Close Listening

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. Not only is The Cinema House and the World a collection of reviews, essays, reflections, blurbs and travel diaries, it is also a manual for thought, the record of a peripatetic and relentless mind. Daney is what thinking sounds like.

Any attempt to measure the true scope of his voice must first reckon with the voice of the father he never knew. Pierre Smolensky was a Jewish immigrant who was arrested by the Nazis shortly after Daney’s birth in 1944, and most likely killed in a concentration camp some time later. His business was cinema: Smolensky was an occasional actor who worked in “post-sync”, dubbing for the actor Albert Préjean. For his son, “[his] body was one thing, his voice another — it was really strange”: his father was a cinematic ventriloquist, throwing a disembodied voice across the screen. Cinema was always the realm of the dead father, where every actor’s voice belonged, on a certain level, to him. And Daney listened. C’est quand même la voix qui compte, he says in a late interview, explaining how he was “programmed” to become a cinephile, a ciné-fils, a son of cinema. “We mustn’t forget,” he says, “that that programming was done through sound, through the voice.”

What went largely unspoken during Daney’s childhood were the facts of his father’s death, which found a substitute in an oft-repeated myth. In addition to being an actor, he was also a world traveller; to the young Daney it seemed like he even “came from another world, from such an elsewhere that I saw myself spending my life alone with an atlas, going to look for that elsewhere to see if he was there!” Legend had it that Pierre had not only set foot in every country in the world, but spoke all its languages, with a fluency that bordered on linguistic omniscience. From this myth, Daney inherited both a taste for international travel and an accumulative, global understanding of language’s passport. He answered the omniscient elsewhere of his father’s voice with an oeuvre whose breadth and volume is staggering: the first hurdle we faced in translating his collected writings was how to wrap our arms around the sheer size of it. And The Cinema House and the World is by no means the sum total of his output. There are six other published titles of film and televisual criticism. There is the book about tennis. There are the diaries.

And then there is the film, Itinéraire d’un ciné-fils, in which Daney performs what is essentially a three-hour monologue, pausing only to light a cigarette or field stray questions from Régis Debray, whose voice sounds faint in comparison. Debray’s queries end up serving more as markers of time than actual directives, given how associative Daney’s extended monologue becomes. It is no less logical, assertive or confident for that — on the contrary, his cataract of words shares the compositional rigor, critical ingenuity and unrelenting momentum of his writing. His assessments are sober, unapologetic, unsentimental, and avoid self-mythologizing, although his project is, at one level, to tell his story: his trajectory as a critic from Cahiers to Libération to Trafic, the review he founded a year before his death from AIDS. Months shy of the end of his life, he narrates not only the history of cinema, but his own history as a critic, writer, traveller and spectator, speaking volumes, charting a map.

Translating The Cinema House and the World felt like an extended pilgrimage across that map, discovering nations whose habitats, dialects and attractions were in a constant state of evolution. Daney had an unusual ability to slip in and out of different registers and forms depending on his circumstance and subject, and his writing continued to metamorphose as his thinking and the culture itself continued to change. The only constant was cinephilia, and the elastic, ethereal notion of an elsewhere that Daney sought and then recreated with the aid of cinema’s atlas of voices. Translating is always listening, scanning for cadence, texture, influence, weight; the myth of the father is a reminder that Daney listened first.