Turns

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. Far from plodding theses or droning soliloquies, as well as the slow, sly and methodical delivery of Bazinian casuistry or the theoretical density of Jean-Pierre Oudart (with whom he co-authored several texts), Daney advanced smoothly, at varying but always exhilarating speeds.

1. Getting Ahead
Daney was reluctant to treat films in the usual manner: through the media refracting what is said about them. The script and the “subjects” tackled struck him as suspicious, their political or moral objectives always based on false problems. His texts distance and dismiss these, often asserting themselves to prove everyone else wrong and offering an unprecedented form of decoding. A film defines a set of problems, and his texts attack these on two fronts simultaneously, both on the theoretical level (what a film makes you think) and on the emotional level (what it makes you feel).

2. Hot off the Press
Perhaps more than other critics, Daney was a man of the hic et nunc — he who said he “had no imagination” and saw cinema as an art of the present, neither nostalgic nor prophetic. His style was as direct as his speech: the writing bears its trace and tone, chemically precipitating the impressions and feelings provoked by a film along with his readings and reflections in the moment. His texts thus follow one another without repeating themselves. For example, despite the numerous writings devoted (by Daney and others) to Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, he always found a new way to approach them, as with Amerika–Class Relations1 , where the film’s materialism — with its visible postures (figuration) and its invisible movements (off-screen) — is likened to the children’s game “One, two, three, sun”.

3. Jolts and Passes
Daney’s criticism was a serious game, and each of his texts offers all the spectacle of a satisfying chess game; one observes each move with surprise and conviction, without having had the time to foresee or fully understand it (for that, one must study the game slowly, by re-reading). There is almost one idea per sentence, and each paragraph moves onto new terrain. Playing off assertion (the strike) and analogy (the pass), Daney’s texts favour slogans and wordplay (“strauboscopic”, say), reconstruct vivid images (like “One, two, three, sun”), and introduce breathing space (asides and parentheses) to gather strength before making another leap. The writing puts its foot down and plays on the power of passion; caught off-guard, one foregoes logic, and the “passer” smuggles across his ideas without giving them time to “sink in”. One thinks of the patter of a pick-up artist — or of Deleuze and Guattari, who declared their Anti-Oedipus readable by a child: find the right rhythm and you’ll get it.

4. Curves
Daney, the loner, was a dialogical man, a slalomer; he loved to set up pairs and see what happened between them, boundaries to frame entrances and exits. One of his densest texts, “The Theatre of Entrances”2 (devoted to John Ford’s last film, Seven Women), focuses on the strange concept of “zero curvature”: the straight line that, through baroque curves and mannerisms, suddenly strikes with the conciseness of classicism. Daney, this master “trail maker”, whose texts are ways of connecting, through the map of a film, the co-ordinates he traces on the vast territory of cinema, thus teaches us, through his shortcuts and fruitful flânerie, that criticism and cinema are akin to the curved motion of speed. As he wrote in private: “The cinema that touches me is the kind where the necessity of creating connections is the subject of real work: getting time on one’s side, inventing it, expanding it. The idea of the PATH. Secular take on notions of the “beyond”. It takes but a turn to create the beyond.”3

• 1“Franz Kafka strauboscopé”, Libération, 3 October, 1984.
• 2“Le théâtre des entrées”, Cahiers du Cinéma, John Ford special issue, 1990.
• 3L’Exercice a été profitable, Monsieur, Paris: Éditions P.O.L., 1993, p. 61.