Day for Night

François Truffaut's Day for Night (La Nuit américaine) opened in 1973 and won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 1974, as well as the BAFTA for Best Direction. It has been the standard reference in any discussion of films about film-making ever since, and Steven Spielberg has called it one of the most-cited works of his early formation. The title is the technical term for shooting day exteriors through filters so that they read as night.

Truffaut plays the director Ferrand, who is shooting Je vous présente Pamela, a fictional film within the film, at the Victorine Studios in Nice. He is trying to keep cast, crew and his own faltering inspiration going long enough to finish, and trouble comes from every side: an ageing diva whose memory is failing (Valentina Cortese, Oscar-nominated for the role), a young leading man (Jean-Pierre Léaud) whose romantic instability threatens the shoot, an English actress (Jacqueline Bisset) recovering from a recent breakdown, an Italian leading man (Jean-Pierre Aumont), and the ordinary piling-up of crises that any film in production suffers.

It plays as broad comedy of the working set and as a love letter to the crafts of production, and underneath both it thinks, without fuss, about the moral compromises a director has to make. Pierre-William Glenn photographs the Victorine sets, Georges Delerue writes the score, and Truffaut's own performance holds the centre; it is one of the warmest films he made. His affection reaches everyone working on Pamela, stars and crew alike, and few directors have looked so fondly at their own trade.