Serge Daney in English

Serge Daney in 2011

2011-12-29T21:00:00.000Z

2012 will mark the 20th "anniversary" of Serge Daney's death in 1992. What is perhaps remarkable is that, despite the lack of proper English translations, Serge Daney has not fallen into oblivion and remains somewhat a cinephilic reference - litlle known, but too important to be ignored. Mentions keep appearing, quotes keep proping up, translations seem to happen. There may even be a few events organised for the the 20 year mark (for example the Trafic, 20 years, 20 films exhibition at the Centre Pompidou in Paris on 11-30 January).

Serge Daney in 1968 at the Odeon theatre

Looking back at 2011, there are a number of signs that Serge Daney remains present in film criticism. Two books by Serge Daney were translated and published in Dutch, the 3-hour filmed interview "Journey of a Cine-Son" has been entirely translated and subititled in English, and a number of translations appeared (or re-appeared):

A ritual of disappearance (Giscard), A ritual of appearance (Mitterand) and a few articles on Joseph Losey on this blog,
a new 1978 interview at Kinoslang,
Cinemeteorology: Too Early Too Late by Jonathan Rosenbaum,
and Welles in Power on the Letter to Jane blog.

There were also two "disgressions": the translations of extracts from Louis Skorecki's Dialogue with Serge Daney and of some of Daney's postcards.

In France, a theatre play about Serge Daney, created in France in 2010, has enjoyed enough success that it continues to tour the country. Serge Daney was even the subject of a festival (The ethical point of view of film: Serge Daney, Croatia and Slovenia, December 2011 - if anybody attended, we're eager for ).

In all, reasons to hope, and to continue... despite the lack of time to dedicate to this blog. Humple apologies to the 2-3,000 people who came to this blog last year (and especially the 100 or so loyal followers who check out on new entries). I will try to do better in 2012.

Happy New Year everyone.

Laurent

Welles in Power

2011-12-25T20:13:00.002Z

Letter to Jane just published on line his latest copy of Cahiers du cinéma in English with an article by Serge Daney on Orson Welles.

Welles in Power (see page 16)

Cahiers du cinéma in English, 11, 1967 (originally published in Cahiers du cinéma, 181, August 1966).

The article was already available in a slightly different translation on Steve Erickson's website.

Merry Christmas every one!

The sap hunter

2011-11-24T10:11:00.000Z

Actor Melvil Poupaud's book "What is My naMe", published this year in France, is a collage of memories, including of Serge Daney.

Between 1986 and 1992, I had the chance to know Serge Daney. He was for me like a godfather, attentive and benevolent, who taught to me, with cinema as primary material.

Together, we had invented an imaginary character, who became a kind of guide in our relationship. S.D. had decided to trace back this "Swine", chasing him around the world. He kept me informed of the progress of his secret investigation with the postcards that he sent to me regularly.

Over time, the "story of the Swine" and my story with Serge Daney became one, with only one character in my mind, between Mr. Arkadin and Jeminy Cricket.

Melvil Poupaud, Quel est Mon noM ?, Edtitions Stock, 2011.

Daney had something for postcards:

Something I should have said, by the way, at the beginning: for me, the absolute image is the postcard, it's not cinema. I have a love of postcards that has never slackened. I've sent tons to everybody throughout my whole life. The postcard is my true relationship to the image, there, it's the postcard. For deeper reasons, more deeply buried, than cinema: which is to say that I already found that cinema was very basic, very popular. Postcards are even lower. They're on their stalls and everyone sends them and writes on the back. And you can write postcards in very coded language, you can write poems, you can write love stuff. All you need to do is write it in a way that even those who read it won't understand it. So it was the maximum possible elitism, possible singularity, and the maximum "let's do with the normal material people use. We're not using great culture." There, that's a digression on postcards.

Serge Daney, Journey of a Cine-son.

Here are some of these postcards.

Rascal!

They almost forced me to pay YOUR phone bill for upstairs!

You did well to go. Everybody ended up freaked out after one week.

I owe you (at least) one meal.

Signed : The Swine (1)

(1) resuscitated.

I know - from a reliable source - that the Swine and his son have abandoned the family kitchen and are on their way to Malta. Despite the heat (in Syracuse, people are dropping like flies, and the flies themselves feel rather down), I'm tracking them. Already, today, I found the proof (see opposite) that the Swine exists since Antiquity! I'll tell you more later. Not a word to Lauzon!

The sap hunter (ex. S.D.)

I traced back the Swine in the Dominican Republic. He has an unfortunate tendency to take himself for Christ. He told me how he has suffered from our mocking remarks but he's still pleased that, despite your minimal spelling, you got your baccalaureate. He salutes, respectfully, the steadfast Poupette.

And me, I'm in Paris.

* SD

Dear Melvil,

After smashing my personal record (1) for the 11 meter sluggish breaststroke, I took a lovely little train to Vevey, going from lake to lake, and gliding to my last festival before returning to Paris after the summer break. I stayed in an old Ruizian hotel, the Three Crown Hotel. Barely arrived, I asked: "where's the sailor? - What sailor, Sir?" mumbled a fat man at the reception desk. I saw his confusion and started to explore the hotel, stamping hazardously on some old indebted billionaire ladies. "Stupor!" is what I shouted in the corridors, a fork in my hand, sure of myself. And on the second day, I spotted a sailor's collar fleeing in the corridors. "Where do you think you're going, shitty sailor" I shouted harshly while clinching a thin vicious-looking boy. Harried, he barely struggled, looking mean, and replied, in Italian: "Che vuoi?" It was him all right, the horrible Swine of Taormina... (to be continued)

(1) of slowness.

Continued,

"- Lead me to your father, I told him while stabbing him with a fork, I have a message from Melvil P...." I spare you the details, the end was horrible. Swine-father ended up employed to look after the wharf's toilets. He was hiding. He called for our forgiveness for having despised us in Taormina and refused to serve us another portion. He admitted he had fled to Malta, to no avail. He promised me he'll go see - as a form of punishment - all of Raoul Ruiz's films.

"- Too late! I told him while I pushed him in the frozen lake. Your adventures were merely a pretext to amuse Melvil Poupaud and I'm afraid he's too old now to enjoy them. Sink, Swine, and stay at the bottom of the lake. On that note (see opposite), a storm broke. Terrible, is it not?

Serge.

Louis Skorecki: Dialogue with Serge Daney

2011-05-25T16:00:00.004+01:00

Louis Skorekci and Serge Daney met in high school, wrote in the same publications and ended up as two of the most original film critics in France - although quite different from one another.

Their first texts were published in the early 60s in Visages du cinéma (amazing texts, on Hawks and Preminger). They joined Cahiers du cinéma together after a trip to the USA to interview MacCarey, Keaton, Hawks, Sternberg and others. They then moved (separately) to the daily newspaper Libération where they wrote their best articles before continuing their own adventures (Trafic for Daney until he passed away in 1992 and Blogging for Skoreki).

Louis Skoreki rarely talks about Daney (here, here and here) but he did publish a book called Dialogues with Daney, a selection of short texts from his daily column in Libération between 2002 and 2007. And it's an amazing read.

You can judge by yourself thanks to the generosity of the Presses Universitaires de France (PUF) who have given me permission to publish the translations of four texts from the book. A really big thank you to them.

Rouge published an excellent portrait of Louis Skorecki in 2007.

I Didn’t Kill Lincoln

Two boys, still young. Let’s say they are cinephiles. Or ex-cinephiles. One is dead, the other alive. They ramble on a bit. Let’s call them Serge and Louis. Louis is the first to talk.
― Do you know who talks best about Ford?
― Lourcelles, you said it already.
― True, I forgot.
― Parkinson?
― Parkinson yourself.
― Calm down Loulou. And tell me what The Prisoner of Shark Island looks like.
― Baroque and cruel, like its title.
― He’s prisoner of what?
― Of Shark Island. The island of sharks.
― It’s a better title than I Didn’t Kill Lincoln*.
― You said it, my nephew.
― I’m your nephew?
― You didn’t know?
― First news.
― I’m your uncle. The one telling stories, beautiful stories.
― Uncle Paul’s beautiful stories, right?
― No, friendly Louis’ beautiful stories.
― Friendly Louis, who’s that? I forgot. I’ve been dead for a while, you know.
― You’re more alive than ever. It’s all about you. Books, PhD theses, articles, festivals, DVDs.
― What’s that?
― DVDs. It’s like a video tape on a CD, if you see what I mean.
― No.
― It’s all about you. You’re the idol of boys and girls.
― I don’t believe you.
― I swear it’s the truth. Tell me you like it.
― I do. But I’d rather be alive.
― Each to his own life and each to his own death.
― So, this Ford?
― You don’t remember? It’s the story of a good doctor, wrongly accused of having helped Lincoln’s assassin escape.
― Warner Baxter in jail? That’s it, I remember. With John Carradine as the sadistic prison guard. His head as long as a knife.
― I love this one.
― Me too.

* Title of the French release (translator’s note)

Rancho Notorious

Two boys, not so young anymore. Let’s say they are cinephiles. Or ex-cinephiles. One is dead, the other alive. They ramble on a quite bit. Let’s call them Serge and Louis. Serge is always the first to talk.
― I keep coming back to Fritz Lang’s incandescent cinema. Was he gay or straight?
― I never knew. I thought for a long time he was 100% gay. Today I don’t know.
― There’s something strange with his films. Not only this hate of women. Something stranger.
― Oh yes, very strange.
― A desire for murder?
― There’s something else.
― What?
― A cross-dressing of the body and the soul.
― Both?
― Yes.
― You’re right, Louis.
― What is this ménage à trois in Rancho Notorious?
― Yes, what is this ménage à trois?
― I don’t know. A scale riddled with deadly indecision.
― It’s almost Chinese, this refinement of love, this love torture.
― That’s right. Marlene tortures herself. Who else otherwise?
― It’s her. It’s her.
― She plays the man. It’s obvious.
― Who plays the woman, then?
― The other two.
― Both?
― Mel Ferrer protects her.
― And Arthur Kennedy attracts her, right?
― Right. She can smell the woman in him.
― How?
― His love for his wife has left traces. She was raped, you remember?
― Yes. Raped and killed. It’s one of the most terrifying beginnings of any movie.
― Arthur Kennedy’s love was interrupted.
― Like coitus?
― He smells like sperm and death. You understand?

Two Rode Together

Two boys, not so young. Let’s call them Serge and Louis. Are they old friends? Cinephiles? Who knows? Serge is always the first to talk. They talk while walking.
― I love this Ford.
― Me too.
― Me before.
― Me first.
― As you like.
― I know that Two Rode Together is the film that brought you to Ford.
― True.
― A filmmaker you don’t like much.
― Let’s say that I don’t understand him. He’s an enigma to me.
― He’s an enigma to everybody.
― You think?
― That’s why he’s the greatest.
― Greater than Mizoguchi?
― Yes.
― You exaggerate.
― No.
― Has Ford made a film as beautiful as Uwasa no onna?
― Yes. Seven Women.
― I had forgotten that one.
― You’re frivolous.
― Perhaps.
― You’re dead. How can you talk about cinema with such aplomb?
― All dead people talk with aplomb.
― Really?
― It’s the only thing they have.
― Aplomb?
― Yes.
― What do you like in Two Rode Together?
― James Stewart, Richard Widmark, slow speed, frontalness, friendship that lasts a long time.
― Do you believe in friendship?
― Yes.
― Do you believe in cinema friendship? I mean true friendship.
― I’ve never believed in human relations.
― That’s true. You always said that HR was overestimated.
― I still think that way.
― Me too.
― You’ve changed.
― Yes.

Trois ponts sur la rivière

Two boys, not so young anymore. Serge is dead, Louis is alive. Louis is the first to talk.
― Do you know who talks best about Biette?
― Not me. I struggle to speak about friends.
― That’s new?
― No, always.
― Why?
― Because of me.
― You? But you love talking to friends.
― Talking to them or about them is not the same.
― That’s true. I forgot
― You get on my nerves. Talk to me about Biette. I heard that he’s dead.
― You didn’t know?
― No, I didn’t.
― You haven’t seen him up there?
― It’s rather big up there, you know.
― That big?
― That big. This Biette, which one was he? I can’t remember.
― That’s normal. You were dead.
― Did he make a lot of films after?
― After you died? Let me think. You died in 1992, right?
― Yes
― I think he made two. No, three. There’s also the last one, Saltimbank.
― That’s a lot.
― For Biette, yes. For Pierre Léon, that wouldn’t be much.
― Pierre Léon? Our Pierre Léon?
― Yes. He films faster than his shadow.
― I’m sure it’s good.
― Yes. It’s a bit Biettian.
― I wouldn’t have thought so.
― You see, one can be wrong. It’s very light, very original.
― Sentimental?
― No, original.
― And Trois ponts sur la rivière?
― It’s the best Biette.
― Why.
― There’s Amalric, the son.
― So?
― I cried.

Thes texts are published in Dialogues avec Daney et autres textes by Louis Skorecki. They appear here with the permission of the publisher, © PUF, 2007. Translation by Laurent Kretzschmar, 2011.

