It’s 1968 and William Greaves is walking around Central Park. His crew are in semi-revolt; they’re hectoring and negotiating and falling to the floor and picking blades of grass. They’re sitting down and talking it through; Greaves floats among them; faux-dictator who — dressed in a green-netted shirt we’ll see, a little later, like for like, on the stocky body of Donatas Banionis in Solaris (1972) — tries to get his way. There’s no script. This is 1968.
Mai-68’ comes and goes; Truffaut — we’re over the pond now, in Nice; it’s summer — is shooting himself shooting a film. This time there’s nothing avowedly experimental about his project; it’s a schlocky melodrama of the old “studio” system (French style, of course) and he’s shooting himself shooting a film. This is Day for Night (1973); or what, in French, we’d call la nuit americaine, which describes the way nighttime sequences are shot during the day, filter over the camera. Faux-night.
So, yes; the theme — Truffaut’s theme — is illusion; the bundle of smeary tricks used by filmmakers to con their audiences into believing that day is night, north is south, up is down. Truffaut-pretend (the Truffaut-director of Truffaut-actual’s film) is shooting a schlocky melodrama and basically nothing is going to plan. Financiers are tugging their collars about funding; his leading lady has recently recovered from a nervous breakdown; his young star (played by an ever pouting-assertive-wheedling Jean-Pierre Leaud) is in the throes of love, and won’t leave his room; he doesn’t like his room anyway. Ok, he goes go-karting.
The film gets made; that’s the “spoiler”. The film gets made with all its compromises and jury-rigging and adjustments. Truffaut-actual is not, like Greaves, content to be quite as passive (capturing, capturing). He interleaves all kinds of mediating effects into his film-about-a-film that assert the deception-making of film (the big apparatus of technical hypnagogery). Interstitial stills; smash freezes; juddery editing; the persistence of a black-and-white dream sequence which slowly reveals itself to show a (I assume) younger Truffaut-pretend stealing film posters from a cinema’s foyer. Truffaut-actual cuts and dices his footage back and forward, sometimes rephotographing the rushes as they spool out or peering, blocky and soft, through the sensor of his camera. He’s letting us know, in no uncertain terms, that a film is being made; a film is being made and it’s chaotic, it is bursting at the seams.
But Jean-Pierre Aumont (in one very memorable scene he remarks to Truffaut-pretend that he’s an old-hand, has “died” in 24 of his films [car crashes, stabbings, poisonings, but never a “natural death”]) comes with a cat’s grin. He’s seen this all before; Leaud doorsteps him, “are women magical?” Replies: yes, and no. The schlocky melodrama of Meet Pamela — the film they’re ostensibly shooting — begins to play second-fiddle to the actually much more ribald antics of the set. Love affairs, boozy hysterics, power-outages. Everybody is extremely competent and extremely naive. Wax is dug out of a candle to stow a hidden, recessed light; a fireplace is pumped up and down with a gas tank; this is illusion. Jacqueline Bisset plays Julie Baker (a British actor; another kind of illusion — fretting about her French). She sleeps with moping Leaud-Alphone and then, breaking the news to her (slightly elderly) husband, Dr Nelson, finds that her teary confession has been smuggled into the script. There are eyes and ears everywhere. The real is just so much more real.
There’s a death; a death-preceding the character’s actual on-screen death, so a replacement — he looks sort of similar, glancingly; fake-moustache pasted on — must now have his back turned to Leaud’s heartbroken bullet. When he falls to the floor (in one of the many repeated instances of this scene, rushing-flowing) it’s wooden and silly. Leaud runs away through foam-pretending-to-be-snow. Financiers are tugging their collars and the press corps are popping up everywhere, asking the most nonsensical questions. Meanwhile, Truffaut is ordering all sorts of books about film; frantic inspiration-finding. There’s Dreyer and Welles and, yes, even Godard. He’s wracked by nightmares of neon cinema awnings but, now, he just wants to get the film done.
Machinery is everywhere; cranes and cameras and storage crates and cables. There are people everywhere, too; being shooed away or dragged around. Farmer-cattlers amble across the set, “hey we should be your stars”; a policeman is in the audience, the rushes have gone missing (a mix-up at the Parisian lab). It doesn’t explain much of anything about how a film is made; it tells you what it takes to make a film. We’re supposed to be impressed and we’re supposed to be hiding behind our hands; and some of its most beautiful shots — Leaud-Alphone approaching replacement-Alexander-father with a pistol, nervously raised — is over-the-shoulder grainy; this is about heartbroken Leaud. It’s nothing to do with Alphonse. Tricky, this. Earlier, the cast and crew spend some protracted minutes wrangling a skittish kitten that won’t drink from the appointed bowl of milk. Like herding cats; I get it.
Films-that-are-actually-about-films. Greaves and Truffaut lead the pack, but it’s been catnip for so many. Pere Portabella gave us his gothick remix-rendition of Cuadecuc, vampir (1970); there’s Larry Gottheim’s The Red Thread (1987), which was assembled from footage he shot with his students and is, basically, about making a film with his students; and there’s Nicholas Ray (eye-patched and hoary), who created the ramshackle beast of We can’t go home again (1973) — also with his students — which was the same year actually (the same year as Night for Day), where revolt and repression are dialed up to their shuddering maximum. There’s a lot more.
If nothing else, making a film makes you want to make a film about making a film. It might be that simple; just as a film is really a kind of collective, wilful deceit that produces something much neater than the final projected “result”. Old-cat-not-yet-dead Alexander (Jean-Pierre Aumont) takes a moment to reassure nervous Jacqueline Bisset, acknowledging that actors often get bamboozled when they finally see the premiere: “did I do all that?”.
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