La Nuit Américaine (Day for Night) (1973) is François Truffaut's celebration of the craft and magic of cinema, charting the pleasures and pains enjoyed and endured by the cast and crew during production of Je vous présente Paméla, a melodrama being shot at the Victorine Studios in Nice. The film-within-a-film stars aging screen icon Alexandre (Jean-Pierre Aumont), former Italian diva Séverine (Valentina Cortese), young heartthrob Alphonse (Jean-Pierre Léaud) and British actress Julie Baker (Jacqueline Bisset), as well as Truffaut himself as the film's director Ferrand. The film won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 1974 and was nominated for three Oscars the following year, and won three BAFTAs for Best Film, Best Direction and Best Actress in a Supporting Role for Valentina Cortese.

Roger Crittenden's compelling, insightful account of the film draws extensively on research in the archives of Truffaut's company Les Films du Carrosse, and on interviews with many of La Nuit Américaine's cast and crew.

In his afterword to this new edition, Crittenden looks back on the film and its tribute to cinema's many technical 'miracles', in the context of the move from material film to digital production and distribution methods which, he suggests, has erased much of the original magic and material uncertainty that once defined filmmaking.