Monday, December 31, 2018

Serge Daney in 2018

Time for the annual round-up. A modest but decent output of events around Serge Daney: seven new translations, a fantastic database and signs that interest in Daney is still going strong.

The new translations on this blog include two pieces on Douglas Sirk (Daney's reviews of The Tarnished Angels and his take on the famous last scene of Imitation of Life), a text on Mizoguchi and the good distance, a double bill with a short film about Franju's Eyes without a face, and an little known article on Grémillon as The Passeur. Elsewhere, Andy Rector published a text on Jerry Lewis' Which Way to the Front? and the Arsenal Institute in Berlin translated a short text on tennis.

This year also saw the appearance of an online database of all the texts published by Daney, with links to English translations where available. For anyone who has tried to do a search in Daney's corpus before, this is an extraordinary gift. Thank you Pierre Eugène, its creator.

Finally, a myriad of miscellaneous events around Daney also took place. In France with a conference in Paris, the reruns of Daney's radio show and the presence of Daney or his words in a film and a theatre play, but also in Spain with the publication of yet another book of translations. We are hearing rumours of more book projects: a possible book of English translation (don't jinx it by setting your expectations too high) and a 'theoretical biography' in French.

Happy 2019!

4 comments:

  1. Hi,
    Wondering if you might be able to point me in the direction of the following paraphrasing of Daney "cinema has nothing to do with spectacle and everything to do with time, time that passes"?
    Thanks in advance for any guidance you can give in the matter.
    Patrick Marshall
    patrickvmarshall@gmail.com

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    1. Hi Patrick, that's definitely something Daney would say but I can't find where off the top of my mind. Anybody else?

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  2. Thanks, as always, for your splendid work and round-ups, Laurent!
    For completists: the death of Jerry Lewis in late 2017 compelled me in 2018 to translate the following 1980 interview with him by Daney and Toubiana; the prologue is most certainly written by Daney, and many of the questions are Daney-flavoured (sometimes after-the-fact: Lewis's statement that his audience of children were kidnapped by DEEP THROAT, i.e. pornography, was mulled over by Daney in his piece on Lewis's late film SMORGASBORD, and also in one of the long interviews); in any case it's an extraordinary interview: http://kinoslang.blogspot.com/2018/02/maybe-we-can-get-it-weaved-no-2.html

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    1. Hi Andy and thanks for the addition. Sorry to have missed that one.

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