We come to expect certain things when we watch a movie. If a big introductory shot shows a lot of people, it eventually lingers and picks out the handsome guy in the crowd who will quickly become our focus for the next two hours. But in “Day for Night,” the camera plays a trick on us, diverting our attention several times over before coming back to that first man.
But even that’s a trick, because it’s all a part of one big scene in a movie, and the take needs to be done again. We’ve seen intros like this so many times, but few directors have ever asked us to look twice.
Francois Truffaut’s “Day for Night” is one of the great movies about the movies. It’s a funny, ironic ode to cinema that simultaneously celebrates the realism of film while scoffing at the phoniness of big studio productions. Continue reading “Rapid Response: Day for Night”