https://www.sabzian.be/text/a-melancholy-sky

A Melancholy Sky

VERTAALD DOOR TRANSLATED BY TRADUIT PAR Clodagh Kinsella

“Happiness, namely the rapid passage from inside to outside.”1
– Serge Daney


He was one of the greatest of cinephiles, but also one of the wariest of the image. If Serge Daney was always interested in the cinematographic image, it was precisely because the latter is not just an image, but “always more and less than itself”.2 The critic loved only two kinds of fixed image: the “paused image” and the “postcard”, which also possess the power to transcend themselves, to suggest movement while remaining still. For Daney, the cinema wasn’t just a matter of images, but primarily of time. “If, for someone like me, the first thing was time and the second the image”, he wrote, “today it’s the opposite: the image comes first”.3

It was on this point that Daney broke from Bazin and Farber, the two other pillars of cinephilia — at least in my eyes — both of whom conceived of the cinematographic image in terms of space. For Bazin, the ultimate form of cinema was a single image stretching to infinity, both in terms of depth (depth of field) and length (the long take), whereas Farber preferred “negative space” and the “edge of the frame”. In both cases, cinema is primarily a spatial art; on the one hand, Bazin’s “dress without seams”, where the unity of space is maintained, and, on the other, Farber’s “boxing ring”, whereby the most interesting events always happen in the corners, thanks to the attacks and sidesteps of the boxer/actors.4

Given the above, neither Bazin nor Farber viewed cinema with melancholy, and both took a favourable view of television. Cinema isn’t melancholy when one considers it as a spatial art. This is not to imply, however, that all those who approach cinema from a temporal angle are necessarily melancholic. If time is thought of as something “open, which changes and never stops changing in nature at every instant”,5 as Deleuze proposed, then cinema, although rooted in time, escapes melancholy. Yet time was, for Daney, experienced as a one-way passage. What fascinated him was not time in its “pure state”, but rather the irreversible passage of time: “Sharing time with characters who share the image and what is out of the frame. Passing time watching it pass.”6

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’”,7 he wrote. In this light, the cinematographic image isn’t so much a fixed object as a perpetual transit from one state to another, a stylisation of this fragile in-between: “Cinema was, after all, the question: how to pass from one thing to another?”8 as he stated.

Neither a “seamless dress” nor a boxing ring, the cinematographic image appears here more like an immense sky, ceaselessly crossed by moving clouds. During the last months of his life, Daney saw this metaphor perfectly crystallised in Maurice Pialat’s Van Gogh, which he described as “a place of passage, like a sky through which pass the clouds of characters and the lightning flashes of what is off-screen”.9 Animated by the coming and going of clouds, this sky not only embodies Daney’s aesthetic and ontological reflections, but also resonates with his political orientation: the passing clouds represent the idea of “resistance”, as indicated by the title of the Jean-Marie Straub film De la nuée à la résistance [From the Clouds to the Resistance].

The passage of time carries an intrinsic melancholy within it, leading us ineluctably towards the end. As Daney stated: “Cinema gave me this discipline. It told stories of countdowns according to the principle: how much time remains before the words ‘the end’?”10 We will grow old with cinema, all the while seeing others grow old — something that never failed to affect him for, as he wrote, “[e]ven in bad films, the ‘gimmick’ of passing time and the actor who is artificially aged and made up always moves me.”11 It is not only the spectators, actors or characters who grow old; cinema itself grows old, it is slowly dying, it is going to die, “it never stops dying” — or perhaps it is already dead, just like its son.

  • 1Serge Daney, “Débats un entretien avec Serge Daney : ‘Le cinéma a renoncé à la gestion de l’imaginaire social’”, Le Monde, 7 July, 1992.
  • 2Serge Daney, “Montage obligé. La guerre le golfe et le petit écran”, in Devant la recrudescence des vols de sacs à main, Aléas, 1993, p. 163.
  • 3Serge Daney, L’exercice a été profitable, Monsieur, P.O.L., 1993, p. 346.
  • 4Farber was an amateur boxer!
  • 5Gilles Deleuze, Pourparlers (1972–1990), Minuit, 1990, p. 80.
  • 6Daney, L'exercice a été profitable, p. 346.
  • 7Ibid., p. 175.
  • 8Daney, “Débats un entretien”.
  • 9Serge Daney, La Maison cinéma et le monde, tome 4. Le Moment Trafic 1991–1992, P.O.L./Trafic, 2015, p. 128.
  • 10Ibid., p. 224.
  • 11Daney, L’exercice a été profitable, p. 39.

Image from Trop tôt, trop tard (Danièle Huillet & Jean-Marie Straub, 1982)

ARTICLE
25.06.2025
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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.

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