Choosing these 26 texts must have presented the obvious headache (the French edition of Daney's complete writings run into nearly 3,000 pages) but this small selection hits the spot in many ways. The book opens with 'The tracking shot in Kapo' - Daney's last and most encompassing text, covering his life as a cinephile in relation to modern cinema - and ends with 'Montage Obligatory' - one of the key texts written while watching the first Gulf War on TV and which made Daney abandon "traditional" criticism and found the more literary review Trafic.
In-between are the best known theoretical texts from the 70s (most of them already translated in English), a few great film reviews of international authors (e.g. Rossellini, Mizoguchi, Paradjanov), and a pretty perfect selection of Daney's key texts from the late 80s and early 90s where he developed his opposition between the image and the visual (including "The last image" from the landmark exhibition "Passages du cinéma"). I particularly like the short section called "The Portuguese pole" with three reviews of films by Reis/Cordeiro, Oliveira and Rocha, as if Daney's many travels and writings on international cinema allowed any country in the world to create a small Daney collection of their own.
O cinema que faz escrever: textos críticos
Serge Daney
Presentation
The Tracking Shot in Kapo
Trafic n.º 4, Autumn 1992
CINEMA IN THE PRESENT I
Amphisbetesis (François Truffaut, L’Enfant Sauvage)
Cahiers du cinéma n.º 222, July 1970
The screen of fantasy (Bazin and animals)
Cahiers du cinéma n.º 236-237, March-April 1972
A tomb for the eye (Straubian pedagogy)
Cahiers du cinéma n.º 258-259, July-August 1975
The t(h)errorized (Godardian pedagogy) AKA The therrorized (Godardian pedagogy)
Cahiers du cinéma n.º 262-263, January 1976
The organ and the vacuum cleaner (Bresson, the devil, the voice-over and other things)
Cahiers du cinéma n.º 279-280, August-September 1977
In Praise of Emma Thiers (Jean-Claude Biette's Realism)
Cahiers du cinéma n.º 285, February 1978
The cruel radiance of what is (Johan Van der Keuken)
Cahiers du cinéma n.º 290-291, July-August 1978
D’une rosière à l’autre" (Jean Eustache, La Rosière de Pessac I et II)
Cahiers du cinema n.º 306, December 1979
Wim’s movie (Wim Wenders and Nicholas Ray)
Cahiers du cinéma n.º 318, December 1980
THE PORTUGUESE POLE
Loin des lois (António Reis et Margarida Cordeiro, Trás-os-Montes)
Cahiers du cinéma n.º 276, May 1977
Que peut un cœur? (Manoel de Oliveira, Francisca)
Cahiers du cinéma n.º 330, December 1981
Exil, amour et tatami portugais (Paulo Rocha, L'Île des amours)
Libération, 20 May 1982
CINEMA IN THE PRESENT II
Jacques Rivette, Le Pont du Nord
Libération, 26 March 1982
Not reconciled (Jerry Lewis' Smörgasbord)
Cahiers du cinéma n.º 347, May 1983
Exil en Nostalghia (Andrei Tarkovski, Nostalghia)
Libération, 4 June 1985
Paradjanov remonte au créneau (Sergueï Paradjanov, Legenda o surasmoj kreposti)
Libération, 4 December 1986
Rohmer côté court (Éric Rohmer, Quatre aventures de Reinette et Mirabelle)
Libération, 4 February 1987
REVISIONS
The eye was in the tomb and watched Franju (Georges Franju, Les yeux sans visage)
Libération, 25 September 1986
Mizoguchi, The Good Distance (Kenji Mizoguchi, Akasen chitai)
Libération, 10 April 1987
La première fois (Roberto Rossellini, Francesco, giullare di Dio)
Cahiers du cinéma, Hors-série Roberto Rossellini, 1989
HALT, IMAGE, VISUAL
Le mot de la fin
L’Âne, n.º 7, Winter 1982
From movies to Moving AKA From projector do parade AKA From defilement to filing past
La Recherche photographique n.º 7, 1989
Le cinéma et la memoire de l'eau
Libération, 29 December 1989
La dernière image
Passages de l’image Catalogue, dir. Raymond Bellour, Catherine David, Christine van Assche, Centre Georges-Pompidou, 1990
Montage obligatory (The war, the gulf and the small screen)
Cahiers du cinéma n.º 442, April 1991
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