Serge Daney: new books (in Dutch)

2011-04-04T10:00:00.001+01:00

The Dutch are taking the matter in their own hands. Two books of texts by Serge Daney translated in Dutch have just been released by Octavo:

Volharden, the translation of Persévérance, the posthumous book with Daney's seminal Kapo article and a long interview with Serge Toubiana about his life as a CINE-SON. It was published in English as Postcards from the cinema.
Een ruimte om in te bewegen. Serge Daney — tussen cinema en beeldcultuur (litterally: A space to move around. Serge Daney - between cinema and visual culture), a collection of articles. See the table of contents below.

The books were launched on March 28th at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy. Solange de Boer, the woman behind Octavo, worked for months to secure the tranlation rights as she realised the lack of clarity around the Daney estate (basically it's mightily unclear who owns what between the Cahiers texts managed by Phaidon and the Libération texts owned by POL). Huge credits to her for taking the initiative and seeing it through.

Here's the table of contents of the second book. I've added links to the texts available in English.

Solange de Boer, Preface
Pieter Van Bogaert, 'Introduction: Serge Daney - Image-espace'
Jacques Rivette, 'De l'abjection', Cahiers du cinéma, nr. 120 (juni 1961), p. 54-55.
Serge Daney, 'L'écran du fantasme (Bazin et les bêtes)', Cahiers du cinéma, nr. 236 (maart 1972), p. 30-41; La rampe. Cahier critique 1970-1982. Parijs: Cahiers du cinéma / Gallimard 1983, p. 34-42.
Serge Daney, 'Un tombeau pour l'oeil (pédagogie straubienne)', Cahiers du cinéma, nr. 258 (juli 1975), p. 27-35; La rampe. Cahier critique 1970-1982. Parijs: Cahiers du cinéma / Gallimard 1983, p. 70-77.
Serge Daney, 'Le therrorisé (pédagogie godardienne)', Cahiers du cinéma, nr. 262 (januari 1976), p. 32-40; La rampe. Cahier critique 1970-1982. Parijs: Cahiers du cinéma / Gallimard 1983, p. 77-84.
Serge Daney, 'L'orgue et l'aspirateur (Bresson, le Diable, la voix off et quelques autres)', Cahiers du cinéma, nr. 279 (september 1977), p. 19-27; La rampe. Cahier critique 1970-1982. Parijs: Cahiers du cinéma / Gallimard 1983, p. 138-148.
Serge Daney, 'La rampe (bis)'. La rampe. Cahier critique 1970-1982. Parijs: Cahiers du cinéma / Gallimard, 1983, p. 171-179.
Gilles Deleuze, 'Optimisme, pessimisme et voyage. Lettre à Serge Daney'. Serge Daney, Ciné journal 1981-1986. Parijs: Cahiers du cinéma, 1986, p. 5-13; Pourparlers 1972-1990. Parijs: Minuit, 1990, p. 97-112.
Serge Daney, 'Sayat Nova. Serge Paradjanov', Libération, 29 januari 1982; Ciné journal 1981-1986. Parijs: Cahiers du cinéma, 1986, p. 72-75.
Serge Daney, 'Vers le Sud. Johan Van der Keuken', Libération, 2 maart 1982; Ciné journal 1981-1986. Parijs: Cahiers du cinéma, 1986, p. 131-135.
Serge Daney, 'Coup de cœur. Francis Ford Coppola', Libération, 29 september 1982; Ciné journal 1981-1986. Parijs: Cahiers du cinéma, 1986, p. 123-126.
Serge Daney, 'Zoom interdit', Libération, 3 november 1983; Ciné journal 1981-1986. Parijs: Cahiers du cinéma, 1986, p. 185-187.
Olivier Assayas, 'Notre reporter en République de Chine', Cahiers du cinéma, nr. 365 (december 1984), p. 57-66; Présences. Écrits sur le cinéma. Parijs: Gallimard, 2009, p. 156-173.
Serge Daney, 'Après tout', La politique des auteurs – Entretiens avec dix cinéastes. Parijs: Cahiers du cinéma, 1984; La maison cinéma et le monde, dl. 2. Parijs: P.O.L, 2002, p. 543-548.
Serge Daney, 'Le cinéma et la mémoire de l'eau', Libération, 29 december 1989; Devant la recrudescence des vols de sac à main. Lyon: Aléas Éditeur, 1991, p. 161-165.
Serge Daney, 'Montage obligé. La guerre, le Golfe et le petit écran', Cahiers du cinéma, nr. 442 (april 1991), p. 50-54; Devant la recrudescence des vols de sac à main. Lyon: Aléas Éditeur, 1991, p. 187-196.
Serge Daney, 'Bébé cherche eau du bain', Libération, 30 september en 1 oktober 1991.
Jean-Luc Godard, 'À propos de cinéma et d'histoire', Trafic, nr. 18 (printemps 1996), p. 28-32.

1978 interview with Serge Daney

2011-04-01T09:26:00.002+01:00

KINOSLANG has an interview of Serge Daney and Serge Toubiana in 1978 where the look back at the politically radical period of Cahiers du Cinéma.

Serge Daney and Serge Toubiana with Fabrice Ziolkowski
Originally published in ON FILM, No. 9, Winter 1978-79 (ISSN - 0161-1585)

I find surprising to find Daney so lucid about that period only a few years later. A lot of what he will say in 1992 is already there.

Daney on Losey

2011-03-16T12:05:00.007Z

I often use Serge Daney’s texts to learn about new films or directors which I know little about. Bizarrely, I had never seen anything by Joseph Losey. Puzzled by watching The Damned and The Boy with Green Hair on DVD, I found these texts by Daney. They are written over a period of 20 years and, despite some contradictions (Accident is rubbished in 1967 but praised in 1984), they show an amazing consistency of taste and judgement over 20 years. Daney, like Cahiers, really stuck to their line, it’s quite impressive…

These texts may also defuse a myth that the late Losey (for example the films with Harold Pinter) was unconditionally beloved by Cahiers. Serge Daney is quite specific on what can be salvaged from Losey’s films.

The four texts are:

Joseph Losey, Accident

A new variation on perversion, lies, fascination and spinelessness. We recognise Losey’s tropes and habits: gazes sometimes empty, sometimes ambiguous, often protruding, actors-mascots faithful to themselves and finally reunited (Bogarde and Baker), relations between masters and pupils, fascinating and fascinated, etc. In an English university with beautiful colours, a young professor (Bogarde) complicates his life unnecessarily. He silently loves Anna, who is courted by a young man and has already been seduced by a third one. Out of cowardice, incapable of playing a true part in this story, Bogarde slowly becomes confident, organiser, matchmaker. He thinks he is pulling the strings when he is merely subjected to events. Bogarde’s character eventually becomes fascinating because Losey’s cinema is more and more like him. A cinema whose trademark has always been the quest (both suspicion and fascination) of the Natural, spontaneity and first degree. All qualities which we must admit have abandoned Losey when he arrived in Albion (except for brilliant instants: Chance Meeting). Only the effects are left, in all their forms, from the comic book to a certain “English accent”. Watching Bogarde, we can see the workings of the alchemy, how the Natural becomes fabricated, how immediacy changes to ulterior motives, how the obvious becomes tortuous, etc. One can find all these effects unbearable or ironically moving. Accident is a vain and sophisticated film with the appearances of rigour. Each scene is articulated around a small “significant detail” joyfully highlighted by zoom shots. The overall impression is of flabbiness (with stiff moments), not to say derision.

Serge Daney, Cahiers du cinéma, issue 191, June 1967

Joseph Losey : The Go-Between

1. That The Go-Between won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Festival is only insignificant in appearance. If the film teaches nothing new about Joseph Losey, its success and the approving murmur around its release should prompt a few questions. For example: what is an academic film today? Or: how to tell a story in 1971 and be loved by film festivals?

2. Answering this question will only be possible once we will know a bit more about the workings of these fictions – teleological but complex – which “classic” cinema has got us used to. This endeavour, which we started here (Young Mr. Lincoln, Morocco, etc.), will need to be continued. Let’s say for the moment that in any fiction, the reason for the passage of a thing to another can very well reside in what we still call a “character”, because a “character” is a significant element with non-negligible properties: he creates relations between different locations and extras; being mobile, he sets things in movement, he gets things into gear.

3. The choice of transparency in classic Hollywood cinema, the refusal of editing (in its strict sense) as an attack on continuity (the guarantee of “truth”), forces to make the diegesis of movements – given as “realists” – rely on certain extras. “Cinema-vérité” itself has never left this necessity (see La Punition). In The Go-Between, where the camera field is constantly crowded with a bric-a-brac of realist notes and true little facts intended to prove that a social analysis is happening, Leo Colston is primarily the messenger between the front of the stage and the depth of field which is often the depth of the fields, very green, crossed diagonally and nervously.

4. Of course, not everyone can set things into gear. It is not even sure that this fiction must be always occupied with the same character (it is rather the contrary). The essential is that there is no fiction outside the mise-en-scene of a desire played – interchangeably, interminably – over scenes of sex, knowledge and money. As for the one carrying this desire, he must never have access to its promise. In any case (and the naivety of Losey’s film appears here), the messenger never understands the content of the message. Thus, the problem which the film hints at (will the child learn about sexual relations?) is a false problem. When the film starts, Leo Colston has refused a long time ago to know anything. The proof is this existence of this “other” knowledge, magical and parodic, and his step back when Ted finally decides to speak. (Nothing is more suspicious than the old Colston’s story about his childhood, a story not of the original scene but of the retrospective effect. Here’s a warning to the good souls who still think that one can soil a child’s soul.)

5. So it is rather misleadingly that Losey chooses Hartley’s novel, the story of what typically constitutes any fiction, or rather: of what is missing for the story to at least barely function, and that we propose to call the gearing function for the time being. If the reasons behind Losey’s choice are not theoretical, they are nonetheless personal and necessary, inseparable of Losey’s conception of childhood as sub-development and/or/thus mutation (The Boy with Green Hair, The Lawless, The Damned, etc.). Leo Colston has access neither to knowledge, sex or money since he is a child (and he is usable by Marian and Ted as long as he is castrated, as it is heavily underlined in the scene where he hurts his knee on a stump where an axe is planted).

6. We shouldn’t attribute only to Losey what is a more general phenomenon about the difficulties we meet today to build credible fictions. If it is difficult to bring ourselves not to tell stories anymore, it is just as unsatisfying to rely (after all, Losey has known Brecht) to the magical, resolutory, value of fictions. We can even think that no one could develop a fiction as complex and rigorous as, let’s say, Uwasa no onna (Mizoguchi) or The Leopard Man (Tourneur). Not by lack of talent but because today, a fiction (for reasons we will need to uncover) needs less to play on – and therefore conceal – the overdetermination of events. Today, everybody (except a few retarded) knows that a fiction is made neither from chance nor from innocence.

7. This is how we end up designating with a certain rage some of the mechanisms of fiction, indulgently accepted as real, like this gearing function, which is so difficult to see working in old films but becomes the very subject of The Go-Between. This murmur (even shocked, even bored) of satisfaction which accompanied films like L’Enfant sauvage, Le Souffle au coeur, Death in Venice or The Go-Between indicates that we have simply recognised that it was more profitable than ever to devise fictions where the gearing function would rest entirely on the frail shoulders of a child. (On childhood as the underlying theme and the primitive scene as countdown teleology, also see The Clowns and The Conformist).

8. The phallic-child – so small he can go anywhere, but so pure that he doesn’t understand anything – allows the audience, seeing what the child doesn’t see (such as Margaret Leighton’s glottal movement) or seeing him not seeing (or not seeing well, and therefore infinitely pitiful), to fantasise delightfully in the alternating roles of the deceiving-master and the mystified-victim. The “purity” of the child is here only as the myth allowing the return of the homosexual repressed. But where Visconti, caught in the same problem, theorizes it by relating it to the mechanism of paranoia, throwing his gaze over Venice as the master who knows he is mad, Losey, who was more lucid at the time of The Boy with Green Hair, feels obliged to attract the attention in terms of social relations toward a visual mechanism which was always designed to conceal these relations.

Serge Daney, Cahiers du cinéma, issue 231, August-September 1971

Joe Losey: 5 paradoxes

First paradox. Of all the American filmmakers who’ve had troubles (at home), Joseph Losey is the only one who has had a second career, the only one to have contradicted this unwritten rule saying that, outside the Hollywood system, the filmmakers trained for this system decline in the Old World (at our home, in Europe). If only for this, Joe Losey is important. To the point that, among those who discovered him late, he came across as an English filmmaker (the man who gave the most beautiful roles to the likes of Stanley Baker and Dirk Bogarde, an implacable painter of the English lifestyle). And from a fake English, he slowly became a true European, meaning the well-rounded-star for great cultural things: from Proust (a film he didn’t do) to Mozart (which he dongiovanised). His longevity had come – ironic history – from his status as refugee-victim from McCarthyism, and eventually got us to forget that he was an American filmmaker (from a good family), born in 1909 in Wisconsin.

Second paradox. Of all the American filmmakers rediscovered and rehabilitated by French film critics in the 1950s, he is the only one to have been rehabilitated (albeit late) by the cinephiles who were politically the furthest from him: the “MacMahonians”. Thanks to them, Losey’s American career (from The Boy with Green Hair to The Big Night, only three years from 1948 to 1951) was finally visible. These were progressive films where, in the film noir genre, a man cast a terrified gaze over racism, the violence of lynching or corruption. Purists of the mise en scene abandoned Losey (with Eva) when he stopped being a series filmmaker and became an auteur, convoluted and a tad pretentious.

