Day for Night in Winston-Salem

This weekend, as part of its ongoing series Looking at Art Cinema, Aperture Cinema in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, will be screening François Truffaut’s 1973 metamovie Day for Night. In this farcical commentary on the filmmaking process, Truffaut stars as a director trying to finish a melodrama while finding himself in the middle of real-life melodrama—as he must cater to on-set chaos and the whims of his leading man, the neurotic Alphonse, brilliantly played by Jean-Pierre Léaud. Costarring Valentina Cortese as a fading diva and Jacqueline Bisset as a British ingenue recovering from a nervous breakdown, this playful ode to the art of cinema also features a tremendous score by the great French composer Georges Delerue. Winston-Salemites, you can see Truffaut’s film—which won the Oscar for best foreign film in 1974—this Saturday night, and in the meantime, revisit David Cairns’s great essay on Day for Night,published for our release of the film last year.