Serge Daney and the Promise of Cinema

Just months before his death, in response to a question of Régis Debray about the images “that looked at you when you were a child”, Daney was unequivocal: “the first image that counted for me, almost the definitive image, wasn’t a cinema image, it was the geography atlas”. As a child, he was indeed captivated by world maps, suggesting a universe far vaster than the narrow confines of his post-war Parisian surroundings. For Daney, they held the promise of becoming “a citizen of the world” — a promise he later believed he had largely fulfilled through his life in cinema, telling Debray: “I’ve lived from that world map”.

A critic operates in the shadows (of the screening room, of films) and in the forest (of journals), and Serge Daney was no exception to the rule. The fact that his career is now viewed as exemplary, and that he has increasingly come to enjoy the limelight, has altered the reading of his texts and — during his lifetime — also their address, influencing their tone and style. One constant remained throughout, however: speed. 

As a critic of a time now lost, Daney’s texts situated us in the role of the spectator – which in turn is also the role of the critic – who exists in two ways: “as an inert body among others and as a vivid gaze between shots”. His love for the interstices justified the existence of criticism, and it is in this imaginative gesture of Daney’s that we try to situate ourselves, demanding time for a film to mature in the body, through stupor, shock or tenderness, and invoking a form of critical writing ready to illuminate.

Daney was opposed to every image that hindered or perturbed this passage, whether spectacular images, pornography, television, advertising, the script, cartoons, or mannerism. Each blocked a passage “between” two elements (the shot and the counter-shot, on-screen and off-screen, two states, two images, two bodies, the interior and exterior of characters, etc.). “The crisis of cinema is the crisis of the ‘between’”, he wrote.

Travel is barely a theme, then. In any case, Daney rarely thematises. His thought proceeds by leitmotifs — or even through personal obsessions that are unafraid to remain so. It’s hardly surprising then that, of the many articles he published — around two thousand — only one includes the word “travel” in its title. Nor that, in that article, the one thing that is never discussed is travel.

What does Daney sound like? Although I’ve spent years immersed in it, I haven’t yet tried to describe Serge Daney’s voice. Translation is more akin to listening than it is to description, or even intellectualisation, and translating The Cinema House and the World has been a practice of tracking a plurality of voices, of following the confident, clipped gait of Daney’s thought as it burns fast through a variety of subjects and forms with almost impossible ease.

It was by inviting us to compare Le grand bleu [The Big Blue] and Palombella rossa [Red Wood Pigeon] that Serge Daney concluded his 1980s[.] […] [W]hile aphasic, “self-legitimatising” individuals retreat into Bessonian depth, a people “sick with language” forms on the Morettian surface. […] For Daney, “Red Wood Pigeon is a great film and Nanni Moretti the most precious of filmmakers.”

Of all the caustic epithets deployed by Cahiers du cinéma during its many critical disputes, perhaps the most archetypal is a term that emerged in the late 1970s: “filmed cinema”. Its meaning can be almost instinctively divined by the reader. Just as films that are adapted from plays in a pedestrian manner, without any thought given to the specific aesthetic demands of the cinema, are derisively dubbed “filmed theatre”, so too there are films that give this same impression of being recycled and derivative, but with respect to the cinema itself.

The principle of insufficiency remains at the heart of cinema, even at a time when auteurs too readily drape themselves in the autonomy of “It’s enough for me.” [...] This solitude gives films a unique tone, a muted rage or a desolate music. How far can a filmmaker go in solitude without losing not only the audience, but cinema?