Third paradox. Of all the American filmmakers who started in Hollywood in the late 1940s, Losey is one of those (but not the only one, see Nicholas Ray and Kazan) who didn’t come from the film industry but from theatre. And not from any theatre, but from the politically engaged art of the 1930s, from the avant-garde. This fascinating but too little known period of American intellectual life saw the future young filmmakers of Hollywood travelling to Moscow to meet Meyerhold, Eisenstein or Okhlopkov and coming back with their head full of ideas on the relation between stage and audience, the desire to work with Brecht or to do street theatre. The result of all these paradoxes was that Losey was never understood as a whole in his career (we’ve had to wait for Michel Ciment’s book, Conversations with Losey, 1979, before we got a less partial vision of his singular journey).

Fourth paradox. Leaning toward Marxism, obsessed with classes, their struggle and hateful relations, an analyst of power struggles between males (with their constant conflict between social class and gender), Losey took the risk to be, up to a certain point, a (leftist) well-wishing filmmaker. But his sincere progressive tendencies led him to find an interest in a more volatile and less easy subject: servitude (involuntary, then voluntary). Singing future utopias interested him less than the stagnating present, trapped in decors full of resentment and humiliation. For human drives are not necessarily progressive. “At the base (correctly writes Deleuze, in the Movement-Image), there is the drive, which by its very nature is too strong for the character, whatever its character”. So much so that Losey’s cinema is primarily a surprising gallery of “fake weak” and “fake strong” characters, caught in the well-known scenario – scripted by Hegel – of the master and slave dialectic.

Fifth paradox. Right-wing fans of the Hollywood Losey admired in him the expression of a certain violence. Not a shiny violence, but a murderous one: Lang’s violence, without the rigour, the violence of a moralist. But a moralist is by definition someone who is less interested in his characters’ actions than in their acts. If the term “action movie” best defines the greatness of American cinema, the catalogues of acts are the strength of European (auteurist) cinema. And Losey, not by chance, oscillated between the two, belonged to the two worlds. “Violence in act, before entering in action” also writes Deleuze. “Static” violence, he adds. And even: “trembling”. There has been some “trembling” with Losey, for example in the way his very catholic career has a logic, and in the way he drops his actors like neurasthenic predators in the over-signifying shackles of a mise en scene inherited from the politically engaged theatre of his beginnings. Some of the trembling was complacent, flabby, senile or academic (let’s move on) but some of the trembling was exact, overwhelming, seismographic (The Boy with Green Hair, The Lawless, The Gipsy and the Gentleman, The Damned, Accident, Mr Klein). Thus goes the human carcass.

Serge Daney, Libération, 23 and 24 June 1984

The small fin: Joseph Losey, La Truite

One shall be wary of social phenomenon films: they are rarely good and age badly. On shall be wary of the sociological gaze, the one that stays when nothing is left of the film. One shall be wary of Roger Vailland’s “cold gaze” because the only coldness worth of attention in cinema is the one that burns. Watching La Truite, the 1960 Liaisons dangereuses came back to my mind. The 1960 version, signed by Vadim, with the late Gerard Philipe and (already) Jeanne Moreau, and adapted in balck and white for the screen by Roger Vailland himself. At the time, the gaze of the ex-Stalinist dandy over Laclos’ heretical world had the bitter taste of scandal, although quickly gone. A few years later, Vailland published La Truite, and a few years later, Joseph Losey, now a European, dreamt to make a film of it. In 1982, Gaumont granted him his wish.

Whatever (some will say), the subject is eternal. In La Truite, one can see that money and sex are running the world and that the only “moral” consists in never forgetting it. Otherwise, it’s the vulgarity of the feeling (ugh!) or the catastrophe of the passions: Vailland cast his cold gaze over all this. Today, no doubt, he would cast his gaze on the adventure-seeking and dubious neo-bourgeoisie, setting up deals between Paris and Tokyo, with its sexual parades, its nouveau-rich culture and the soft pleasure of a vulgar and international “art de vivre”. Fine. But if the subject is eternal, the film isn’t. A film is always “at present”, always an indirect documentary on the desire which has produced the film. And for La Truite, this desire mustn’t have been very strong since the fishes, small and big, fooling and fooled, smart and only half-smart, who are playing the extras in this tragic fish tank, are not interesting. And that’s a problem.

Never mind (some will reply): we don’t care about this mediocre and rather rotten world, what matters is the gaze cast over it, Losey’s. And here there are two possibilities. Either the author loves his characters despite their faults and he endears us to them, one by one, round about a shot, a gesture, a nothing. Or he doesn’t really like his characters, less in any case than the social mechanism that they represent, which surpasses them and crushes them. For they are all Don Giovannis with small feet and small fins.

But this oscillation is typical of Losey. There are two Loseys. The Losey who believed in the heaven of ant-racism and American progressive tendencies (first period, before McCarthy, with beautiful films like The Boy with Green Hair). And there is the Losey who believed in Marxist sociology, in the unfolding of class contradictions, in Brecht which he staged. The Losey who, in this old master-and-slave story, preferred the dialectic to its elements. He sometimes managed it (Accident, Mr Klein) but generally he weighed everything down, confusing complication and complexity, overlaying to his mise en scene a permanent “don’t be fooled, follow my gaze” giving simple minds the feeling to understand everything there is to know about class struggle.

So, which Losey filmed La Truite? An old man who didn’t chose. The “trout” is perhaps, in the book, a cold and vicious heroin, doubled with an ex-little girl who has forgotten nothing of the “stupidity of the country life”, but the film so clumsily (it’s a scandal) multiplies explanatory flashbacks that, in the end, all is left is a vixen pulling the strings of an ordinary plot. In brief, the “trout” is not J.R.. We can’t really hate her. She’s not an absolute, just a headline act.

The game of anti-bourgeois massacre is a difficult one. Without true hate, one better be judge and jury, both bourgeois and appalled by the stupidity of bourgeoisie, dazed little fish and distant fishbowl.

Losey looks at this small world, this modern fish tank, with a slightly indifferent tenderness. He continues to pretend undoing the terribly tangled web of the plot, even though it is no more important than mishmash. He can’t help it if Huppert is only good when she avoids comedy (the two little scenes with Alexis Smith – the red-dressed lady of the Tokyo Hotel, fantastic – are excruciating), if Olbrychski badly dubbed looks pale, if Lisette Malidor is better than her ethical act, if Moreau only has one real scene to play (she dies of it), if between the film poster and its flat reality, a thousand things complicate everything with no gain for anyone.

La Truite is therefore a vain film. We simply get tired following the plot: everything lacks, the stakes are vague, details are absent, one forgot to film too many things. Great filmmakers, when they grow old, should have gained the privilege of painters: to film what they want and who they love. Only. When Losey films bowling or a Japanese taxi, we dream about the simple and pleasant film which he could have pulled off from the simple exhibition of the cast amidst beautiful sets, in Ginza or in the French countryside. Enshroud in Alekan’s truly magnificent light, they would have looked beautiful.

Of course, it wouldn’t last two hours, not even one. To film successful people doesn’t mean you succeed in making a film out of it. That’s moral.

Serge Daney, Libération, 22 September 1983

Journey of a Cine-Son - Part 3 (with transcript)

2011-02-28T09:00:00.000Z

Part 3 of Serge Daney's Journey of a Cine-Son interview is online at Vimeo (see my earlier post for some background).

I must say it's the strangest of the three parts and the one that puzzles me most. Daney's tone is different; there's this strange "crepuscular" feeling where he mixes his own destiny with that of cinema. In some sequences, he almost seems to be rambling about, clearly taking risks by talking about changes in society rather than the old familiar territory of cinema. But on the other end, there are some really strong ideas. Here are two of my favorites:

"Television is a big hospital telephone"
"Television is teaching you how to at last sell your experience"

As with the first two parts (1, 2), here's the full translated transcript:

The Channel-surfer's gaze
Regis Debray: The move to Libé is, I imagine, the return to reality for you. I mean, living among the non-cinephiles. You can't just enjoy yourself, you also have to make yourself understood. Did you live through it as something pleasing, the public, news, travel, or as something ascetic?

Serge Daney: Oh no, for me it... I was very... At first I was very scared, because I'd never in my whole life thought that I could be on a daily paper. It hadn't occurred to me, so it was - but equally, Libération was my newspaper, in the sense that I read it every day. I'd even written a bit, in 74, 75, very dogmatic things, it wasn't a good period. But Libé, traditionally, had no-one for cinema, had left cinema up for grabs, for whoever wanted to pick it up. In 81, July must have done… There was a putsch, I really see now just how much of a putsch it was, headed towards, let's become acceptable, let's become presentable, let's have some art critics worthy of that name, so there had to be cinema, enough kidding around. And he knew that I was fed up with the Cahiers, I had reached a point - I couldn't bear the Cahiers anymore. I'd decided to stop before, and he suggested it, and in the end it happened quite quickly and quite well. I wrote insane amounts. It liberated me, it's not a pun, Libération liberated me. But it wasn't at all, before I enjoyed myself, now I'll make myself understood.
I never really enjoyed myself writing for the yellow Cahiers. It was a relation to jouissance, which has nothing to do with pleasure: jouissance is something else, it's stronger but it's more dangerous. You stand to lose a lot. Pleasure came at Libé, because pleasure meant realizing that, if I said "I" and I stopped saying "we", if I dropped the Cahiers thing, I was capable - which no one had told me, which I hadn't guessed myself, which I'd repressed, etc - of entertaining people, i.e. of making quite complicated texts, with exactly the same content as in the Cahiers texts - I didn't compromise on that at all. I had an enormous head start of culture, of thoughts - I had all the texts not written because of the Cahiers; the Cahiers were terrifying, you wrote one paper a month, you had no feedback from anybody, it was terrible. You wrote for the Cahiers, you didn't write for the Cahiers people who didn't say anything: there were secret rivalries, terribly narcissistic writing, just like anywhere. After five years you say no, I need someone to tell me that I exist, I'm dying! It happened in Libération.
But I had the feeling of having a huge head start of unwritten texts, of, of non-communicated emotions, of little stories, which had been left stranded, which hadn't been written. So I found - I had the cheek, for the first time in my life, to say I exist, and the proof is, I write. But fundamentally, I didn't adapt anything to anything.
It just so happens that at the time, Serge simply wanted a cinema section. His dream was that on cinema posters, there would be the Libération critic. There, that's what he saw. And at the time, we were far from it. Afterwards, it became the rule. So that's what I had to bring him. It didn't matter with what I brought him that. It just so happened that what I wrote moved some people, or surprised a bit. And so, for five or six years, I recycled like mad - well, not only recycling, there are also things that I figured out like that - I liberated myself. And I wrote a lot. After all, it was articles of five or six times the basic 1,500 characters units, because at the time we didn't have any advertising at first, so we did the whole page. I've even had that extraordinary pleasure of writing an article, spending almost the whole night on it, of bringing it the next day to the paper, following it through to the press, of leaving, at the time at one in the morning, and I saw it composed, and I even helped the editor to put on a title, a caption etc. When you've known that, you can't really complain about journalism.
Personally, I mean. Because it might be every journalist's dream which is to, one, do something he believes in, two, it... it's gratifying, because people read it and like it. Three, he's the absolute master of his page. For me, my page was like, like a film. I did the captions, I did the title, I did everything. Also because I hadn't learnt otherwise, at the Cahiers I also did everything. I did the cooking, I did the grub. And it was very very liberating for me. When - so it really wasn't for a wide public, Libération was a marginal paper, with strange tastes about lots of things, and my whims about cinema were accepted just as Bayon's on rock music were. Because it was still 19th century art criticism, with quills. And that's what was missing so cruelly at Libération, and what Serge wanted. Not by any love of quills; because he thought, and from his point of view he was right, that at that moment Libération needed to start existing in art criticism, and in bourgeois art criticism. So cinema isn't only bourgeois, but for example, the failure of classical music at Libération means that because it was truly a very elitist sector, very protected, well we weren't lucky enough to have someone tell us "Well, that's my thing, and I'll do it for you, Libé-style" In the right time, in real time. And there are lots of people, I know that thanks to Hervé Gauville, I started going to see dance, and I realized I was really stupid because I should have gone earlier and that it really did me good.
For me that's the golden age of Libé. I have the feeling of having known a golden age of Libé that I would date until 85-86, in 86. There. So for me it's a lot of work, a lot of anxiety, the usual things... but absolutely, the feeling of having access to pleasure at last, and not simply being the slave of jouissance anymore, to stay slightly Lacanian.

RD: You've said, "The evolution of media sounds the death knell of smugglers such as me". How do you see the future, say of Libé, the paper, its horizon, July, and cinema's place in all that. In a newspaper of the new era, the audiovisual era.

