The Cinema of Day for Night
Aug 25th, 2008 | By Rick | Category: Classic Cinema, Reviews
François Truffaut’s Day for Night opens on a small, grassy plaza. Immediately, a bus roars by in the foreground; the sound of its engine drowns all others out. The camera picks up a woman and her dog and tracks along with her, pausing at a subway entrance long enough for a man to emerge, then follows along with him. As he turns to cross the street, the camera continues on, only to pick up a second man, descending into the plaza. The second man confronts the first, there is a slap, and at that precise instant, we hear “Cut!” and realize it’s a movie. Well, we knew it was a movie, but we thought it was part of our movie; instead, it’s a movie within a movie. And after the A.D. resets the shot, we go again, only this time, instead of hearing the sound effects, we hear the director’s shouted instructions: “News vendor, be more lively”; “Woman with the dog, faster”; “More activity around the subway.”
It’s clear Truffaut is telling us exactly what the movie is about — the craft and artificiality of film-making. And of course, the title itself is a dead giveaway: it refers to a seminal trick of the movie trade: the shooting of night-time scenes during the day. (The original title, La Nuit américaine, is the French term for the technique.)
Jean-Pierre Leaud
The plot is simple: we follow a film director named Ferrand (Truffaut himself) as he directs a pot-boiler called Meet Pamela. We eavesdrop as he is hounded by his crew, as he makes decisions about everything from wigs to guns to set construction, and as he manages and placates a rambunctious cast. Intercut with all this are the back-stage goings-on of his players and crew, as they do a little bed-hopping and tantrum-throwing along the way.
Truffaut infuses these activities with his trademark sense of immediacy and humanity. All the antics of the cast and crew, no matter how crass, are treated with wit, understanding and sympathy. His shots are composed so that we often feel like we’re looking casually into the lives of these people; there’s action captured through windows or “accidentally” after tracking on the shot’s main subject. On the other hand, when we’re watching the shooting of scenes from 
Meet Pamela, we’re often unsure of the point of view: is it that of the film or the film within? Sometimes we think it’s the former, then pull back to see the film crew; other times, it’s clearly the latter, and all we hear are the director’s instructions.
All this is to blur the lines between our movie — Day for Night — and Meet Pamela, the film within a film. And to add another layer of meaning, Truffaut playfully uses all the syntax , all the clichés in the filmmaking lexicon to tell his story. There are dream sequences, tracking shots, and sudden zooms; lap-dissolves, fades and even a wipe or two. In one instance, flash-bulbs from news-photographers in the scene where the star Julie (Jacqueline Bisset) arrives at the airport bleed back into the preceding one. Her presence is so strong that it’s even felt in the chronological past of the film.
Bisset commutes to work
All of this serves to remind us that Truffaut is using the cinematic form to tell a story about the cinema itself. Along the way, he delights in exposing a variety of short-cuts and tricks of the trade. There’s the fake candle, with an embedded light to illuminate the actor’s face, and the platform placed over a pool to film a recalcitrant starlet. Perhaps most spectacularly, a window facade is built on a scaffolding — reachable only by ladder — to foster an illusion of facing apartments in Meet Pamela. The sight of sex-pot Julie climbing the ladder bare-foot and in a night-gown perfectly captures the disconnect between movie fantasy and reality.
Although it has a three-act structure, the real rhythm of Day for Night is in the making of the film. And so, it begins with the first shot of Meet Pamela and ends with the last, and the subsequent break-up of the company. Along the way, we are drawn into the pulse of the filmmaking, the alternating shooting and downtime, shooting and downtime. It’s clear that Truffaut regards a film company as a family, perhaps more of one than in real life. As the film draws to a close, there is real nostalgia and melancholy as all go their separate ways.
Leaud, Bisset and Truffaut
Truffaut handles a large cast with precision, skillfully interweaving the story of the film and the goings-on within the company. Bisset’s Julie is a British star, known to have had a “breakdown,” who arrives amid uncertainty about her ability to complete the film. Jean-Pierre Léaud plays Alfonse, a love-sick actor with a role in “Meet Pamela.” Clingy and needy, he arrives on set with a girlfriend (Dani) for whom he’s wangled a job as script girl. Valentina Cortese plays Severine, an over-the-hill diva reduced to mother-in-law roles and Jean-Pierre Aumont is Alexandre, an older leading man with a secret. Finally, in her first major role, Nathalie Baye rounds out the cast as Ferrand’s right-hand woman Joelle.
The script, by Truffaut, Suzanne Schiffman and Jean-Louis Richard, is episodic and full of juicy lines. Some examples — Joelle, after being told of a crew-member’s defection with a stuntman: “I’d drop a guy for a film. I’d never drop a film for a guy!” Ferrand, in voice-over, musing about the filmmaking enterprise: “Making a film is like a stagecoach ride in the old west. When you start, you are hoping for a pleasant trip. By the halfway point, you just hope to survive.”
