Serge Daney in 2012

2012 marked twenty years since the passing of Serge Daney (who died of AIDS in 1992). The "anniversary" triggered many events in France, including an programme of conferences, lectures and movies at the cinémathèque française, a new documentary and the publication of the third volume of Daney complete writings.

I wish English-language publishers had seized the opportunity to get a book of translations out, but that wasn't to be. Yet, there's hope. Several translations of Daney popped up here and there, in DVD booklets, books, blogs, etc. Daney seems very much recognised and discussed. I take it as a sign that we have all stopped waiting for "official" translations and that it's now down to us to carry on the task of translating where and when we can, what we judge relevant, interesting, or simply worth sharing. So I shall be carrying on in 2013 the task of referencing English translations of Serge Daney. I might do a few myself. As always, if there are volunteers willing to help out, do get in touch.

Here are the new translations which appeared in 2012:

• Otto Preminger, The rules of the game.
• Two texts on Jerry Lewis: Frank Tashlin's Who's Minding The Store? : Frank and Jerry and Smörgasborg.  
• The subtitled version of a documentary / conversation between Daney and Jacques Rivette. 
• Nick Ray And The House Of Images.
• Two early articles on Douglas Sirk and Mark Donskoy.
• A whole raft of translations on the diagonal thoughts blog.
• The text Daney wrote when he discovered (literally) Arthur Pelechian. 
• An analysis on "the relativity of film criticism" in a review of Henri Verneuil's Les Morfalous.
• A favourite of mine: Daney's review of Et Dieu créa la femme. 

As for the audience of this blog:

• 4,500 unique visitors throughout the year, but this is a meaningless figure as the majority must be robots browsing content. I prefer to count the fifth of these (900) which stayed more than a minute on the site. And nearly half of all visitors are returning ones.
• Only 65% of visits came from English-speaking countries - a pointer towards a global interest in Daney via the English translations. I know of several people who have translated Daney into their languages from the English translations they found.
• The posts on Preminger, Journey of a cine-son, Smorgasborg and Losey were clear favourites.

(I'm hoping no publisher would dare interpret these numbers as an indication of a possible readership, they would be very sad people).

So here's to more Daney in 2013. Happy new year to every one!