Throughout Francois Truffaut’s 1973 masterpiece Day For Night, a callow movie star played by Jean-Pierre Leaud asks “Are women magic?” The most agreed-upon interpretation is that Leaud’s character, Alphonse, is really asking whether movies are magic.

Insight Into a Truffaut Masterpiece
Throughout Francois Truffaut’s 1973 masterpiece Day For Night, a callow movie star played by Jean-Pierre Leaud asks “Are women magic?” The most agreed-upon interpretation is that Leaud’s character, Alphonse, is really asking whether movies are magic.
Throughout Francois Truffaut’s 1973 masterpiece Day For Night, a callow movie star played by Jean-Pierre Leaud asks “Are women magic?” The most agreed-upon interpretation is that Leaud’s character, Alphonse, is really asking whether movies are magic. Looking at it another way, we might consider whether the question is meant to reveal that the self-involved Alphonse is blind to the great labor being performed around him in service of making a movie, especially by women. The women are not magic, but they are working very hard.
Presenting Day for Night for Turner Classic movies, Steven Spielberg described it as “the most accurate portrayal of what it is like to make one movie… where nothing goes right. Which is so often the case.” In Spielberg’s appraisal, it’s a portrait of a director (Ferrand, played by Truffaut himself) not as a visionary or auteur, but as a resourceful project manager. In Ferrand’s words: “What is a film director? A man who’s asked questions about everything. Sometimes he knows the answers.” Ferrand is directing a sappy melodrama titled Meet Pamela, and no one is better at helping him produce all the answers than Joelle (played by Nathalie Blye), the so-called “script girl” who is based directly on Truffaut’s great collaborator, Suzanne Schiffman. Schiffman should be recognized as Day for Night’s co-author. She had served as Truffaut’s script supervisor since 1960’s Shoot the Piano Player, and on Day for Night became his writing partner as well as the assistant director. This partnership would extend to nearly all of Truffaut’s films thereafter. Day for Night’s story pays tribute to their partnership, as well as the labor, both physical and emotional, that goes into the making of a film, emphasizing filmmaking as the work of an ensemble with all of their personalities and baggage in tow.
Truffaut and Schiffman each performed multiple roles in making Day for Night, and accordingly the characters they’ve created also play multiple roles, especially the women. In front of Ferrand’s camera, we have three leading ladies: the pregnant Stacey (Alexandra Stewart), whose condition threatens the sexualized image of her character the producers had hoped for; the faded star Severine (Valentine Cortese), who struggles to perform in spite of alcoholism; and Julie, the film’s biggest star, played by Jacqueline Bisset at her most stunning. Based on Truffaut and Schiffman’s experiences working with Julie Christie on Fahrenheit 451, the fragile Julie struggles to perform in her first role after recovering from a nervous breakdown. Behind the camera, the women likewise play multiple roles: we have script girl Joelle dutifully solving crises on set while also juggling her sex life; the makeup artist Odile (Nike Arrighi), who also acts and encounters romance; and Liliane (the French pop star Dani), who lands the job of script supervisor through Alphonse, her paranoid and possessive boyfriend. Each woman struggles to balance her professional and personal life in an environment where the distinctions are often blurry, while director Ferrand and script girl Joelle conspire and scramble to keep everything working from day to day. All is work, and whether they find happiness or endure heartbreak, they are never not working. In a series of dream sequences, a young Ferrand is shown fantasizing about becoming the next Orson Welles, but the grown Ferrand is just happy to be working. “Making a film is like a stagecoach ride in the Old West,” Ferrand tells us. “At first, you hope for a nice trip. Soon, you just hope to reach your destination.”
Truffaut’s longtime friend Jean-Luc Godard famously hated Day for Night, and responded by writing a series of letters accusing Truffaut of being dishonest and chastising him for a perceived failure to carry the torch of their revolutionary ideals with this latest film. Their friendship ended as a result, and was supposedly never repaired. While Day for Night declines to attack capitalism and imperialism directly as Godard did in his own work at the time, Truffaut and Schiffman’s immensely popular and knowing tribute to the people who labor to make movies is undoubtedly revolutionary in its own right.
MATTHEW CARON
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Dear Desert Community,
I hope you are all keeping healthy, balanced, and enjoying the desert winter; we know how special this time is here.
First of all, I would like to introduce myself: my name is Patricia Vernhes, and as of November, I have taken on the role of Programming and Development Director at the Hi-Desert Cultural Center.
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