SD: I admit I don't know. Because when you're pessimistic - and I am a bit, by nature, I always tend to see things in black. I also try to be careful - because otherwise I'm very care free, so you mix the two and in the end it's ok. It's that in 85-86, I had the feeling that I was going to start repeating myself, i.e... And I was beginning to see the cinema that had made me, I was beginning to see the films that had seen me. I was beginning to be able to put a name, like in, like a psychoanalysis. If cinema is the century's psychoanalysis, as Guattari said, the century's mass psychoanalysis, I've done mine. And it maybe hasn't cured me, and anyway you always die cured, but still, very slowly, much more slowly than a normal psychoanalysis, it taught me things about myself.
And at some point I understood what I was telling you earlier on, for example: for me cinema will always be a question of time, not the image. And it's too late, that's the way it is, I'm not going to fight with people who go on thinking that Les Enfants du Paradis is the most beautiful, the most beautiful French film, because for me, Les Enfants du Paradis, if that's all there'd been in cinema, I would have chosen... watercolours. But there's La Règle du Jeu, and that for me remains unforgettable. There's a time when you stop, you stop... the better you know what makes you tick, deeply, the less you want to impose it on others.
Because it’s not fair. All you can do is explain as best you can, that's what I do now. For me, and for people like me. That's what cinema has been. But it's not all of cinema. There are people for whom cinema is the Marilyn fan-club to die for. I respect their wish to die for it, I almost died for it. But it's not me, I wasn't born for... There are some people for whom the love of cinema is to have the same boots as Monty Clift in a western. It makes me laugh. But I like Monty Clift a lot. But I mean, there are many houses. There are many rooms in the Father's house, in cinema too. Not that many, but many. There's a Les Enfants du Paradis room. People who don't like cinema usually adore it. But… well, I've stopped fighting. So at some point I said I'll stop fighting.
Otherwise, if I take the front page of the paper to say, Manoel de Oliveira's film is a great film – he's one of the last very great living filmmakers today, but he's Portuguese, his films will bring in 5000 people – July will give me the front page, or he won't stop me. So in a sense, I had the privilege of having the crisis of cinema all to myself, I had the beauty of it all to myself - only sons are quite harsh, they don't share! And I had the crisis all to myself. I said no, there's something that doesn't have a grip on reality anymore, no grip on reality. I see it around me, what I'm told about films in the corridors of Libération is worthless. One day, I woke up and... I'd written a very enthusiastic text about Fanny and Alexandre, which I consider to be one of Bergman's most beautiful films, even if it's his testament and it's very... it looks academic. Our culture would rather say, give us the little unknown Bergman. Anyway. It's still an absolutely magnificent film. The people in the paper - it came out in 84, 85, to give a date - and the same thing for Ginger and Fred. There was the thing about Fellini and Bergman. The two typical film-makers for people who only have literary emotions for cinema. Which is the reason why at the Cahiers we were never really Fellinian or Bergmanian: there were always people, Jesuits, the people from Telerama, to come up with literary emotions for those films which happened to be great films. And suddenly I hear people saying "Oh, no, Bergman, it's always the same, I've had enough, I'm bored. Oh, really, you think it's good?" And I say "Are you nuts? Go and see Fanny and Alexandre right now!" I told myself, ok. In 1980, you still want to fight for very difficult film-makers; in 1985 you tell yourself that even Bergman and Fellini, you have to shake your best friends up for them to go and see Ginger and Fred, but that they're offended when you tell them they don't go to the cinema anymore. Because they think that... And they're two absolutely... almost academic film-makers.
And recently, what, a year ago, I saw The Godfather III, by Coppola, which I found absolutely wonderful. It's a wonderful film. In my opinion, it's the best of the three, and it's, it's fascinating today etc. The Cahiers people didn't mention it, no the Cahiers talked about it, it's the Libération people who didn't do... anything, thinking that Coppola is over, it's out of fashion, you can... No one was going to stand up and say "Hey, you're forgetting Coppola". Coppola isn't fashionable at all any more, he's paying his debts, off with his head. Even Libé! It does piss me off quite a bit. It's the best of the three Godfathers. And I said, if today I wrote at Libération about cinema, well maybe I would have done it in a rage, and it would have made a good text, I would have said: "You, you absolute idiots, now it's Coppola you don't even see. We started with Straub and we end up with Coppola!" It means that in ten years, it's the whole of cinema you have to promote. And that's too much for me. Because I'm not used to promoting all of cinema; it's what I'm doing now for you, I'm praising cinema in general. That's because, well, it's the whole century, my whole life, ok. I can say I have reasons to like what I like and everyone, I hope, has them - I hope - but before you said yes, in cinema I prefer this, there are some who'll say something else. Today, I've got the impression that it's the whole of cinema that's swinging over into something else. So maybe I'm not the one - maybe I'm the smuggler for all that, but not the one who can find the way to say, ok, enough kidding around, media is the pits, or at least it's something else, let's be nice, it's something else, something deeply different.
Cinema goes from Lumière to, let's say Coppola, and up to you: everything is for grabs, almost equally. There's no modernity of Coppola and archaism of Méliès, it's not true. In fact Méliès and Jean-Cristophe Averty, they interact, video interacts with the beginning of cinema. What are the sublime proofs, who are the Jean Douchets of today, or the mes of tomorrow? I'm fine with having been a smuggler, but at a definite moment and that moment has tipped over, already. The Cahiers, of which we still hope that they'll have a good period in their life, who'll say and who'll find the right words to say it, the natural words, knowing that the kids are going to watch the video tape on TV, that they're not going to go to the Cinémathèque - and I'd rather they watched TV or the video tape: they're emotional things, they're... Long live the sect, long live the couple, long live the clique, enough of that democratism that brings, that leads to the junk you see now on television, La Nuit des Héros. Well, you'll rebuild an elitist culture for yourself, a film culture. Elitist, but since it's cinema it'll never be profoundly elitist, because cinema will always keep that side that comes from circus, it comes from cabaret, it comes from Muscle Man, it comes from the local vamp, and it comes from the avant-garde as well. Because what's the avant-garde, it's the little chemist who, on his own, tinkers... Resnais isn't... He's not an intellectual, Resnais, he's a little chemist: he does experiments since he's small, so people say, how complicated, yes, but it's as much part of cinema as... as Ava Gardner.
So I have a tendency, at the moment, today, hic et nunc, to say, stop shaming us with the spiel, "Oh, cinema, what a wonderful culture, but I don't know it, I'm not a cinephile, I haven't seen..." I mean, it's something with a lot of happiness and up to you to go, to go and see. I only hope that there will be smugglers. And I don't know what they'll be like, and they won't be like what I was, even if I was that for a while, and I'm not ashamed to say this, on the contrary, I'm happy. But for me it's finished. And they won't be like Poivre d'Arvor, they won't be like Claude Jean-Philippe, they won't be like... What else can I say... They won't be like the weatherman. Maybe they won't be in the media, maybe they'll know how to write, maybe they'll do magazines. Otherwise, cinema will disappear. It'll be recycled. It'll be recycled like many things in the 20th century.

RD: A world without cinema, is that possible? Should we talk about of cinema in the past, I mean if I see, for example, that in ten years it's lost 30% of its audience in France.

SD: 30%, yes.

RD: What is a world without cinema?

SD: Well I think we're beginning to see, i.e. I've been scared of it for a long time, but there was still cinema, well a bit, there were still beautiful films, they're rarely the ones people go and see, but there are still good films. So there still is cinema. There's still, much stronger than concrete cinema, the extraordinary funerary status of cinema which was elevated, especially in France, by all governments... French governments protect cinema, since Vichy, since Vichy. And it's a paradoxical situation, and troublesome, because you can't resent the state too much for keeping cinema's head above water, but if it were left to the market, like some things in television are, it wouldn't keep up: it would be squashed by America, which has the advantage of producing films for the only public left, i.e. the kids. American cinema hasn't made films for adults for a long time, so it's a cinema that has lots of qualities, because there are good things, even Terminator 2 isn't the worst thing ever. The problem is that you can't make a whole world and you can't build a civilization on the desires of an eight year old child. It's... God knows it's precious, because we've all been that child, and God knows if I've talked about it personally at the beginning, but cinema also promised that I would become an adult. Thankfully, it didn't keep that, but I believed in it very strongly.

RD: You walked a tightrope between cinema and television. Did one teach you something about the other, I mean does one understand cinema better from television?

SD: No, you understand television wonderfully well from cinema, no. To understand television, I think you need a distance that I don't have, that no one has. Maybe McLuhan had a few wonderful intuitions, and that's why in France, they did their best to not translate him and not cite him. Because visibly, in the slightly crazy things he said, some of them are unremittingly true. Anyway. No, I think that to take, to measure the scale of what television is or represents - since it's only the trailer for something - I think that in its actual form television will disappear. But what it's putting in place, what it's setting up at the moment, as we watch, it's maybe very considerable and enormous, in terms of its amplitude, and maybe it doesn't concern the zones that cinema covered. So inversely, having a culture of cinema, it's a bit like having done Latin for six years, you wonder what it's for, and one day, you receive some submissions and you see, these people don't know how to write French. Well never mind, six years of Latin help me to understand the mistakes in French grammar: it's that kind of discrepancy. And when I say, six years of Latin, it's not to play an elitist card: I'm saying, the directing... the setting up of a gag by Buster Keaton - who was a guy who barely knew how to read and write and who came from the circus - or of an Aldrich film noir is today much, much, much too complicated, and I would say, much too elitist, for the average perception, let's say the one that comes from television, which has reduced the basic grammar of cinema - which already wasn't very developed, but which was starting to have some very fine structures - which has reduced that to three or four possible cases. Which is to be explained by the fact that it's a broadcast machine, and so its problem is obviously not to refine procedures or language, but to be sure to reach everybody.
Television is of the family of the telephone, and it has more or less the problems of the telephone, i.e. it's only worth what the communications are worth, and they're all private. Which is to say that when Poivre d'Arvor tells the news, he's showing his boss that he's doing a good job. It's a private conversation. He's not speaking to me. When the people on Channel 5 talk about themselves, they're funny, suddenly they're beautiful, they explain, they get people to explain to them what a compulsory liquidation is and they do it turned towards the... They forget to turn toward the camera and the prompt, it's funny, and they're suddenly very interested because their daily bread is at stake and they're right, I'm on their side. I would have liked them to have done that all the time, on all of everyone's news. But they don't. It's that, I think, quite simply, that it's become impossible for television to take the individual into account. So it works on the basis of the individualist ideology, but it's only ever an ideology, it can't take the individual into account anymore: it's the individual that takes it into account, in a perverse way. So I switch channels, I follow my own whims, I do my own edits and I despise it, which isn't good either; it's wearisome. I was the first official channel-switcher, I chronicled it, I found it fun to... yes, to make fun of TV a bit, but there was still a lot of goodwill in my little books. And I wrote every day. Every day, I had to sketch a little something of television. Something domestic. And at some point, I got scared, scared for me, I told myself I was developing a ridiculous sense of superiority in relation to television. TV doesn't care about being superior or inferior to me, I'm not in its world, I only exist because I put myself there by force, I said: "Well, I enlighten myself every day, it amuses me, it amuses people like me." After that... It's not even understood. Beyond that.

RD: Which is to say that you can't criticize television –

SD: No.

RD: - without criticizing the public it's targeting?

