Sightlines · reception
How Day for Night was received
1973 · François Truffaut · Day for Night on Sightlines
The arc
A hit from the start — it won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film and BAFTA's Best Film — and it's only grown into the definitive love letter to moviemaking, the film every 'movies about movies' list is measured against.
What’s debated
The eternal fight it sparked is Godard's: after seeing it he called Truffaut a liar for romanticizing film sets, igniting the letter-war that ended their friendship — so fans still argue whether it's an honest portrait of filmmaking or a beautiful, cozy fantasy of one.
Its footprint
Its title put the film-set trick of shooting 'day for night' into the wider vocabulary, and Truffaut's line that films are 'more harmonious than life' gets quoted anywhere people wax romantic about cinema; the Godard–Truffaut breakup letters it provoked are legendary cinephile lore in their own right.
Where it stands
A permanent canon fixture and cinephile comfort food — the warm-hearted counterweight to 8½ in the movies-about-movies pantheon, and a reliable gateway drug into Truffaut.
Did you know? When Ingrid Bergman won the 1975 Supporting Actress Oscar, she used her speech to apologize to fellow nominee Valentina Cortese — insisting Cortese deserved it for her performance in Day for Night, as Cortese blew her a kiss from the audience.
Named by the director
- Citizen Kane (1941) — Truffaut built the recurring dream of a boy stealing Citizen Kane lobby stills from his own childhood, and long named Welles's film as the one that made him want to make movies.
- Lillian and Dorothy Gish — Truffaut opens the film with an on-screen dedication to the Gish sisters, saluting the silent-era acting tradition the film honors.