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Day for Night
original movie poster
Directed by	François Truffaut
Written by	François Truffaut
Starring	Jacqueline Bisset Valentina Cortese Dani Alexandra Stewart Jean-Pierre Aumont Jean Champion Jean-Pierre Léaud François Truffaut
Music by	Georges Delerue
Cinematography	Pierre-William Glenn
Editing by	Martine Barraquè-Curie, Yan Dedet
Release date(s)	May 14, 1973 (premiere at Cannes) May 24, 1973 September 7, 1973
Running time	115 min.
Language	French, English
IMDb profile

La Nuit américaine is a 1973 French film directed by François Truffaut. It stars Jacqueline Bisset and Jean-Pierre Léaud. In French, La Nuit Américaine ('The American Night') is a technical process whereby sequences shot during the daytime are made to appear as if they are taking place at night. In the English-speaking world the film is known as Day for Night, which is the equivalent English expression.

The film is often considered one of Truffaut's greatest films, and indeed one of the best films ever made: for example, it is one of two Truffaut films that feature on Time magazine top 100 list of the 100 Best Films of the Century, along with The 400 Blows.^[1]

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 a British actress, Julie Baker (Jacqueline Bisset) who is 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 film's themes is whether or not movies are more important than life for those who make them. The film is known for its many allusions both to film-making and to movies themselves (perhaps unsurprising given that Truffaut began his career as a film critic who championed cinema as an art form). The film opens with a picture of Lillian and Dorothy Gish (to whom it is dedicated). In one scene, Ferrand (played by Truffaut himself) opens a package of books he had ordered: they are books on directors he admires such as Luis Buñuel, Carl Theodor Dreyer, Ingmar Bergman, Alfred Hitchcock, Jean-Luc Godard, Ernst Lubitsch, and Robert Bresson. The film makes wry allusions to Jean Renoir's The Rules of the Game^{[citation needed]} and Marcel Ophüls's documentary The Sorrow and the Pity (used here to humourously describe a marital relationship).

Many of the problems and the filmmaking techniques used in the film are highly realistic, so much so that some critics, and Truffaut himself, have likened it to a documentary.^{[citation needed]} In one example, Severine, who keeps forgetting her lines, requests to simply mouth numbers instead of the actual words and dub them in later, a practice commonplace in Italian cinema. After two failed takes, she simply pastes her lines on walls that will not be seen on screen. In a case of life imitating art, Truffaut used this technique when he worked on Close Encounters of the Third Kind.^{[citation needed]}

There was an interesting incident reported on the DVD. The famous writer Graham Greene, has an uncredited cameo appearance as an insurance company representative in the film. On the DVD of the movie, it was reported that Greene was a big admirer of Truffaut, and had always wanted to meet him, so as it turned out, when the small part came up where he actually talks to the director, he was delighted to have the opportunity. It was reported that Truffaut was unhappy he wasn't told (until later) that the actor playing the insurance company representative was Greene, he would have liked to have said hello, as he had admired Greene's work as well.

The film won the 1973 BAFTA Award for Best Film and 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.

Julie (Jacqueline Bisset) and Alphonse (Jean-Pierre Léaud ) in a scene of Je Vous Presente, Pamela , the melodrama inside La Nuit Américaine.

• Jacqueline Bisset
• Valentina Cortese
• Dani
• Alexandra Stewart
• Jean-Pierre Aumont
• Jean Champion
• Jean-Pierre Léaud
• François Truffaut
• Nathalie Baye
• David Markham
• Zénaïde Rossi
• Xavier Saint-Macary

• La Nuit américaine at the Internet Movie Database

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1. ^ http://www.time.com/time/2005/100movies/the_complete_list.html