General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20265 min read

Day for Night (1973 film)

Day for Night (French: La nuit américaine) is a 1973 comedy-drama directed by François Truffaut about the making of a film, with Truffaut himself starring as a director struggling to complete a melodrama while his cast and crew lurch through personal crises. A France/Italy co-production, it premiered at the Cannes Film Festival on May 15, 1973, and went on to win the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.¹^•²^•³

Key fact	Detail
Original title	La nuit américaine, the French trade term for the day-for-night technique of faking night scenes in daylight¹^•⁴
Director and star	François Truffaut, playing the director Ferrand¹
Principal cast	Jacqueline Bisset (Julie), Jean-Pierre Léaud (Alphonse), Valentina Cortese (Séverine), Jean-Pierre Aumont (Alexandre), Dani (Liliane)⁵
Premiere	Cannes Film Festival, May 15, 1973²
Academy Awards	Best Foreign Language Film for 1973; the following year, nominations for Truffaut's direction and screenplay and for Valentina Cortese as Best Supporting Actress³
Key crew	Screenplay by Truffaut, Jean-Louis Richard, and Suzanne Schiffman; music by Georges Delerue; cinematography by Pierre-William Glenn; produced by Marcel Berbert⁵
Runtime	Reported as 115 minutes (Film at Lincoln Center), 116 minutes (Criterion, BFI), and 120 minutes (Rotten Tomatoes)¹^•⁵^•⁶

Spoilers

Story and production within the story

The film is a backstage story in which the real drama happens between takes.³ Truffaut plays Ferrand, a harassed director shooting a melodrama called Meet Pamela (Je vous présente Paméla) at the Victorine Studios in Nice, in the south of France.⁸^•⁹^•¹⁰ The production is seemingly cursed: Ferrand's schedule has been cut to seven weeks, and after the first day the lab accidentally destroys a complicated and costly crowd scene.¹¹

The ensemble around him supplies the complications. Jacqueline Bisset plays Julie Baker, a highly strung Hollywood star recovering from a nervous breakdown; Valentina Cortese plays Séverine, an aging Italian diva who forgets her lines when she drinks; Jean-Pierre Aumont plays Alexandre, a consummate professional distracted by a lover's expected arrival; and Jean-Pierre Léaud plays Alphonse, the impetuous young leading man whose fiancée runs off with a British stuntman.¹^•⁵^•⁶^•⁸ Ferrand's relationship with Alphonse carries particular weight because Truffaut and Léaud had a father-son relationship in real life, dating to Léaud's role as Antoine Doinel in The 400 Blows; in the film, Ferrand tells him, "People like you, like me, you know well, we are made to be happy in the work of cinema."¹

Truffaut drew on accumulated set lore. The Guardian's review notes the film's affection for the trade's simplest artifices: the fake snow, the fake candle, the fake hotel window, and a remarkable cameo by Graham Greene.⁸

The title and the technique

The English and French titles both name a filmmaking trick. "Day for night" refers to shooting night-effect exteriors in daylight, using filters, under-exposure, and printing techniques, because early or cheaper film stocks could not register images in limited light.⁴^•⁷ The method was developed in the Hollywood studio system, and the French called it la nuit américaine, a label the Penn study describes as carrying a touch of derision, distancing a realist French ethos from Hollywood artifice.⁴ Truffaut took this trade term as his title, and the film's dual naming in French and English follows directly from it.⁷

Reception and honors

Day for Night was widely embraced on release and became one of Truffaut's most honored works.³ It won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film for 1973, and in the following year's ceremony it received nominations for Truffaut's direction and screenplay and for Valentina Cortese as Best Supporting Actress, an unusual showing for a subtitled film.³ Contemporary American critics were emphatic: Vincent Canby of The New York Times called it "the best work of François Truffaut," and Andrew Sarris of the Village Voice called it "the one movie Truffaut was born to make."¹² On Rotten Tomatoes the film holds a 98% Tomatometer from 40 reviews.⁶

Roger Ebert, reviewing a 1997 revival, described the film as "a poem in praise of making movies. Not good movies, not bad movies, movies," and noted the forced community of a film shoot, a family that forms when shooting begins and breaks up when it wraps.¹⁰ Pauline Kael took a cooler view, finding it "tender but too fan-magazinish in approach, too tenderly shallow for its own good."⁶

The Godard rupture

The film's most consequential aftermath was personal. Having by that time embraced a radical, anti-illusionist approach to moviemaking, Jean-Luc Godard is said to have sent Truffaut a harshly critical letter after watching the film; Truffaut's angry response brought their celebrated friendship to an end. The rupture is routinely cited as emblematic of the French New Wave's split between Truffaut's humanism and Godard's political modernism.³ The Guardian likewise records that Godard broke with Truffaut after seeing the film.⁸

Truffaut publicly defended the film he was making within the film, "claiming a nostalgia for films that are not afraid to tell a story and that have no qualms about being melodramatic."⁷ Senses of Cinema observes the irony that Day for Night could only have been made by Truffaut, yet is about a film that could have been directed by just about anyone.⁷

Legacy

The film has remained a touchstone for filmmakers. Richard Linklater, director of Nouvelle Vague (2025), told the Associated Press that when he was starting out he would watch La Nuit Américaine before every shoot.¹³ Time Out places it in the pantheon of films about filmmaking, striking a balance between the operatic neuroses of Fellini's 8½ and the warm nostalgia of Singin' in the Rain.¹⁴ The Criterion Collection issued it as Spine #769 with a 2K restoration supervised by cinematographer Pierre-William Glenn; both the Blu-ray and DVD editions are now listed as out of print.⁵

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 21, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026