SD: There. I think I'd always doubted, I'd always balked at that because I didn't like it, the idea that you have to criticize the public. But I think that today we have to because of the recent evolution of television.
And it seems, not for a very long time, since the last few months, because there have been economic crises, because the advertising boom is over, there's a page turning, so television is discovering not only that it's no better than the telephone, and on top of that it discovers that it didn't... that it didn't learn to work much during this whole, in the end quite euphoric period, when nothing was happening and it... it was flexing its muscles. So there's an acceleration of the, like that, a sort of uneasiness in TV which, on the one hand, pleases me, because I saw it coming slightly before the others, and at the same time is becoming to bother me a lot. Because I think that you shouldn't claim victory because public space is turning into a garbage can, because it will never be replaced by peer to peer private space, so we'll have that problem of the public space, which is the problem I'd wanted to evade in my hatred of theatre by cinema, and then from cinema to television, so which follows me: how to belong to a society through what that society produces, and not through the group affects that we'll leave to the son for the moment, but it's not too far off. When you're too abandoned and too lonely, what are the transitional objects? Is that lighter good, is that film good, is that television programme good? Can I read the other? There. It's my question, it's the whole century. Today I have the feeling that television is a trial version, or is itself trying to be, something it doesn't measure, because I don't think it measures anything, it's a blind machine, it's a machine... I mean TV is like society: society doesn't have any knowledge about itself, it needs sociologists, who are in general its parasites, who don't see any better than it does. So it's true that you can't ask TV people to have the awareness of something that passes through them and of which they're unaware. And me, maybe I can a bit because I have the memory of cinema and I'm not satisfied with cinema, there, that's my little niche. And maybe because I come from that tradition of the Cahiers, a tradition that in the end is fundamentally quite religious. I.e. we think that something connects things and connects people. It's the absolutely minimal definition of religion and in that sense, I'm religious. But I'm really not a believer. And religion went with cinema. People who handle communications always have a foot in religion, always. The people who make the communications machine work, without having any discourse on it, are in general miscreants. There's no one more miscreant than advertising people or creative people. Because they know very well how to create the illusion, they're in exactly the same situation as, let's say as the high clergy of the Middle Ages, the one that had studied, and as Lacan says, only theologists can say that they don't believe in God. They're well placed, they're paid to know. The others, they vaguely believe, and anyway they don't care. And so there's something that worries me today because TV, if you look closely, McLuhan wrote about media, and McLuhan is a rather twisted Canadian Catholic, if I've got it right. In cinema, it interested Rosselini, who had a religious past, even if he tried to secularize it, or rather to make a secular religion, in the second half of his life, not very convincing but totally heroic, totally kamikaze. And Godard, well; he's someone who, he's a good Lutheran, I mean he's someone who knows what a holy scripture is. And why not the Cahiers, and why not myself within that. It worries me because those people tended to be imprecators, they were people who said, well... and I'm part of that! And we'll get our hands dirty! I've said above how much I loved, in cinema, the money aspect of things, the power, all these things at which I'm not very good, I say never mind, what counts is that it's not forced on me personally, but I'm willing to be part of it, to be the careful spectator of it, because it settles into those objects that I like, which are films, I'm not prudish, I don't do my little, my little experimental cinema universe with my four masterworks under my bed, I hate that. On TV I select at random, I switch channels, and I wait for something to speak to me. So I'm really in need, I'm really a man of communication. Not like those who do it, I need it. And television is the idle, it's the sick, it's the elderly, it's all the completely dead part of the population. So it weighs a lot, all these people, it's the weight of the dead already on the society of the living. The living, active people, they do other stuff than TV. They watch the news and three or four talk-shows. So you have to see what TV is: it's a big hospital telephone.
So... I mean, I belong to the people who were interested in TV at some point, much to everybody's surprise: a lot of people like me... And I can't prove them wrong, they're sorry for me, they think "But he's crazy, television isn't an art", there are people who never hesitated on that, television isn't an art. It never will be. If it had been an art we would have realized, it's existed for fifty years, it hasn't created anything. It leeched everything, it destroyed everything, it saved a few things, it... ok, but it's no art. I'd say, I don't care whether it's an art or not, as long as it communicates a bit. I'd rather it communicated on television, badly, but it can be made better, than have it communicate very well in the ciné-clubs with Claude Jean-Philippe. Nobody's interested anymore. Or Michel Simon, stuff like that... Old administrators of something... Well it's my culture, I'm like them. But you sense that there's an aspect of, "I don't care what happens when I'm gone", because it's not going to happen again, people like that. And now I tell myself yes, TV is a question of communication. So, in the final analysis, a question of religion. Or of interested, religious people. But then the enemy's taken power, because in religion there's lots of room, there are lots of roles, there is a little theatre. Catechism has won. It's not the imprecators saying, we'll try - Godard said, let me do all that you don't like doing. For example, you don't like filming sports, you do it badly. You think you do, but you do it badly. I like football a lot, I can film it. So of course, they never gave him a football match to film, he would have been capable of not filming the goal when it happened, and France would have had a collective collapse. Or the variety shows, Godard would say. Well, I don't know if he said that, but it's funny to see if you could film a popular singer as they filmed Charles Trénet in 1930, i.e. in close-up, no playback, a real sound, the camera doesn't move, so that we can see what the guy has got. You'll realize that in general they don't know how to move any more. Which is normal, since the camera moves twice as quickly as they do. Someone who's under a Louma crane is protected. Guillaume Durand's show is interesting, they invite lots of people and tell them, you're gorgeous, stand up. So you see Besson stand up, saying I will die for Dubrovnik. And then Piccoli, who stands up saying, let's have a civil war, it's loads of fun. They're very moving, especially Piccoli. And then you say yes, but were they told that there was a crane swishing past at 800mph, and they looked absolutely grotesque?
You're not responsible for your own body on TV, so it's not worth having people who can film people's bodies better than others, because the question's beside the point. We are already, with our own bodies, because it's still our bodies, I'm not even talking about computer-generated images, we're lightened. There's a sort of... We're freed from this question of knowing that you can maybe film a sportsman better, because a sportsman has his body, and his technique, or even a singer, because he has, in cabaret, for a long time there was a real, a real physical thing, and it's got nothing to do with aesthetic tastes or new culture or non-new culture. Channel 7 obviously doesn't film a modern dance show better than Channel 1 does Patricia Kaas; simply, they don't have the same audience, one puts on a bit more airs and the other is a bit more lower quality. The question - it's a very difficult question. It seems to me that not too long ago - and it went through cinema a lot, through musicals, for example - not too long ago someone could understand that. Could understand that there are different ways of making, of making a body exist on screen.
So I say all this, to come back to catechism which is the thing that's bugging me at the moment, I have the feeling that in catechism, the question of the body isn't asked. In catechism, what's at stake is the question of attitudes. What do you do, when do you teach kids to get up, to kneel, to get down, mass, I've known that, I went to catechism. What do you teach them as the minimum basic religious knowledge, generally absolutely unusable and stupid, because theology, which is much more interesting, is kept for the bright kids? And that the priests, who weren't very beautiful themselves, and those kids, all of that, anyway. And it's a question of, will television find the formatting and the aesthetic of training necessary to make individuals, determined by the market, learn at last to move together, to make movements together, in relation to television, with television. With it, because they're full of goodwill. So, degree zero, games: games are, come and learn to shout for joy - because you've won a slipper, I don't know. People go to these games, they win things and they're disgraceful, I find them disgraceful: they behave very, very badly, i.e. as you would when you're at home and you're really not careful, when you're in front of your wife you've just beaten or your kids that you're not helping with their homework.
Games, well, games, ok, but things like reality shows - actually that's funny, we're so ashamed we've kept the English word - that are coming from America where they've had huge success. Still that perpetual thing, that runner-up's bragging recognition that television is integrally an American culture. Just as cinema was shared among different peoples, so television is born american. Well it could have been born Nazi, it was close, but they lost. And so it was always American, and still today, the programmes that are copied in France, and they boast of copying, it's extraordinary: "I'm the one who will adapt to France this programme that had a huge success in Phoenix, Ohio" - Arizona, not Ohio. They really have a low degree of pride, but anyway, moving on. But games, why not.
But reality show stuff, isn't it: television is teaching you how to at last sell your experience, what it's worth and how it should be sold, and how it should be shown, and it should be told, how it must be relived, and on what conditions. And if you don't learn, thanks to us - TV is a good daughter, it's really democratic - if you don't learn, thanks to us, to say tomorrow on television how having been saved from a mortal accident fifteen years ago by a nice neighbour made you reborn, isn't it, it's the reborn, all the Nuit des Héros scenarios, I was reborn and great, there was TV. Or there's TV today, so today I can have my baptism certificate. We're entering american culture, which is a culture where you're always being reborn - but it's more sincere with them, deeper, it's their religious streak, born-again Christian, all of that. You say on which conditions there's a rebirth. You also say on which conditions there's no more transmittable experience.
In general, when people live through a great experience, what do they say? They say, "I can't describe it." They all say that. War, they say "War, it's not what you think, I did it, we had a lot of fun." "Really?" "Yes, but it was also horrible!" "Really?" "We were very bored." "Really?" I haven't been in any war, but I guess that's what it's like. I think the great writers have talked about it well, I've read Jean Paulhan's Le Guerrier Appliqué, I've read books. It seems to me that the great books also had a bit of this function. And the great films: I've seen La Grande Illusion. I've understood things. They're things I've always known I would never live through. But the experience had passed into certain objects, which had themselves passed on, been passed on to me, and I'd said Roger that. Of course, if there's war tomorrow, it'll be useless, I'll discover my experience of war, but never mind, it makes me the imaginary Other or the real Other, the partner for the people who lived through that, including before me. Anyway - but in general, what they have in common is, you really have to work a lot to transmit an experience, to tell it. If there has been art, at least in modern, recent times, it's because certain people had the courage to go, to go and bring back experience, and experience is always human. In the final analysis, it can't be only one person's, it's not possible. Only one had it, but when he had it, if he managed to transcribe it, it was an experience that could be shared. Not entirely, a bit. In cinema, it was a bit. In television, not at all.
So what comes in its place? In its place, you tell people, no, don't give us the "I'm still thinking about it, I can't tell, it happened so quickly" spiel. I find it very moving. It's like, well, it's like porn films, what do you want to pick up, even if you capture the sperm coming out, you can't pick up anything. Everyone knows it, and mankind is eternally starting again with the same... Anyway. It's our destiny. You shouldn't be too stupid in relation to that. And you shouldn't let people manage it, you have to live as our, our graceful load. You shouldn't live it as something that you'll let Cabrol manage. And so, it seems to me that television is saying, "No, we don't want people's real experiences anymore, because they don't know how to express it anymore" - and it's true, we're very bad actors of our strongest experiences. Of course, after you redo them, you tell them, you write them, you make them into legends. Especially us, because we have access... But, when you're honest, sometimes you wonder, but what did I really think at the time? What did I think at that moment, did I think of anything? Why was I so calm, why did I lose my head? Well you're entering psychoanalysis, you're entering into a problem that sometimes art can touch. But not television, in any case, you need more time, you need more honesty. Sometimes, by chance, it passes through TV. Someone, experience passes. One thing that struck me a lot, recently, is d'Aboville. D'Aboville reaches America, and he's in a frightful state, and everyone can see that he's incapable of lining up two words. But it's very good, and the images, which aren't very pretty, speak for themselves. In media terms, it's a failure. But it's not important. D'Aboville, empty-handed. And it's very good, I find it wonderful that on something as considerable, really, as what he did, the least he could do is to not, on arrival, have the sublime quote. Three or four days later, somewhat better, he goes to a TV channel, and someone says, looking ecstatic and deeply moved, Gérard d'Aboville, what made you hold on? And there, he has an answer that I like, he says "In the end, pride. I didn't want to be defeated. Pride." Pride is a fault, it's a sin, but still, you shouldn't forget that sometimes, in life, pride can help a lot to make you hold on. Even if it's not only good. I say, this guy is good, he's not media-conscious, he's got an independent streak, I'll do what I want, which I don't find very nice, but I'm so fed up with nice people on TV that as soon as there's someone slightly dislikeable, I now look at him with love. Because you're so fed up with this or that person's frozen smile. A month goes by, d'Aboville comes back, this time on Guillaume Durand's show. This time we're deep in catechism. Of course, catechism is always made by a total adventurer. And, same question. Gérard d'Aboville, where did you find... And there, he did give the television speech, i.e. it was my dream, I wanted to be true to my dream, and he made a whole implicit speech, every morning little French kids should wake up, and they should have a dream, a child's dream, and of course it's useless, you're so much prettier when you're useless, and of course it doesn't save any lives, it's slightly sterile, but if everyone... And suddenly you end up with an almost Cressonian discourse, about France which, because it has two absolute weirdos, in tennis and there, who've won stuff, imagines itself pushing back the borders of its Frenchness. Well, I think it's exaggerating, it's not pushing back anything, and it should be careful. But it shows how, in two months, someone who tended to resist media and who wasn't very good at them, learnt the language, and this language is what I call the catechism. D'Aboville learned to behave, and he learned to shut up, and even he learnt to say what you're supposed to say. So he didn't talk about his experience anymore. Because experience is always the same thing. It's the aspect where you didn't live through it... He talked about the meaning of his experience, he talked about how it should be interpreted and lived through. And he put himself - his body had changed, he'd recovered - he put himself in the position of the mediator of his own life. So I think that what television will try to do, and it's not sure that it'll succeed, in which case it's other things, more sophisticated, which will do it, maybe through advertising, maybe through much more Big Brother-izing modes of social communication, it's the "learn how to sell yourself" aspect, how to sell yourself according to the rules of the market represented by television, how to sell your experiences. Don't let others tell them in your place. Which means, don't let actors act it, and then people are surprised that there's a crisis of cinema, that there's a crisis of stories. Actors are very bothered, they've had their livelihood taken away. It was their passion, to say, I will be d'Aboville. D'Aboville says no, I'll do it the TV way. And TV says aahhh, we love you. It's a true moral example. So individualism, and catechism.

[break]

RD: You have said, we're not in the civilisation of the image, but in the civilisation of the screen. What does it mean?

SD: That's something that I probably took from Virilio or someone else, because it's an idea that's been around. But what's for sure, is that, to take television, which is the latest known image system, let's say, and in which vast masses of people take part, it's difficult to talk about television now as you did before, as if there was a conscience behind it, a black box, or people who decided, who offered things to us, or who wanted our wellbeing, who were producers. There's still a bit of producing on TV. Variety shows is still producing. As long as that was there it was like cinema. So we thought that behind the programmes, there were still people who thought the programme through, which is difficult, which is different from cinema. To think a programme through is different from thinking an object through. But you can still maybe conceive a programme intelligently, the people from Canal + have proved that you can have a talent for programming. Which is an absolute novelty, we didn't know what talent for programming was. But it's not indispensable, since Canal + managed to score some points, deservedly so, by thinking just a bit about... about their public. I.e., by being somewhat appropriate to the way people live. Actually, by breaking with the mass, to go back to the religious metaphor. It's because Canal +, at one point, thought that breaking with the mass wasn't a suicidal idea, economically, that they gradually unlocked two, three million subscribers. I was one of the first, so I wasn't affiliated with the mass and I was happy that there was a TV channel like me. But as long as the idea of programming is there, the idea of production, the idea of people who want our well-being - even if they line their pockets - all of that was like cinema. And then, the emptier it gets on the other side of the screen, i.e. behind the images, the people who make them, the waltz of responsibilities, "it's not me, it's not my fault, we didn't see it coming" - it's ridiculous on Channel 5. I mean, those are people who would get thrown out of any packaging company, but they last for years on TV and everyone watches them with tears in their voice. So you say really, it's not the market law of the jungle that's lost, it's something else. There's a sumptuary economy in television, which means that Lagardère can risk ruining Hachette not having thought of anything, or having surrounded himself with people who don't think of anything. Because it's obvious, even from a commercial standpoint, that he didn't have the shadow of a chance. So it makes the question of what moves people interesting. What is it that today there are people, for example, who can't stand to see Channel 5 disappear, people from the public. Just like not too long ago they'd gone out to defend NRJ. One of the last great demonstrations. It's very strange, the evolution of... So that, it's not my thing, it's politics or sociology, but you can see the evolution. But all these evolutions are heading the same way. The centre of gravity is moving towards the viewer. Which is to say that television will be more and more on the spot.
It will be indexed to its whims and fancies, and the exchange will be, you come and do your own television, and in exchange television will do what I said it did earlier, which is to give a few lessons in manners, which you badly need. I think there's a sort of exchange, really basic, happening at the expense of everything television was when they tried for quality. But when I say quality, I don't like that word, I mean... To answer your question, are competent people condemned? Yes they're condemned, of course. Because it's a completely useless skill, and even discrediting one, since it forces you to sell your singularity. If I sell myself as Mr Cinema on TV - they won't want me anymore - I'm selling a singularity. And that's unacceptable. It's unacceptable. It's in that sense that we're becoming American. Because Americans loathe – they love individuality, they love personality - everything must be very personal - but they only like clichés. So you have to be personally like everyone else. And that, Americans manage it quite well. How to be personally average. Above all, how to never be in the minority. Americans have a rather strong culture of democracy, and us, much weaker. So you don't want to be in the minority. And you don't know what it means. So you want to be part of the winners' group. And the winners' group is society. So when society is the winners' group, with the means to test it night and day, with opinion polls, satisfaction polls don't cost anything. It... It means nothing. I mean, they don't even ask people to say I liked it, they ask them to say I'm rather satisfied. I'm rather satisfied of J&B's whisky. There. But I know it's very inferior to the whisky... There. Such and such a whisky with a sublime peat taste. But I'll be judged based on my "rather satisfied". Which represents no particular love. Ultimately, it sounds pretentious, but lack of love has a cost. It means that channels disappear and there's no one to say "It's me! I loved it, I made it. I watched it." The people who defend it are those who didn't watch it, I mean, they don't want it to disappear, but they didn't watch it. They say, a channel without news isn't a real channel. But news was never a commercial factor. News is a ruin for all TV channels.

