The Best Old Movies on a Big Screen This Week: NYC Repertory Cinema Picks, September 21-27
Day for Night (1973)
Directed by François Truffaut
The original French title, La nuit américaine, is a) much better than the English “translation,” and b) the name, everywhere but the United States, for the technique of filming in daylight and then processing the footage to make it look like night. It’s a film about filmmaking and maybe even for those who have been involved in the process, as it certainly shies away from the heavy subjects Truffaut raised in his Antoine Doinel films. Even though death, cheating and lying are elements in the plot, they mostly serve as disruptions to the film-within-the-film, the shooting of which is the through-line for all the character relations and the stressful contrivances inherent to the daily labor that is making these fictions we enjoy so much. Funny even in its darker moments and emotional in its revealing of lighting sources (I find a scene with a fake candle, magical and obvious at the same time, particularly moving), it’s Truffaut’s best film. Jaime Grijalba (September 22, 7pm at the Metrograph, preceding a discussion with Breixo Viejo, author of Film Books: A Visual History)