Movie: Day For Night

There was a time, back in the early seventies, when I was a huge fan of Francois Truffaut. On the same trip where I found a copy of "Birdman" I also found a copy of "La nuit americaine" which I hadn't seen since it came out.

Like "Birdman," it's a film about a film. It is, like Fellini's "Otto e mezzo" a film about the difficulties of making a film, a film about how creating something meaningful out of the morass of competing responsibilities that is being a film director can be so difficult as to approach the impossible.

As a mirror to reality, Truffaut populates the film with many real people.  He himself plays the director.  Several of the crew, the real crew, play crew members in the fictional film (which, to complicate things even further, is a film about making a film).  The actress who played his assistant is based on his real assistant.  The behind-the-scenes scenes of cameramen and sound guys walking around and doing their jobs could just possibly be them working on the real film, not the fictional film.

Mrs NoCo hates this kind of self-referential bullshit.

I thrive on it.

I'd forgotten the film stars Jean-Pierre Leaud, who played Truffaut's alter ego in his first quartet of great films, collectively called "The Adventures of Antoine Doinel."  When they meet and collaborate in this present film it gives an eerie sense of déjà vu.

One amusing tidbit of trivia, although "day for night" (and its French equivalent "nuit americaine") refers to shooting "night scenes" during the day with a special filter over the camera lens, there is no actual day-for-night shooting in this movie.

On a broader definition though, "day for night" could be expanded to mean ALL artifice employed to fool the audience, and in that sense the film's title is more appropriate. The street scenes were shot on a backlot with building fronts left over from another movie, the snow was spray foam, and the film-within-a-film was merely a plot device to create the overall film about a film company.