The masters
Georges Delerue’s score is delicate and unobtrusive, and provides one of the most evocative scenes in Day for Night. Ferrand receives a package of books on the cinema, and as he unwraps them the phone rings. It’s Delerue on the line — he’s scoring Meet Pamela and has a snippet of melody for the director. As we hear the melody, Ferrand begins placing the books on the table, and they fill the frame: Bunuel, Dreyer, Lubitsch. Bergman, Godard, Hitchcock. All the greats that influenced Truffaut over the years, gently evoked in a scene that conveys more love of the cinema than ten treacly films like Cinema Paradiso.
Bisset directed by Truffaut
In fact, that is what Day for Night ultimately accomplishes: above all, it conveys an intense passion for the movies, a hallmark of the French New Wave in general, and Truffaut in particular. Crew-members eat and drink cinema: the listen to movie quiz shows, talk about it constantly, and go to the movies on their nights off. Actors reminisce fondly and constantly about their triumphs and failures, all in good humor and evident love. For those familiar with Truffaut’s oeuvre, there is an additional layer of meaning. Seeing Jean-Pierre Léaud pining to go to the movies cannot help but evoke The 400 Blows, where the much younger Léaud plays hooky from school to sneak into the local theater. The scene with Delerue cannot help but remind us of his classic scores for Shoot the Piano Player and Jules and Jim, both, of course, directed by Truffaut.
Cinema-folk seem endlessly self-reflective, endlessly fascinated with their own art. As a result, there are many movie movies out there, by everyone from Wilder (Sunset Boulevard) to Fellini (8½) to Altman (The Player). Some, like the three just mentioned, are classics that have much to say about the process and business of the cinema. None (that I’ve seen, anyway) convey the day-to-day rhythms and joys of filmmaking with such gentleness, accuracy and good humor as this film does. As Truffaut himself puts it half-way through, in Day for Night, “Cinema is King.”
[here's a copy of the Delerue scene for your viewing pleasure]
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This is on my very long list of movies I HAVE to see someday, but just haven’t gotten around to.
Now I’ve got to put it into my ever-growing Netflix queue.
It sounds a little like “The Stunt Man,” another movie about the making of a movie, and one I’ve always liked a lot.
“The Stunt Man” does feel like it sometimes, but it’s a mean-spirited movie compared to “Day for Night.” Truffaut felt no need to trump up the conflict — a megalomaniacal director, a fugitive stumbling onto a movie set — he just made a movie about the movies.
There isn’t a mean bone in “Day for Night’s” body, one of the consistent joys of Truffaut, in my not so humble opinion.
Don’t get me wrong, I think “The Stunt Man” does have its pleasures, chief among them Peter O’Toole. It’s just that its tone is very different. Although I do suspect its Richard Rush and his screenwriter had seen “Day for Night,” and not too long before, either.
Very lovely review, Rick.
This is one of my favorite films, and Truffaut’s celebration of the cinema is as touching as anything I have ever seen. As you say, the New Wave in general and Truffaut specifically displayed great love for the cinema, and it is one of the very themes that defines Truffaut’s work. Day for Night is the apotheosis of this, and it’s a gorgeous, loving film in every respect. Godard’s Contempt–another film about the making of the movies–is in many ways an achingly beautiful film, but it’s also embittered, tortured, angry and sad. I love 8-1/2 as well, but Day for Night is simply just a phenomenally humorous, tender and touching work. Only Truffaut could have made it.
I really love this movie Rick and I think you nailed it right on the head.
This movie isn’t mean spirited. With all the quirks and problems these people experience throughout the making of MEET PAMELA, it doesn’t sour my desire to make films. It’s like seeing a romantic comedy where the main couple is always fighting, but you know they still, ultimately love each other.
Does that make sense?
Thanks, Alexander … I love “Day for Night” because of its simple joy over the filmmaking process, without an axe to grind or an ox to gore. “Contempt” I love as well, but as you say, Godard’s bitterness shows through, especially in the over-the-top American producer. I don’t think it’s an accident that Truffaut came to Hollywood to make a film (even if it was the problematic Fahrenheit 451) and Godard never has.
Hell, Truffaut even appeared in a Hollywood extravaganza, and his humanity showed through even in a Spielberg movie. In fact, that’s where I first encountered him (no pun intended), and thought “someday I have to see his films.”
Joe, thanks for the compliment.
Your analogy does indeed make sense . . . I think the quarreling-but-still-loving couple metaphor is a very apt description of Truffaut’s relationship with the filmmaking process.