Hacker Cinema
Day for Night
La Nuit américaine
1973 · Film · 116 min
Directed by François Truffaut
A committed filmmaker struggles to complete his latest project while coping with a myriad of crises, personal and professional, among the cast and crew.
8 neutralfrom 8 commenters
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8 comments on Hacker News
Have to check it out. Not sure about the 2022 show, but the 1996 movie sounds intriguing. Don't remember anything about Day for Night, just that I found it similarly confusing as Fellini's 8 1/2. I do remember that I really liked Jules et Jim by Truffaut, but then again, it has Jeanne Moreau. I can recommend her movie Bay of Angels. It's a simple but great movie: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0056846/
I recently binge watched a series (Irma Vep) that, very tongue in cheek, addressed the malaise of "platforms" affecting film/cinema. It's a very complex work (in terms of multiple layers of readings) spanning the director's closure over his lost love (see Irma Vep 1996), a hat tip to Truffaut's Day for Night, and a very explicitly expressed concern of characters of how "content platforms" have killed cinema and mutated it to "TV" and "series". Naturally all this was said, to wrap up the irony train, on HBO's platform.
Irma Vep (2022): https://www.imdb.com/title/tt13649314
Italian films recorded dialogue after as well, no? I'm not sure whether it's all sound, but you can clearly tell that the dialogue is dubbed. In Truffaut's Day for Night, the Italian actress Valentina Cortese mentions that with Fellini, the actors would recite numbers instead of lines. The most egregious instance is Antonioni's Red Desert, which stars Richard Harris, who I'm pretty sure did not speak fluent Italian with a perfect accent.
Funny reading this. A classmate of mine from USC was telling me that their production company was working with Apple to produce a show and it was not going well. Apparently among the folks they felt if Apple just filmed themselves flailing around trying to make something it would be a better show than the show they were making. They reminded me of Truffaut's "Day for Night" which we had seen in Cinema 190 (the cinema elective that engineers often take) and said it was kind of like that, only way funnier in a sad sort of way.
We have a running comparison of "LA people coming to the Bay Area to do tech because 'How hard can it be?'" and the reverse being true as well, "Bay Area people going to LA to produce television/movies because 'How hard can it be?'"
Reality is complicated, and smart people so often seem to miss that.
neat! I particularly love the visual appeal of night mode - reminds me of "Night" scenes in old movies where you still could see shadows and sunlit surfaces because of daylight filming: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Day_for_night
> No French cinema
The following films are on Lee's list and are French:
Les 400 coups (400 Blows), Truffaut La Nuit américaine (Day for Night), Truffaut A bout du souffle (Breathless), Godard Paris brûle-t-il? (Is Paris Burning?), Clément
So 4/87 (approx 5%) of his films are French.
No French cinema? Breathless is on there, as well as 400 Blows and Day For Night.
Francois Truffaut's Day for Night is a movie about making a movie. In the end when the movie is ready, everybody is laid off and they're figuring out what to do next, where to go etc.