https://www.sabzian.be/text/a-citizen-of-the-world

A Citizen of the World

Introduction to ‘Serge Daney and the Promise of Cinema’

This text is an introduction to the Issue ‘Serge Daney and the Promise of Cinema’.

“Cinema is a promise to be one day a citizen of the world.”1  
– Serge Daney

Serge Daney (1944–1992) remains one of the twentieth century’s most influential film critics. Growing up in Paris, he developed an early passion for cinema. His first article appeared in Visages du cinéma in 1962 and, by 1964, he had joined the editorial team of Cahiers du cinéma, becoming editor-in-chief in 1973; here he would help to steer the magazine back towards film criticism after a more politically driven period. In 1981, he moved to Libération, broadening his scope to encompass television and other media and, a decade later, co-founding Trafic in response to cinema’s shifting intellectual landscape. “By review,” Daney stated of the new journal, “we mean a place where one might take the time to ‘re-view’, and where this time of reflection would not be confused with the hurried and often artificial time of ‘current events’.”2

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”.3 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”4 — a promise he later believed he had largely fulfilled through his life in cinema, telling Debray: “I’ve lived from that world map”.5

Throughout his life, Daney was a keen traveller — of both the world and cinema — and found solace in the notion of voyaging “without luggage, totally self-sufficient in his dispossession”.6 Travelling meant embracing the idea of being reduced to one’s own body, “of leaving no images, no trace: being clandestine in the world”;7 perhaps this explains his aversion to taking pictures of the places he visited — preferring to send pre-existing images as postcards to his mother in Paris.8

Daney’s notion of culture as an international phenomenon long predated his travels or writing. “Even before the love of cinema”, he wrote, “there was already the idea that there would be no culture without a promise that would concern the entire civilisation”.9 Despite his self-declared “unfathomable lack of political education”,10 Daney embodied a spirit of working-class internationalism: “It couldn’t be bourgeois culture, but that of the whole world… Culture wasn’t what gave me society…but rather what gave me the world”, he wrote.11

If culture represents the promise of a world then cinema, as Daney stated, was what “allowed me to belong to my class, or perhaps more a status than a class: the poor…Cinema allowed one to have a finger in every pie, to skirt society by stealing one of its popular products” — adding that such was the reason “why there is a cinephilic international: we’re able to connect without any problems with popular American productions, even though none of us is American”.12

As a country that was “still missing” from his map, cinema embodied a deeply felt promise of universality to Daney. This stood in stark contrast to the tame, standardised “global style” created by the world market — for instance through festivals, which tend to use identities and cultures as mere currency. Far from the promise of “liberating”, the effect has been one of ossifying not only films but also the act of thinking about them. In place of polemics and poetics, criticism has increasingly blurred with publicity; it’s often plagued by a “unanimity” that, in Daney’s words, is “unable to do anything other than mimic disagreement”.13 Daney himself, by contrast, longed for a shared imaginary space through cinema, a global citizenship of viewers, where images connect us without requiring us to be the same, allowing us to imagine ourselves somehow in relation to the world; a way of taking without owning, of belonging without opting in.

Despite his global outlook and reputation, Daney’s writings long remained unavailable in English, existing only on the periphery through “unofficial” online translations14 or edited collections. It wasn’t until 2022, with the publication of the first volume of The Cinema House and the World, that an English-language publisher took a chance on the critic. This was followed by a translation of La Rampe (Footlights), and Serge Daney and Queer Cinephilia, the first scholarly volume about Daney in English. Hopefully, these publications will mark the start of a truly international journey for his thinking and writing.