[break]

About the screen, if you will, I think it's the only reality we are absolutely sure about today. I.e. between us and the place which, before was the place of the Other - one of the places of the Other, great or small - there is, for sure, a screen. And this screen can either connect us to people who want our well-being, who would be the people making TV, so who still broadcast something, who produce and broadcast, but I think it's... That's what television was until now but it's not obvious that it'll be that way for ever. And then you can use a screen because you have a VCR and the possibilities for domestic uses of images are incredible, total, and that we're only beginning. So no, when I see the screen - everybody's probably like me and in fact I'm rather late, because I'm still watching television almost in the situation of someone waiting for the serve to send the ball back. So often I wait a very long time. So, do you use for tapes or rather to see if, by chance, on the Hertzian networks, there isn't something interesting, fun, or unexpected. Information is what keeps us in that idea of the global village. That's why, even badly done, we value it a lot. Because we tell ourselves, today, the world will have been like that. It's TV telling you. It's obviously not true, but it's the images of the day. So we know they have tampered with them but still, they're careful, they say “Archive footage”, they say... and that's it. We'll have to make our feeling for the present differently. We'll have to make it ourselves. Will it be through screens, I don't know.

RD: It's the question I would have liked to ask you: ultimately, literature will have made the 19th century, i.e. it made the imaginary, the ideals for identification of the 19th century. Cinema did it for the 20th. End of cinema: where will it happen, now? The role model? I.e. the James Stewart of your childhood?

SD: I have no idea. I think the weight of the imaginary of which we are the sons, or the cine-sons, is so huge that... that I don't have much imagination, I don't know. When you see Terminator 2, it's a lovely script, it's a shame that the film is lazy, because you see a machine arrive that's simply stronger. The machine is the stronger one. Schwarzenegger is weaker. And this machine is perfectly unpleasant, it's a real machine. There's no anthropomorphism there. The bad Terminator is really not someone you can associate with. So you look at Schwarzenegger, with sadness, as someone still... It's a machine capable of making itself human. So the film, with its huge success, with the kids and everything, it does say that we're at a loss there. With myths. But I'm pessimistic all the way because I think that there are myths being patched up, but that you need... But that they're real myths, i.e. myths somewhat like in primitive societies, or African tales: cosmogonic myths. I think you need - so for better or for worse, I think it's out of our hands - I think Man needs to tell himself again under what conditions there is the human and the non-human, for example. I thought that the human was a battle we'd won, since I came after inhumanity. And many of us had this kind of illusion. So humanity had been won. The unity of mankind had been won. Racism was ridiculous. Today I think all of that will be asked all over again. For example, I think that the question of knowing whether we are the sons of our parents or of the dolphins, which is a serious question, which is in the children's unconscious, is a mythological question. When it's told by the griots, the Fula and the grand-parents, we say, what sublime stories. I think we'll have to deal with them. Not me, I'll really be history's posthumous child. The only myth we had, probably you too, was History with a big H, we were ready to do the stupidest things for that myth. It kept us, and cinema was in History. In History. You lived in cinema as in History. Of course, you wake up one day, you tell yourself it was Yalta, it's over, now you don't understand a thing, you're like everybody else. "Ah, what a shame, it was a nice story", it lasted fifty years. So I'm not ahead. You wake up, you wake up at the foot of a world where you'd again have to have mythology, without bigotry, without religion, wow... That seems somewhat hard. Anyway, what's rearing its head is somewhat worrying, I mean the first mythology that appears is of course the vitalist earthly mythology, the one that's been used a few times already in history, including once recently under Nazism, and I don't think much of it. Recently, I was very shocked, there was, in Libération and Le Monde, there was an ad for a Yoplait foundation, did you see it? It was in the papers, it was written in a kitchen-sink French, there was a Moon sect aspect to it, manipulated. And it's Yoplait foundation for young sportsmen with Olympic ideals. I don't know what the link with yoghurts is. And the text is terrifying. It went through, in fact, it went through, Libération included. It was terrifying, either in its thoughtlessness, or in its clumsiness, it was thought through but clumsily expressed. It was: Article 1: Earth is naturally beautiful. Article 2: Earth belongs to all men. It was Earth, the planet. She was the star. There was never the word "man", there were fifteen, twenty... There were problems between men but that's a question of world government, never mind. Moral values still needed to be respected, and the slackening... And I said, but how quickly do you move from that to Leni Riefensthal? I was scared. Because the ecological ideal, on that side, I'm not talking of environmentalism, which seems to me to be a good thing, at least hard to fight today. But ecology, in the sense that the first measure that Hitler took was to declare the Black Forest sacred, that ecology, which has already had its go in the limelight, in modern history, and I don't see why it wouldn't just be a first go. Even if we always lived it as "never again, it can't come back, and anyway we'll fight it." We were ready to... We yelled fascism will not pass, we studied how Reich had seen fascism rise, how Brecht had seen it, how Thomas Mann had seen it, how the communists hadn't seen it... You won't catch me out on that, on how fascism rose everywhere... But it's rising now and we're very weak, there are few of us, our ideas are jumbled, we whine... But it's rising. 30% less cinema in one decade, 30% more of Le Pen's ideas. So, no doomwatching, but I mean it should inflect what we say differently from what we said five, ten, fifteen years ago, I mean we, we who speak through... That's all we have to do. I think that within that, cinema is part... of the beautiful part of the heritage, but slightly thrown out. There. Now, mythologies, yes, cinema, I'm in a fix because I never approached cinema from its mythological side, it doesn't interest me. I took it on its, let's inhabit history, let's inhabit the geography map and history. And it seemed possible, and it made me live, and I travelled the world thanks to that, so I at least inhabited it. But I'm not interested in mythologies. There were sociologists who wrote the myth of Bambi in fifteen volumes, they said "but in fact!", there are oafs who never stop doing that, they say "ha ha, you rancid intellectuals, absolutely incorrigible clerks, you make fun of Dallas which you find horrible, whereas it's exactly like The Odyssey." You're ashamed for them, because you say yes, there are four or five stories on earth, we've known that for a very long time. We've known it for a very long time, there are very few stories going round. What is it that means that The Odyssey isn't Dallas, that if people don't know anymore we're in a fix? Do we know it ourselves? Do we know it well, can we talk about it, can we pass it on? Can we pass it on, this idea, have we reread The Odyssey, recently? That's where we're at, if we're somewhat honest.
So I tell myself, I don't think much of the first mythology coming up. It's, our mother Earth, little sister Earth, our little sister. And she has all the rights. And we have none. And mankind, it's debatable, it's negotiable. There are human populations, they scare us, we're stronger, they're, in many ways, also stronger, in other fields, it could go wrong. So will it go wrong because cinema will be dead, no, that's not enough, it's a symptom, it will go wrong because we won't have created sublime myths. But man doesn't create myths because someone at the UN said we'll make up two or three myths and save the world. I think that we should be careful when talking about mythology; it's been a very, very, very long time since any new myths have been created. Literature created three or four. Since Faust, Don Quixote, that's it. You can tell hundreds of stories, and as long as you tell stories you're alive, as long as there's someone to listen to them. That, yes, that's a question of hygiene, telling stories. Putting oneself in the other's place. But myths, that's something else. I feel very helpless in relation to that.

Translation and transcript by "nletore & newland @ KG" with only minor edits by me.

Journey of a Cine-Son - Part 2 (with transcript)

2011-02-22T09:29:00.000Z

Part 2 of the translated video interview with Serge Daney "From Cahiers to Libé" is now online at Vimeo.

It covers broadly the time when Daney started edited Cahiers du cinéma (1974) before moving on to the daily newspaper Libération (1981). It also has good pieces on the power of the image, French cinema, new images (already talking about CGI and 3D in 1992!), Kapo and morals, the visual... in short, it's perhaps the best episode of the three. Shall I say it's essential viewing for many cinephiles?

See my earlier post for some background on the full interview

And here is the full translated transcript;

From Cahiers to Libé

Regis Debray: You become editor of the Cahiers in 74, at a time of particularly acute theoretical and political delirium. Roughly speaking, Maoism, theoreticism, all those -isms that have become, maybe not history, but let's say of the past. How do you land again when you're on such a UFO?

Serge Daney: Landing is slow and painful, as slow and painful, let's say, as taking off had been care free and light. Having said that, I lived through 68 somewhat differently from the Cahiers people. To make it short, it played like reality truly hitting me in the face. So after the events, which I lived through on a very literal plane, very... It's a good memory for me, May-June, a wonderful memory, but slightly solitary... After, I left for India, inaugurating the great third world travels where I had, one after the other, the shock of illness - I came back with tuberculosis, badly hit - and the shock of the third world, which I had never seen in my life. And there, I did have the feeling of being more worldly wise, but very late, really very late. Well there was the sanitorium, all of that, I got better. I travelled again, I spent almost a year in Africa, on the road. I was really disconnected, without any plan. It was really like Rimbaud: I went to Harare. I did it all. I didn't take any pictures, but I sent postcards.
Something I should have said, by the way, at the beginning: for me, the absolute image is the postcard, it's not cinema. I have a love of postcards that has never slackened. I've sent tons to everybody throughout my whole life. The postcard is my true relationship to the image, there, it's the postcard. For deeper reasons, more deeply buried, than cinema: which is to say that I already found that cinema was very basic, very popular. Postcards are even lower. They're on their stalls and everyone sends them and writes on the back. And you can write postcards in very coded language, you can write poems, you can write love stuff. All you need to do is write it in a way that even those who read it won't understand it. So it was the maximum possible elitism, possible singularity, and the maximum "let's do with the normal material people use. We're not using great culture." There, that's a digression on postcards.
I came back - somewhat calmed down - from the far-away countries around 1970-1971. And maybe that's when I realize that I have only one family anyway, that it was that of the Cahiers, whatever happens. Even if I had abandoned it, forgotten it and that I'd thought of something else for all these years. I came back a bit... I thought, slightly sobered up, by my travels, but in fact still as naive and still as suicidal with regards to society. We lived, after all, with the idea that everything was going to blow up, in those years. That's been forgotten.
The Cahiers seemed heading - after a period of flirting with Tel Quel and the Communist Party - for an even more radical way, which was called Maoism, roughly speaking, pro-Chinese. One day, Jean Narboni, who was a very important character - I haven't talked of the Cahiers people one by one, but God knows if there are stories... But one can't do everything. Narboni, who was by far the most important person in the Cahiers, who had the most emotional and intellectual impact, who was a bit older than us etc. One day Narboni told me "come on, let's have a drink". I would have cried for joy, because Narboni never spoke to me: that's sects, groups for you. And he told me, "I do think it's wrong, the Communist Party, it's a sidetrack, all of that; we have to be more resolute." Roughly speaking, he was the admiration of Sollers and Tel Quel, so the Cahiers had an evolution absolutely parallel to that of Tel Quel at the time. So we pretty quickly found ourselves Marxist-Leninist.
And I said yes, in a way about which I think a lot at the moment, because I've become rather a man of goodwill and a sincere humanist with age, but at the time all those discourses bored us to tears, it wasn't worth much. So I tell myself that we must have been quite desperate, individually, to opt for something as obviously screwed up. And on top of that, I don't give a damn about better tomorrows, I never believed, out of a total incapacity to imagine anything other than what is going on. But I like this situation where we found ourselves hated by everybody and feared by everybody. Because people were scared, at the time, you mustn't forget that people... Well not everyone, but in the intelligentsia people had been shaken by 1968. And I told myself, why not go on with the Cahiers, of course with something absolutely... already condemned by history, already ridiculous to many people, very dislikeable, for sure, seen from the outside, but which after all fitted quite well with the "we don't do anything like anybody else!" side. So it didn't last very long, it lasted two years. The delirium, obviously. We went pretty far with the auto-maceration, since the idea was "we won't be filmmakers", which was fine with us, because none of us was a born film-maker. So we'd found a justification: we won't be film-makers because there are much more important things to do which are to create a great Chinese-style cultural front, with a mass line etc. As soon as reality entered the picture, it fell apart. I'll only note, without knowing whether it's in our honor or whether on the contrary it's a sign of absolute collective baseness, that we plunged politically collectively. Which enabled us not to belong to any group since we became our own group. And to go on washing a lot of our dirty laundry in private, all of our heritage etc. We did it with a lot of naivety, we did go pretty far, up to where afterwards it's pathology, but we stopped in time.
We didn't do anything base in relation to cinema. Which is to say we never said anything good about, I don't know, an Elio Petri film, or a "left-wing-Italian-committed" film, as all the leftists liked them. We always said good stuff about Straub and Godard and everyone told us off, because those films were considered indigestible by everyone - and they were indeed quite difficult films. Absolute fidelity to our tastes in cinema, our Cahiers tastes, even if reduced to a very Jansenist base: Straub, Godard.
Godard, at the time, was also very naive, very Mao. He was more active than us, he did lots of stuff and we followed him a bit. As for Straub, he was a very important film-maker to us and still very important to me - even if, well, we're all twenty years older. We went on, on a little minuscule line that should have broken down a hundred times, and that didn't break, which just goes to show it was solid after all. Anyway, when we tried to form a great cultural front in Avignon, it was absolutely disastrous. We realized that we weren't capable of animating three ants, and that anyway, we were going to form an alliance with people we didn't like much, who were the cultural animators, who needed dogma, and we were the little Parisians who provided the dogma. Always the same thing.
And it broke. It broke, which is to say that the people who had backed this kind of passage to a more than chic radicalism, first of all chic, then lumpen chic. We had arrived at a state of complete hatred, we were cut off from the whole world - and it was very unpleasant. We found ourselves back at square one. And the people who had backed that - Comolli and Narboni - who had followed that movement... They split, they made their films, they left.
And there was, for me, an unforgettable meeting at the Cahiers du Cinéma - there were about ten of us to have lived through that from A to Z, not many, we were always together - we said, does someone have a bit of time to do the editing on a part-time basis, because everyone's leaving. And I said, me, there was only me, there was only me who had nothing to do with my life. I said yes, I'll do that. It was paid 700 French francs a month, at the time, 1974, which even at the time was very little. And there you go, I started doing the Cahiers like a sleepwalker: I didn't know how to format a page, I didn't know anything, I didn't know how to make a text. In the Maoism of the time, we'd got hold of one or two young people who were very politicized students, who didn't know much about cinema, but who were sharp and intelligent. There was one called Serge Toubiana. He learned to read, to write, he learned to watch films: he learned everything at the Cahiers. He unlearned, without great difficulty, his political culture which was useless, because he'd understood that all of that was ending and he was the only one with whom I could talk.

