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Serge Daney: |
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The first year of the existence of the journal Trafic (issue 1, Winter 1991) was also
the last year of Serge Daney’s life (he died from AIDS-related illness in June
1992). In his lifetime (born 1944), four major collections of Daney’s essays
appeared: La Rampe (Gallimard/Cahiers
du cinéma, 1983), texts from Cahiers du
cinéma, the magazine he co-edited between 1973 and 1981; Ciné journal (Cahiers du cinéma, 1986),
texts from his period as film critic for the newspaper Libération; La Salaire du
zappeur (P.O.L, 1988), a project in television criticism; and Devant la recrudescence des vols de sacs à
main (Aléas, 1991) – the title is derived from the warning given to French
cinema patrons to “watch their bags” – gathering short pieces on film and media
(especially the TV coverage of the Gulf War).
Posthumously, more appeared: L’Exercice a été profitable, Monsieur (P.O.L, 1993), his film
diaries from Trafic; L’amateur de tennis (P.O.L, 1994), a
collection of sports journalism; the extraordinary Persérvérance (P.O.L, 1994), transcribed and edited from Daney’s
discussions with Serge Toubiana (another former Cahiers editor) in February 1992, available in English as Postcards from the Cinema (Berg 2007);
and L’Itinéraire d’un ciné-fils (J-M
Place, 2000), another interview-based text.
The final period of his life yielded, in fact, many
urgent, in-depth interviews and transcriptions of public talks, printed in
journals including Cahiers and the moderately
Catholic Esprit, as well as a TV
documentary made by his old Cahiers compatriot, Pascal Kané. The massive editorial enterprise of collecting Daney’s
previously unanthologised work began in 2001 with the first volume of La Maison cinéma et le monde (P.O.L);
the fourth and final volume appeared in 2015. The ongoing English translation
of that project as The Cinema House &
The World has been announced by Semiotext(e) for April 2022 – I hope it
succeeds (and continues) where several previous translation plans have run
aground before even seeing the light of day.
Despite the best efforts of magazines including Rouge (www.rouge.com.au,
2003-2009), and Laurent Kretzschmar’s sterling Internet resource Serge Daney in English (http://sergedaney.blogspot.com/)
begun in November 2005, there are still relatively few purely English-speaking
cinephiles in 2021 who have a proper sense of Daney’s central, significant
place in European criticism – even if they might be faintly aware that he is a
name often cited enthusiastically by luminaries such as Jean-Luc Godard and several
generations of critic-fans.
In 1985, Raymond Bellour described Daney as France’s “most
scrupulous and inspired film critic”. (1) His sensibility permeates virtually every
page of Gilles Deleuze’s two-volume work on cinema. He was constantly invoked
by filmmakers (including Raúl Ruiz, Philippe Garrel, Wim Wenders and Robert
Kramer) on the same level as Roland Barthes or André Bazin. Indeed, many of the
thoughts and formulations in Godard’s video series Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988-1998)
are closely anticipated by passages in Daney’s critical writing: there is a
now-familiar ring, for instance, to:
In those crazy times, there was still something called
“cinema history”, which, before our very eyes, would weave the most paradoxical
alliances. Glauber Rocha could discuss Eisensteinian montage with Godard, say
what made Faulkner a cinematic writer, or why one should, paradoxically, regard
Buñuel as a “Tricontinental” filmmaker. (2)
A student of modernism and Chinese culture, Daney
joined Cahiers as a writer in his
early 20s (his very first published piece, for the small magazine Visages du cinéma [faces of cinema]
edited with longtime collaborator Louis Skorecki [aka Jean-Louis Noames], was
on Howard Hawks’ Rio Bravo [1959]).
He embodied, in his texts, all the subsequent sea-changes of Cahiers: in the mid to late ‘60s, the
self-critical and politicised jettisoning of the proud auteurist legacy from the
‘50s; the time of (as he called it) the “savage application” of Louis
Althusser, Michel Foucault and Jacques Lacan from the late ‘60s to the mid
‘70s; the return of cinephilia by the end of the ‘70s (involving an attention
to films which, according to Bill Krohn, “display the erotic paradoxes of
classical cinema […] and reflect its extinguished brilliance at quirky angles,
and with a lunar pallor”) (3); and the early ‘80s stirrings of a radically
transformed, postmodern, audiovisual culture of media simulacra (which Cahiers liked, at the time, to describe
as mannerist or baroque).
As Daney and his comrades got older, their sense of
cinema’s history deepened into a mature reflection on the medium’s great forms
and artists – just as their consciousness of the rapidly changing dilemmas of
its political meanings and effects, as well its technical mutation into the
electronic-then-digital age, became more acute.
La Rampe shows Daney’s evolution from one Cahiers contributor among many (a Jerry
Lewis, Godard and Hitchcock fan) into a distinctive, racy, illuminating,
furiously engaged critic. His taste virtually defined Cahiers culture in its various phases and levels: Rossellini, Lang,
Renoir, Ozu, Buñuel, Satyajit Ray; Godard, Rocha, Oshima, Moretti; Minnelli,
Tourneur, Dwan, Nicholas Ray; and fervently promoted discoveries from countries
and regions previously under-represented on the international film culture
circuit at the time.