Last year, Daney would have celebrated his eightieth birthday. We seized upon the occasion to reflect on the continued resonance of his writings and ideas through an issue comprising contributions from critics, academics and translators from around the world — one that reminds us of the promise of that missing country called cinema: an imaginary place that is nonetheless home to “true inhabitants who [speak] the same language”.15

  • 1From the video interview Serge Daney: Itinéraire d’un ciné-fils by Pierre-André Boutang and Dominique Rabourdin, 1992. There is a full transcription of the interview on the blog Serge Daney in English. All English quotations of Daney in this article are drawn from the sources stated in the footnotes, except the below, which was rendered by the authors.
  • 2Video recording of Serge Daney’s presentation of Trafic at Jeu de Paume, Paris, 5 May, 1992.
  • 3Itinéraire d’un ciné-fils.
  • 4Ibid.
  • 5Ibid.
  • 6Serge Daney, Postcards from the Cinema, trans. Paul Douglas Grant (Oxford: Berg Press, 2007), p. 97.
  • 7Ibid, p. 98.
  • 8Recently, Pierre Eugène shared a map on his website dedicated to Serge Daney tracing the film critic’s travels around the world, recorded via postcards (part of the Bonaud collection) sent to his mother and grandmother.
  • 9Daney, Postcards, p.109.
  • 10Ibid., p. 82.
  • 11Ibid., p. 109.
  • 12Ibid., p. 114.
  • 13Ibid., p. 77–8.
  • 14For example, the afore-mentioned blog Serge Daney in English, run by Laurent Kretzschmar.
  • 15Daney, Postcards, p. 78.
ARTICLE
25.06.2025
FR EN
In Passage, Sabzian invites film critics, authors, filmmakers and spectators to send a text or fragment on cinema that left a lasting impression.
Pour Passage, Sabzian demande à des critiques de cinéma, auteurs, cinéastes et spectateurs un texte ou un fragment qui les a marqués.
In Passage vraagt Sabzian filmcritici, auteurs, filmmakers en toeschouwers naar een tekst of een fragment dat ooit een blijvende indruk op hen achterliet.
The Prisma section is a series of short reflections on cinema. A Prisma always has the same length – exactly 2000 characters – and is accompanied by one image. It is a short-distance exercise, a miniature text in which one detail or element is refracted into the spectrum of a larger idea or observation.
La rubrique Prisma est une série de courtes réflexions sur le cinéma. Tous les Prisma ont la même longueur – exactement 2000 caractères – et sont accompagnés d'une seule image. Exercices à courte distance, les Prisma consistent en un texte miniature dans lequel un détail ou élément se détache du spectre d'une penséée ou observation plus large.
De Prisma-rubriek is een reeks korte reflecties over cinema. Een Prisma heeft altijd dezelfde lengte – precies 2000 tekens – en wordt begeleid door één beeld. Een Prisma is een oefening op de korte afstand, een miniatuurtekst waarin één detail of element in het spectrum van een grotere gedachte of observatie breekt.
Jacques Tati once said, “I want the film to start the moment you leave the cinema.” A film fixes itself in your movements and your way of looking at things. After a Chaplin film, you catch yourself doing clumsy jumps, after a Rohmer it’s always summer, and the ghost of Akerman undeniably haunts the kitchen. In this feature, a Sabzian editor takes a film outside and discovers cross-connections between cinema and life.
Jacques Tati once said, “I want the film to start the moment you leave the cinema.” A film fixes itself in your movements and your way of looking at things. After a Chaplin film, you catch yourself doing clumsy jumps, after a Rohmer it’s always summer, and the ghost of Akerman undeniably haunts the kitchen. In this feature, a Sabzian editor takes a film outside and discovers cross-connections between cinema and life.
Jacques Tati zei ooit: “Ik wil dat de film begint op het moment dat je de cinemazaal verlaat.” Een film zet zich vast in je bewegingen en je manier van kijken. Na een film van Chaplin betrap je jezelf op klungelige sprongen, na een Rohmer is het altijd zomer en de geest van Chantal Akerman waart onomstotelijk rond in de keuken. In deze rubriek neemt een Sabzian-redactielid een film mee naar buiten en ontwaart kruisverbindingen tussen cinema en leven.

Related