Day For Night/La Nuit Américaine

Directed by François Truffaut. Starring Jacqueline Bisset, Jean- Pierre Léaud, François Truffaut, Valentina Cortese, Dani, Alexandra Stewart, Jean-Pierre Aumont, Nathalie Baye Club, IFI, Dublin, 115 min

ON THE LAST occasion that the British Film Institute compiled its poll of the greatest ever movies – among the few such charts worth heeding – Michael Dwyer, this paper's late film correspondent, named Day for Nightas one of his own 10 favourites. Happily, a glance at François Truffaut's 1973 meditation on film-making, reissued this week in a shiny new print, confirms the picture as a knotty, witty gem of the brightest lustre. Self-reflection has never been so pleasurable.

Day for Night(both the English and French titles refers to the practice of shooting evening scenes before dark) details the pleasures and discontents of a crew working on a (possibly not very good) film entitled Meet Pamela. Truffaut himself plays the director. Jean-Pierre Léaud is the young dreamboat and Jacqueline Bisset a neurotic English actor. The usual stresses of film-making are augmented by affairs, pregnancies and car crashes (both literal and figurative).

You could argue that the founders of La Nouvelle Vague, employing post-modernism before the term was fashionable, always made movies about movies. Jean-Luc Godard's Breathlessis, as much as anything, a meditation on the potency of popular American cinema. However, Day for Night(along with Godard's Contempt) attempts to actually engage with the nuts and bolts of the movie- making process.

When novelists start writing about novelists, the reader can be forgiven a weary groan. But the film set is a perfect environment for staging a dramatic narrative: a tight impromptu family of professionals is rammed together for a limited amount of time. Truffaut’s film offers a near-perfect blend of allusive in-jokes and loosely structured, high-quality soap opera.

In a largely negative review, US critic Pauline Kael said Day for Nightwas for "those who would rather see a movie, any movie (a bad one, a stupid one, or an evanescent, sweet-but-dry little wafer of a movie like this one), than do anything else". Many readers will view this as an unintended recommendation.