In his Trafic diaries at the end of ‘91, Daney was fortunate to reflect on an especially rich
moment of vitality in post Nouvelle Vague French cinema: Garrel’s J’entends plus la guitare, Maurice
Pialat’s Van Gogh, Danièle Dubroux’s Borderline and Leos Carax’s Les Amants du Pont-neuf. But he also
never lost sight of the sometimes tawdry ironies of film culture – as when,
also in the diaries, he notes finding himself the only customer at a Paris
screening of Kira Muratova’s masterpiece The
Asthenic Syndrome (1989).
Despite his centrality in the history of Cahiers, Daney’s real fame came from his
long stint at Libération (often
abbreviated as Libé) as resident film
and TV commentator. Fervently embracing journalism – he had, in his Cahiers years, pioneered a newspaper
section prescient of much to come in the magazine’s history – Daney became a
true chronicler. He admired Barthes’ Mythologies for the way it alternated
between “extreme close-up descriptions” and general meditations. (4) It was
this same interplay of the specific and the general – the fugitive,
unsystematised search for a theory or cultural aesthetic of cinema across a
scrupulous attention to each material moment of it represented to the writer –
which was so beloved by his faithful readers.
As Bellour remarked, Daney perpetually reconciled the
“charming lightness” of journalism with the “exacting duties of rationality”,
and it is “from this tension ... that poetry is born”. (5) The insights sparked
from such poésie critique (to borrow
Jean Cocteau’s term) were often breathtaking and profound; on Valeria
Sarmiento’s Notre mariage (1984), for
instance, he mused:
Without families (to hate or create), there would be
no domestic scenes – hence no modern cinema. No Antonioni, Bergman, Pialat. But
without the family there would have been no melodrama – hence no “classical”
cinema. No Ford, Pagnol, or so many others who drew our tears. It is through
the aesthetic of the domestic scene that we have became modern (thus full of
resentment), but it is through the cold logic of the mélo that we remain, despite everything, archaic (and thus a little
frail) […] Without families, there would be no film. (6)
Daney was a figure at the forefront of criticism. As
Thomas Elsaesser observed, Daney was the first well-known, high-profile critic
to radically turn around his own sense of cinephilia and cinema culture in
order to self-critically pursue the newer audiovisual world of ads, rock clips,
TV and various media events; he was, in this sense, one of the few writers of
his time to attempt the reinterpretation and renewal of Guy Debord’s Situationist
account of the society of the spectacle. (7)
Among Daney’s key recurring themes was the ethics of
the image – and the politics of our response to it – positioned between cinema
and these new cultural-technological mutations. The sad fact that at least one
major publisher judged a translated selection of Daney’s texts to be outmoded (not
much he could have done to ameliorate that, dying and all), and therefore not
worth the bother, has as its brutal corollary the simple fact that the changes
which Daney began to diagnose are still the very same ones we are struggling to
articulate and understand now.
Like Godard, Daney always had a skill for a finely
turned, thought-provoking aphorism, a sudden condensation of sensibility, idea
and passion. In 1977, he ended a dialogue with Bill Krohn about a forthcoming “Cahiers presents” season in New York by
remarking: “We probably won’t be bringing an old Mizoguchi. But precisely after
all that has happened, it’s an old Mizoguchi that should be brought: he is almost
the only filmmaker to have made Marxist films”. (8) And, in his final public
appearance (to launch an issue of Trafic),
he remarked that the cinephile-critic needs two strong legs to walk on: a Ruiz
leg and a Manoel de Oliveira leg. (9) Global film culture today badly needs the
wit, strength and wisdom of Serge Daney.
1. Raymond Bellour, “Analysis in Flames”, Diacritics (Spring 1985), p. 55.
Reprinted in Bellour, Between-the-Images (JRP/Ringier, 2012).
back
2. Serge Daney, Ciné journal, Vol. 1 (Paris: Cahiers du cinéma, 1998 edition), p.
56.
3. Bill Krohn, “Translator’s Note”, Film Reader, no. 4 (1979), p. 119.
4. Frédéric Sabouraud and Serge Toubiana, “Zappeur
et cinéphile. Entretien avec Serge Daney”, Cahiers
du cinéma, no. 406 (April 1988), p. 54.
5. Bellour, “Le Voyage absolu”, Magazine littéraire, no. 232 (July/August 1986), p. 79.
6.
Daney, Ciné journal Vol. 2 (Paris:
Cahiers du cinéma, 1998 edition), pp. 213-214. back
7.
Thomas Elsaesser, “Rivette and the End of Cinema”, Sight and Sound (April 1992), pp. 20-23. This was subsequently
reprinted in a longer version as “Around Painting and the ‘End of Cinema’: À
Propos Jacques Rivette’s La Belle
Noiseuse” in Elsaesser, European
Cinema: Face to Face with Hollywood (Amsterdam University Press, 2005), pp.
165-177 (the passage cited is on pp. 170-171).
8. T. L. French [Bill Krohn], “Les Cahiers du cinéma 1968-1977:
Interview with Serge Daney”, The Thousand
Eyes no. 2 (1977), p. 31. The reprinted version of this text in Krohn’s
invaluable collection Letters from
Hollywood 1977-2017 (SUNY, 2020) drops the final “advertisement” (alas),
but the book contains other, priceless material on Daney.
9. See the Daney tribute issue of Cahiers du cinéma, no. 458 (July/August
1992), reprinted in Vol. 4 of La Maison
cinéma et le monde (P.O.L, 2015); also, the special Trafic issue (no. 37, Spring 2001), “Serge Daney: après, avec”.
© Adrian Martin July 1992 / March 2001 / March 2007 (with bibliographic updates November 2021) |
