Day for Night

"If one were to take one of his later films to a desert island, it would have to be La nuit américaine (1973), in which Truffaut succeeds gloriously in capturing the frenetic joy and frustration of making a film with a team of actors and technicians."

So said Peter Cowie when referring to François Truffaut's magnificent Day for Night (La nuit américaine); a film - much like Federico Fellini's 8½ (1963), Jean-Luc Godard's Le Mépris (1963) and Andrzej Wajda's Everything for Sale (1969) before it - about filmmaking itself. Whilst I believe Cowie is right in stating that if you were to become stranded on a desert island and had to take one of Truffaut's later films it would "have to be" Day for Night, I myself would go one further and say that if you were to take a film about making films then, again, it would have to be Day for Night, hands down.

In his annotation of Day for Night, Brian Hoyle pinpointed exactly why I would opt for Truffaut's Day for Night over the likes of 8½ and Les Mépris; it's tone is "far removed from the introspection and lofty artistic ambitions of Fellini's film in this mode and the cynicism and alienation of Godard's." Indeed, unlike Fellini and Godard's films - which focus more upon the struggles of the director (themselves) and some of the more negative aspects of film making, at times rarely focusing upon the actual art of filmmaking - Day for Night acts as Truffaut's love letter to cinema, reminding us that not only is he a director, auteur and critic, but also a cinéphile like you or me. Throughout the film Truffaut constantly pays tribute to his cinematic influences, heroes and contemporaries; whether it be through Ferrand's recurring dreams involving Citizen Kane (1941) or Ferrand's pile of books on directors, auteurs even, such as Alfred Hitchcock, Howard Hawks, Ingmar Bergman, Luis Bunuel, Robert Bresson and Godard.

Despite creating Day for Night over a decade after the peak of the Nouvelle Vague he helped instigate, Truffaut still manages to use the same sharp editing and freeze frames present in The 400 Blows (1959) and Jules et Jim (1962). Whilst one could talk endlessly about Truffaut's majestic composition and subtle touch through which he pulls back the curatin and reveals the magic of making cinema - the crane shots of crane shots, the cat and milk scene, the electric candle etc. - there was one particular recurring sequence I found even more interesting than most. More than once during the film we hear an uplifting piece of orchestral music set to Dziga Vertov style, Man with a Movie Camera-esque (1929) montages illustrating the mechanism of the camera as well as the film making and editing process, romanticising the entire notion of cinema and once more reminding us that this is Truffaut's love letter to the art of cinema; this is his Man with a Movie Camera, his 8½ and his Les Mépris all in one.