DAY FOR NIGHT (1973)
Though cinema originated in America and nearly every film on this list depicts Americans making American movies, celluloid fever is by no means limited to the United States. Yet even in foreign lands, our influence nevertheless pervades the art form: the original French title of François Truffaut’s shaggy dog charmer is La Nuit américaine, a phrase referring to the filmmaking process known here as day-for-night, which literally translates as “American night.” While the main plot of Truffaut’s love letter to his chosen profession involves the offscreen dramas of several above-the-line divas starring in Day For Night’s film within a film, Je Vous Présente Paméla (Meet Pamela), it’s the below-the-line grips, prop men and other crewmembers who are the workaday heart of this naturalistic depiction of the hard work and small victories of any and every film production, an exhilarating, exasperating process where success or failure rests not in the director’s vision or the ultimate quality of the end result, but rather on a zillion unpredictable details like a small cat deciding whether or not to drink milk from a saucer while a dozen otherwise sane adults stand around, clutching heavy equipment, praying to get the shot they need before they lose the light.
Read More...