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RD: What was the film critic most like: a poet, a psychologist, a psychoanalyst, a philosopher?

SD: No, in my opinion... It's sad to say, because these are harsh words, but a film critic is a failed priest. It's a guy who is in between; a film critic is someone who is between an experience which he absolutely doesn't want to give up and a certain idea that it's his duty. So that it goes through him and it reaches people: there, so it's the problem of any mediator. When I said priest, it's because in our culture, it was that image for a very long time… - but you could say he's a psychoanalyst, a para-psychoanalyst, a para...
For example, Godard had attacked me one day, nicely, in public, by telling me that I was like a lawyer. It was the moment when I wrote a lot, I was starting to perorate about cinema, I was getting a bit too comfortable. And I took it badly, because, well, I was touchy, but I thought about it again afterwards, and I think he's absolutely right. And it's true that even today I take it in my stride, I say, it's true that I've had the feeling, for a little while, that when people come and ask me questions - like today - it's maybe not me who interests them, or else they would have been interested earlier, so it means that it's what I represent, it's a certain fidelity to a fixed idea: it's that cinema, roughly speaking, is good. So you start by saying it's good and you end up saying it's on the side of Good.
Which is where I'm at today, I tell myself "there is something in cinema that is worth something, that has a moral worth, that has an ethical worth," which is why the world without cinema worries me. Because I don't see at all what could play a comparable role, because public space was anonymously, simply, occupied by films and people who watched them like that, slightly on the sly, on top as well as at the bottom of society, and that I loved that anonymity, and that it made of me, despite my fears, in the end an acceptable citizen of my... of France.
So I say yes, I'm the advocate of cinema, I never stop telling what a wonderful thing it was. So my problem, my own specific problem, is that of course, it's the Minerva’s owl aspect, which is to say that I'm incapable of telling you what tomorrow will be like and I dread the worst, and I can tell you, maybe by embellishing a lot, how extraordinary it was yesterday. And that, I wonder - whereas it must partly be due to me, there are people with a melancholic character - it was always better before. Not nostalgic, I have no nostalgia, but melancholy, which isn't the same. Secondly, isn't this melancholy inherent to cinema? It's a question I ask myself all the time.
For example, people who like theatre. I think that if theatre was stronger today, if it had the strength that everyone would like it to have, the strength it had at certain moments in history, in the XVIIth century, or the Greeks, or England, that's the true public space. When people go to the theatre they go to purge themselves, to purge passions, to play out very violent antagonisms, gods against men, classes against classes, and I've never lived that. A bit, the National Popular Theatre, when I was small. I've never lived it, but somehow I miss it, I tell myself, that's public space, absolutely occupied by people whose function is to give themselves, to belong to others, the actors, but the public has its own role. That, in my opinion, has trouble existing in theatre, because it's going through the same, the same attacks, let's say, as all the traditional arts, by... Media kill, media kill. Well, they don't kill, they devitalize, like teeth. There, it's a devitalization of everything, but the corpse is a good likeness. There's the light comedy theatre, and even, even filmed operas with people on playback on TV. There are even lots of films on TV. But it's devitalized, which is to say it's not on the grounds of passion. And collective. I may be very individuatlistic, it was always the collective that I hoped for from cinema. Today, I'm the advocate of that. And at the same time I tell myself that it's not reasonable, there is, in cinema, something that's always already lost.
The image that has affected humanity the most deeply, it's the train in Ciotat station. Since then, they all affect us a little less deeply. Every day, every day, every day, it's an hourglass, cinema images lose their capacity for wonder, their capacity to dazzle us. People have thought that way for a long time: they've actually thought that way since the New Wave arrived, because the New Wave arrived with that consciousness. And I would even say that the father of them all, Rossellini, had it before everyone else. And even Renoir had it. Which means that in fact, it's very old, this consciousness, that perception was going to... That you were going to have to work a lot, sweat a lot, invent a lot, to create simple effects to wonder at, magic lantern effects, as strong as what cinema must have produced, and very quickly, in the whole world and in the space of a few years, with those first... Baby's meal, the passion of Christ, the Czar's coronation... because cinema started with that. And straight away! It's extraordinary. It started straight away. It didn't wait, Lumière sent people everywhere: that's an extraordinary reflex. Anyway, so that's being lost. So at one point, we said - and it was Bazin's naivety, it was his strong idea and his naive idea at the same time, Bazin said: "Long live Cinemascope, long live color films, long live 3-D films!" Because he thought that each time that man will again face the problem of realism that is inherent to Western art, even to art full stop, he will face this problem again, and he will redefine it within parameters that will change: "don't be old school!" So we were very Bazinian: we were for Cinemascope, which was after all a ridiculous format that didn't hold up to history and which now causes enormous problems. We said, it's more reality, obviously the quality is less good, since we're going to have to learn how to make the great films of Cinemascope. And one day we'll be able to make the great films, the great artistic problematics of Panavision, which is much more beautiful, and why not of 3-D cinema, and why not... And you end up with the Géode, and you end up with Trumbull's sixty-images-per-second things which are extraordinary when you see them, but it costs insane amounts of money and nobody commercializes them. It's been about thirty, forty years now that the lazy discourse on cinema consists of saying - it's true that cinema will have trouble finding its charm again.
In my opinion, the last film that had the effect of child-like wonder - and that's why I place its author higher and higher in my personal hierarchy - it's Kubrick, it's 2001: A Space Odyssey. 2001 must be - 1968, and Playtime, 1967, but Playtime wasn't a success. 2001 was a success. 2001 is the last encounter between art - and serious art: I mean, who can say they've understood 2001? I didn't understand the ending. The kids loved it. Loved it. The guy saw more or less what was going to happen in ten years time, what a space shuttle was going to look like. Not fifty years, ten years. Realist: he saw, he extrapolated from three or four things. Gutsy: creation of the world, the monkeys. And... the film critics, George Lucas, Francis Ford Coppola, when they saw that, aged ten, they said: "I'll redo that one day", and they redid it. It seems to me that since then, I'm thinking but I can't find anything as spontaneously ravishing, whatever the aesthetic tastes. No need to draw you a map: "Good God, we're going to live that." Kubrick had that feeling, we're going to live that. That's for sure. And he's right, we're living that. It's almost already behind us, the computers, the first computer to talk and die in cinema, it's Kubrick, there's never been a better one after. In fact, things are born very strong and then subside. I didn't think that before but now I think it. So it's always at the beginning that you have to see something. So I've participated, half-heartedly, because I didn't believe in it too much, but without asking myself the question too much, for the last thirty years, in that question: admittedly, the cinema we so loved won't be the spontaneous wonderment it has been, but so what, since anyway, technically, this story will continue, and it will continue in an extraordinary fashion. It will continue... You shouldn't be on the side of the old farts who say "No no, I only love my black and white" etc. No, we said, "On with!", like Bazin, "On with!". And that's where there is a great difference with the Qualité Française and with people like René Clair and Co, who thought that cinema would never be as good as in the silent era, which by the way is defensible, from their point of view, but prompted them to make completely worthless films. You should believe in the future of your tool, when you're an artist: you shouldn't believe that tomorrow it's condemned because the market doesn't want it anymore, or else it's not an artistic tool, it's something else, and we were daydreaming and that's a bit hard!

RD: You made your name with pertinent attacks, or amusing, in any case, the target was the Qualité Française. Let us say, the chow, the national grub. To give names, Delannoy, Tavernier, Berri etc.

SD: Oh yes!

RD: So I'd like to know, why this grudge against this kind of cinema.

