La Nuit américaine

Being very much interested in the process and nuance and technical elements of filmmaking, I found this film to be fascinating. Although it is not an exhaustive account of the technical processes necessary to make a film (which, I’m sure, would prove to be tedious and indeed uninteresting in a narrative format), Truffaut captures the essence of what it is to be involved in the filmmaking process—what it is to be on set, dealing with the dramas and comedies which inevitably (and possibly necessarily) take place. It is a film about both the process of creation and the passion for art and storytelling (contrastingly, the film within the film seems to be overly melodramatic and artless; however, it works humorously when seen relative to the overly dramatic lives and personas of the actors who fill the roles).

An interesting thing, too, and something we touched on in class, is that the drama and conflict is all centered around and created by the actors. While standing as a sort of humorous shot at the unstable and overly dramatic nature of the actor persona, it also seems to reflect something of the exaggerative and unrealistic nature of human interaction and emotion in film. While good film indeed elicits true emotional responses in the viewer, it seems often to accomplish this by presenting situations and characters that do not truly reflect “reality”. That is, the dialogue is often exceedingly dense, the situations meticulously concocted, and the human interaction (and I’m speaking now of the New Wave especially) sort of inaccessible or imperceptible. However, as I see it, this amplified and sometimes impenetrable nature of characters and situations in film is necessary in eliciting said responses and creating the themes, moods, and meaning a particular film is aiming for—the beauty and intuitiveness of film can be largely attributed to this heightened and distorted quality, when it is done well. La Nuit Americaine brings attention to this idea by juxtaposing the melodramatic actors with the ordinariness of the crew which surrounds them.