems one deals with when making a movie. One of the key themes running throughout the film is whether or not movies, for those who make it are more important than life. The film is known for its many allusions both to film-making and movies themselves. Not surprising since Truffaut started out as a critic who often championed cinema as an art form. The film opens with a picture of Lillian and Dorothy Gish to whom it is dedicated to and Truffaut(as Ferrand) in one scene opens a package of books he had ordered only to reveal books on directors he admires like Luis Bunuel, Carl Theodor Dreyer, Ingmar Bergman, Alfred Hitchcock, Ernst Lubitsch, Robert Bresson and makes wry allusions to Renoir's The Rules of the Game and Marcel Ophuls's documentary The Sorrow and the Pity (used here to humourously describe a marital relationship). Much of the problems and the film-making techniques used in the film are highly realistic, so much so that some critics and Truffaut himself have likened it to a documentary. One instance when Cortese's character, Severine, who's struggling with her lines, requests to simply mouth numbers instead of the actual words and dub them later. This was a practice that was commonplace in Italian cinema. After two failed takes, she simply pastes her lines on walls that don't show on screen. In a case of life imitating art, Truffaut used this technique when he worked on Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Cast includes Awards It won the 1973 BAFTA Award for Best Film, the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. Valentina Cortese was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress, and Truffaut for the Academy Award for Directing. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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