Various Daney news

While we're all waiting for the publication of Paul Grant's translation of Persévérance (Postcards from the cinema, to be released in December), there are a few other events worth noting eventhough they are all in French.

Daney on video
The French video website Vodeo sells the two best filmed interviews of Daney: the 3 hours documentary Itinéraire d'un ciné fils on DVD (which was already available from Amazon) and Pascal Kané's Le cinéphile et le village which can be downloaded online for a fee.

Daney radio programme
The French National Audio-Visual Insitute (whose mission is to preserve and make available the audiovisual archives in France) has made available a number of recordings of Daney's Sunday evening radio program. You can access them via their Video On Demand website by typing "Microfilms" in the search tool.

From September 1985 to July 1990, Daney hosted a weekly radio broadcast called Microfilms on French public radio station France Culture. These are discussions between Daney and others involved with cinema (actors, filmmakers, technicians, critics).

Here's a first list of the programs available online at the moment. They can be purchased individually for 5 euros.
- Philippe Garrel
- Jori Ivens
- Robert Kramer
- Maurice Piallat
- Barbet Schroeder
- Jean Rouch
- Raoul Ruiz
- Jacques Rivette
- Jacques Demy
- Claude Chabrol
- Manuel De Oliveira
- Marin Karmitz
- Raymond Depardon
- Francois Dupeyron
- Jean-Luc Godard
- Raoul Sangla (TV film director)
- Jacques Doillon
- Wim Wenders
- Jean-Marie Straub
- André Techiné
- Etienne Chatillez
- Michel Piccoli
- Georges Franju
- Eric Rohmer
- Jean-Christophe Averty (a French video artist pioneeer)
- About John Cassavettes
- Jean-Claude Brisseau
- Michel Chion
- Cinema through the eyes of a blind person
- Elisabeth Roudinesco (a French Psychanalist) on Batman
- Philippe Queau
- Gérard Frot - Coutaz (filmmaker) and Micheline Presle (actress)


The increasing amount of video and audio material available about Daney is a challenge to our translation efforts. Video interviews can be subtitled (and english subtitled versions of Jacques Rivette Le Veilleur and Itinéraire d'un ciné-fils exists already) but I don't see how the radio programmes could become available in English without some massive transcription effort.

Let's hope that the popularity of Daney in film and audio format combined with the release of Postcards help make an even stronger case the case for the translations of all the other essential written material.