Fritz Lang’s Moonfleet and Alain Resnais’s Night and Fog are two films that influenced Serge Daney’s understanding of cinema and the world early on, shaping the moral and aesthetic poles of his cinematic universe. Their influence would be felt throughout his career as a critic.
“The cinephile is an orphan who chooses to be kidnapped by a rather special passer-by who launches him, but not just any old way, on his apprenticeship in the world. There’s a film which tells this story, the cinephile myth incarnate; it’s Lang’s Moonfleet. Nobody learns as fast from Jeremy Fox as the young John Mohune. Obviously, if the auteur is like a father, you don’t make an alliance with him so as to go and have some fun with the other children. You make an alliance with him so he will show you the gravity of the world. In Lang, for example, children are the ones who should not be lied to.” – Serge Daney, Propos d’un passeur, 1993
“I felt that the distances set by Resnais between the subject filmed, the subject filming, and the subject spectator were, in 1959, as in 1955, the only ones possible. Was Night and Fog a ‘beautiful’ film? No, it was a just film. It’s Kapo that wanted to be a beautiful film and wasn’t. And I’m the one who would never quite see the difference between the just and the beautiful, hence my rather ‘workaday’ boredom in front of beautiful images. [...] Resnais was the filmmaker who kidnapped me from my childhood, or rather, made me a serious child for three decades.” – Serge Daney, Postcards from the Cinema, 1994
This programme is presented in collaboration with Arta Barzanji and Gerard-Jan Claes, who edited and compiled for Sabzian the issue ‘Serge Daney and the Promise of Cinema, available in English and French, featuring contributions from critics, academics, and translators from around the world.
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