LA NUIT AMÉRICAINE · DIE AMERIKANISCHE NACHT | Stationen der Filmgeschichte - Black Box im Filmmuseum Düsseldorf

LA NUIT AMÉRICAINE
THE AMERICAN NIGHT

FR 1973 · 116 min · Original Version with Subtitles · digitalHD · FSK 12 · Dir.: François Truffaut · Screenplay: François Truffaut, Jean-Louis Richard, Suzanne Schiffman · Cinematography: Pierre-William Glenn · Starring: Jacqueline Bisset, Valentina Cortese, Alexandra Stewart, Jean-Pierre Aumont, Jean-Pierre Léaud, François Truffaut, Nathalie Baye, and others

A film crew is shooting a melodrama at the Victorine Studios in Nice. Director Ferrand juggles his actors’ and actresses’ neuroses, the vagaries of the weather, and the everyday disasters on set: equipment malfunctions, romantic entanglements
develop, and a cat refuses to cooperate.

With *LA NUIT AMÉRICAINE*, Truffaut presents his magnum opus on filmmaking. It is not a romanticized view of the director’s artistry as the sole creator, but rather a film that conceives of film production as an inherently collective creative process amid constant chaos and hustle and bustle. While the Academy awarded the film an Oscar in 1974, Godard saw things, to put it mildly, a little differently. *LA NUIT AMÉRICAINE* became the catalyst for the final rift between the two former colleagues. In contrast to Godard, who claimed that in cinema the truth is projected 24 times per second, Truffaut positions cinema as a machine of illusion and leaves open the question of whether the illusion might not even be more important than life itself.

In cooperation with the Filmforum – Friends of the Film Museum
Introduction on October 20: Helmut von Richter (Filmforum – Friends of the Film Museum)