SD: It's not a kind of cinema, it's a part of the portrait of France which I don't accept. It's the academic part, artistically you can say it's academic, it's the least inventive part of cinema. But above all it's of obviously... There is a grudge, effectively, which is to say there might be a certain excess, but I think that considering how often we've broached the subject by association, you understand a bit better. I haven't digested stuff that I found at my birth, in France, and still today, no. So I think that the French "quality" cinema is absolutely contemporaneous with a certain period that lasted from 1940 to late in the 1950s: which was a stifling period, absolutely stifling, which was the period of after the Collaboration. So I'm not at all saying that the film-makers I don't like collaborated, and I'm not vindictive. It's very annoying, in fact Autant-Lara himself used to say - Autant-Lara used to complain, and God knows that he complained a lot, that the golden age of French cinema was 1940-1945. And it was true for him, it was very good, he made all the films, many films, some of them very good. It's true that it was a time when they gave Carné enormous resources to make the only, well one of the only very big, very ambitious films that took a long time to shoot, which was Les Enfants du Paradis. So all these films have something in common, they're studio films. France is occupied and the studio, the studio represents for me the Occupation in the field of cinema. The Occupation, of course... I mean the studio creates a certain aesthetic which is only interesting, in my opinion, if you're in the question of true and fake. Which means that there's nothing as beautiful as a film that's obstinately fake, in studio settings and that mimes what isn't part of the setting. There's something very poignant that takes place, in certain Orson Welles films, or Josef von Sternberg, or Jean Grémillon, for example, to pick a film-maker I admire a lot, and which I absolutely wouldn't place in the "Qualité Française". Very great film-maker, and in my opinion, there you go. It's because I love Grémillon so much - not for that long, he's a film-maker I discovered late - that I have the feeling that a guy like him was somewhat the victim and the loser in the game where all the others unashamedly won. And Grémillon, because he was very vulnerable, as a man, is a much greater film-maker. There, it's interesting to see through him all the contradictions of the time, including the political contradictions. Le Ciel est à vous is a very extraordinary film, that is still very, very surprising today. So it's not at all me saying "Long live the sublime resistance", which by the way didn't film anything, and "Down with the skivers!" It's that, sorry, but Vichy cinema looks like Vichy France. And France has had greater periods in its history. It seems so obvious to me that I'm even a bit ashamed of having to say it, but because it's coming back very strongly.
On things which are closer to the Cahiers aesthetics, all of that, it's something I've already said, it's that all these film-makers are in wrapping effects, in pre-television-drama effects, which means they're always talking about stories which are already inscribed in culture, in literature. The problem is how to make the nth Pot-Bouille, the nth Germinal, the nth... All of XIXth century literature was run through it, as if there was a notsalgia for this very strong period, and very terrifying, this very harsh period, whereas this cinema was made in a much more spineless period and which continually gave itself images of Balzac, a lot of Zola. It's a cinema that's already in the digestion of its loss of illusions. The theme of the loss of illusions is more or less the one running through all these people: Autant-Lara, Allégret, Delannoy and Clouzot. And it's not the loss of illusions which is a problem.
Flaubert has a terrible quote in his letters where he says, "Poor people are those who say they've lost their illusions", as if to say, "As if it were interesting!"
What's interesting, it's that precisely, from then on, there are people who go on believing in things without any illusions, and it's... there's a difference between beliefs and illusions. So that's more a cinema of a great decorators, great costume-makers, with some rather beautiful things in fact. I have no taste for that. I have no taste for French cinema of the forties. I'm like Godard, I copy him, I say like he does: when I hear, in Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne, Elina Labourdette, say at the end of the film, she's about to die, and Paul Bernard tells her "Stay", and she says "I stay", and she says "I fight". Godard, who always interprets everything his own way, says "yes, it's the only word of resistance that was heard during the war in all of French cinema, the way in which Elina Labourdette says I fight." She says it in an expressionless voice, no one talks about Bressonian neutral voices yet. And it moves me deeply, because of course I feel that at that moment Bresson is inventing a cinema, and Bresson is neither a resistance fighter, nor a left-wing man. It's not at all in ideological terms. He's inventing with Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne, which is one of the most extraordinary French films ever made, something for me which ridicules for ever all of Autant-Lara. Well, because it's not the same scale, it's not the same scale. There's something, there's the sound of a voice that you hear. And so it turns out that it's not that one, because Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne I saw it later, great... great official critic.
But it's Pickpocket, for me, when I was fifteen. It was Pickpocket, it's 58 - it came out in 59, it's not that far, I've never gotten over Pickpocket. There, but I think there's no need to draw you a map, you won't find anyone to tell you "I really hesitate between Le Mariage de Chiffon and Pickpocket", no, it's people of a different kind. I'm not saying this to say that I would have been virtuous and resisted etc, I don't know at all. But I am surprised that French cinema continues to crow about an absolutely minor, decorative, and rather spineless period, in terms of ideology, of its history.
So there are people who have a lot of talent, like Autant-Lara, like Clouzot, like Clément, and in my opinion, something rather sad happened to them, but they were also foolish enough to not understand what happened to them, which is that the New Wave arrived, they thought it was a revolt by underlings, as in Zéro de Conduite. They forgot that they were squatting French cinema, that they had prevented, by excessive unionisation, and an ideologically very developed professionalisation, they had also somewhat prevented French cinema from renewing itself. So for ten years, you have people rebelling on the side bench, called Franju, Melville, Leenhardt, Rouch, and who were never within the normal circuits. Astruc! Those people are considerable people. All of them had careers that were somewhat aborted. And then there was a little group that had more energy than the others, and the times suddenly pushed behind them.
It's true that I'm not reconciled with those people, because when the situation got beyond their control they were incapable of adapting to smaller budgets, to start again. Some of them were still very creative, a guy like Clément, he's making Plein Soleil. Plein Soleil was an old film, but it's a wonderful film. It's a film which still today, because Delon... Well, let's say that Clément saw Delon, as Vadim, who isn't a great film-maker, saw Bardot. It's the problem of vision, it's the problem of the visual. There, that's how I'll answer you, with the visual.
What happened, at one point, in 1955-1960? You have film-makers, who aren't necessarily great film-makers, who see something happening before their eyes. For example, Roger Vadim, very bad film-maker, as time confirmed - but at the beginning, why not, Sait-on jamais wasn't that bad - he sees Brigitte Bardot. Bardot is the most important thing to happen in French cinema in 1954-55. Lots of people miss that, starting with me - I was ten, but I could have been a bit sharper! It doesn't interest me, I found her stupid. And still today, I again have no sympathy for Bardot, for what she's become, so there we're really in a sort of tail-end of history. But Vadim sees Bardot and he films her - badly, but it's genius. He falls in love with her, obviously, but he has the intelligence not to make an artist's film but a teensy little film that doesn't go down in any history. Where, nevertheless, it's something wonderful, Et Dieu créa la femme is a wonderful film, where you have Curd Jürgens, experienced actor, Trintignant, rising young lead. Vadim, on top of it all, also recorded their astonishment at acting with this young girl who breaks all the known acting modules and who visibly invents a dialogue of her own, which is profoundly stupid, but unforgettable. "What a dumb rabbit": no man from the qualité française could write anything like that, and there you go, that's it. And at that moment, she's obviously the one who's right since the whole of France is going to look like Bardot. So she's brilliant, at that moment. I didn't see it then, but she's brilliant.
I mean, three years later, old Carné - not that old - still a great, very much idolized film-maker, announces that he will make a film about youth: I don't know if you remember, Les Tricheurs. Which is a film everyone's forgotten now. It was a gigantic event, everyone talked only about that. It was 58, it came out in 1958, so made in 1957, so two years before the New Wave, so really just-just. People said "It's terrible, Carné shows us a horribly cynical world, young people aren't human anymore, they're monstrous, they sleep together, they play truth or dare, are they really our children?" And others would answer: "But you're silly, don't you realize, it's full of humanity, they need love, who must talk to them." There's a pre-Ménie Grégoire style debate, atrocious, in the very, very backward France of the late 1950s, which is ridiculous today when you see the film which is completely insignificant. Insignificant! It's a film which is completely uninteresting, apart from the fact that it was talked about a lot then. And when I say, Carné saw nothing, it's not to say that his conception of youth is dated, because after all, why not, old people aren't always wrong. But he had auditions, he saw Belmondo, he hesitated, he didn't take him, he took Charrier. There! I mean, a year later Godard or Truffaut, which one of the two, sees Belmondo. There, like Bardot!
So I would answer through actors. You have to see, film-maker is a job where it's better to see than to not see, and among the other things, it's something of a riddle, there are the actors. I don't know what people who went on watching Gabriel d'Orza and Saturnin Fabre could see of France. So yes, Guitry is wonderful, he didn't compromise. But the others, no. Guitry only wanted to see himself so he didn't go wrong, he said what the deal was. And sometimes Michel Simon. So there, it's through realism. I think there's a line beyond which cinema doesn't go, beyond realism. I didn't always think so in such a definite way, but as far as I'm concerned that's what it is. And I'm quite doubtful as to whether there are other possibilities.

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RD: New images, it's something of the same story, it's a tool without a creator, without a producer.

SD: Yes. New images are the best example, because for all the time that people have been talking about them, it's enough, we don't see a thing, when we do it's not interesting because what's wonderful with new images, is that, is that there are people who have a technique to make a nail out of... To represent a nail from software. From their point of view, it might be sublime, I can't imagine. I mean I know how to film nails with a 16 mm camera. So there's a moment when we say listen, all of this is very nice but when does it become really interesting for others, and really staggering? It has to be really staggering, in terms of the image, for all your inventions to be useful, or at least artistically. And as, in general, they're technicians, they have scientists' imaginations, i.e. quite trivial, or very playful, med students, not very far-reaching. And I don't know how it'll end up, and it's something that no-one can anticipate, about new images, etc. There will of course be stupefying uses, I think they will enter domestic life directly, and there won't be any mediation of Art...
And there's something very simple with cinema, that cinema represents, let's say, in the history of... It's that cinema is maybe one of the moments - so here I'm going for it - when human beings are in the position of being a spectator, the one who comes afterwards and watches. And who's faced with the finished fact, that's very important. He’s not interacting. Maybe he is on another level socially, but he's the one in front of whom something is presented, he's the one to whom something is shown. It's very important, because the act of showing is certainly the essence of cinema - and not of images. Images are maybe the essence of media and television. But the act of showing, as an act, in the sense that if it's an act a morality becomes possible - if there's no act there's no morality possible. Well maybe cinema is a very important moment, that we were quite right to love - and maybe wrong to under-estimate, let's say philosophically. Let's say there are moments, in the history of civilisations, where there was a good ecology of questions and answers, where people made good serves and there were good returns. Maybe I was good at returning, with regards to cinema, but I never served, I didn't make any films. So I was taken up in this story and I'm happy to have been taken up in this story. It's this story which I'm afraid will disappear. History, to serve, that's a beautiful word, in tennis, it's to help out. People ask what public service is, think of tennis, see what a service is: it's someone who’s here to help you, it's simple. Don't look for anything complicated, don't ask Pascal Joseph, he doesn't know. Don't ask Cotta, she doesn't know. Ask the dictionary, do what Godard does. Serving means there is some one who'll receive, who'll return. If I was able to return with words, that's good. But there are people who could return with their lives, cinema enabled some to return with their lives, with theirs, with their stars, with those they wanted to look like, with their dreams, we're not going to judge that, that's people's lives. Maybe that didn't always exist - maybe in the 19th century, it existed in the 19th century, in theatre, in farce, I don't know, I don't know the history of 19th century popular culture very well. It's for certain that cinema is the absolute follow-up to it. It lasted fifty years. From 1900 to 1950, cinema kept our childhood interests alive, but not only biological children, children in relation to a civilization. I.e. we want to be flattered about our face, our existence, our identifications etc; and the other arts didn't do that anymore, they'd become something else, cinema went on like that until the Second World War. It woke up in 1945, with the hangover from Roma, città aperta, and very quickly Nuit et Brouillard. It didn't prevent people from trying to make literary adaptations of Radiguet, with contrasted shadows for the good bourgeois people of France, but it was over, the worm was in the fruit, the virus was there. And from then on, cinema lived its adult years: forty years.
Now it's senile. Or it's infantile. In America it's infantile, here it's senile. We have Berri, for the elderly, they have Terminator, for children. There's no adulthood in cinema: it's past, so of course I'm in trouble. But it did happen that cinema was, if I show you something, you tell me something. You tell me something: it's good, it's no good. It's maybe this fundamental thing that is being blown away. They show people - you think they show on television? On TV you programme stuff. It's not showing, so people don't see it. If you tell me, this is a lighter, I show it to you, I'll say I don't like, I don't like the orange, but it reminds me of a lighter I had, actually it might be mine, that was taken from me... And we make a story, from an action. It's not visual, it's the actions, it's the action that counts. Afterwards there’s visual, but there are thirty-six ways of visualizing this lighter, including that strange way we call cinema, which consists of placing a camera, setting the lights and making sure that this lighter is the one that will be filmed. And the day when it's a computer-animated image, how do you show a computer-animated image? We will face the question. If we don't face it the computer-animated image won't participate in art. After all, maybe art will pass somewhere else, or art will pass nowhere, or it will disappear. But I mean the act of showing, in cinema, was where cinema and theatre, in the end, were never really differentiated. Where cinema and photography, because what's powerful in great photos is that the act of showing is more important than what's shown - there's still someone saying: watch that, I saw that. And it's in this sense that cinema is impure, because the act of showing is impure. Showing is impure. Because by showing, you're sticking your neck out. You can show something and have people laugh at you. On TV you never get laughed at because they never show anything. They throw out stuff that ends up directly in the bin. Or they show people who get ousted after ten years because you're sick of seeing them. It's ridiculous: there's no possible morality, there's no possible morality of images with TV, so no possible criticism of TV. That's how I found it. On the other hand, criticism of cinema has been possible. But it was possible because cinema was possible, because cinema was the art of inventing transitional objects and inventing distances.
So when I watch the way Fritz Lang organizes, around Glenn Ford, in The Big Heat, an interlocking of spaces that is incredibly sophisticated for a film noir that showed in neighborhood cinemas, well I know, then, whether I'm ten years old or twenty years old or my current age, I know that I'm there, in this mesh of spaces, in time, in this time, in this very space-time. I know where I am, I can only be where Lang put me. Because Lang is a true film-maker who won't put me just anywhere. And I'll say that cinema, fundamentally - and that's why you shouldn't bad-mouth auteur theory too much, even though it has huge flaws. Rather than the culturalist conception of cinema, which likes anonymous art, because it enables it to rule through statistics. Yes, there has to be a man, there has to be someone who at some point, takes us by the hand, and tells us: "There, you're going to watch this scene, which is horrible, I'm called Hitchcock, you're going to be very scared. But you'll see this scene from a place that is your place, which is the place for you, and this place will be constructed through mise-en-scène. You won't be alternately here with the camera, then up there, then there, then there. You're a specific height, you're with the camera there, and the camera has its rules and it follows them, and you'll see that space is vectorised. And you'll see, and you'll understand, and you'll be scared, or not, from a position in the world."
There's a thing I recount very often, so I'll repeat myself, but never mind. The article that made me understand, not cinema, which made me understand where I was in cinema - I knew it very well, but I hadn't understood it - it's an article by Rivette. And I must have told you this story, because for me it's... it's the matrix for everything. It was in front of a Pontecorvo film called Kapo, which was a film about the concentration camps made in 1960...1961. Pontecorvo is a left-wing Italian film-maker, bad film-maker, but good guy, against the Algeria war and everything, but really a bad film-maker. And Rivette writes an extraordinary article. Rivette was thirty at the time, I must have been fifteen or sixteen. He tells the ending of the film and he says: On Emmanuelle Riva's corpse - who's dead, she died on the - I haven't seen the film, I haven't even seen the film, it's as if I'd seen it, and there was this image in the Cahiers, but you see it in so many films, that visual cliché, that visual, that it's as if I'd seen it.. So she dies, and the camera reframes her face so that it fits right into the top of the screen and the shot is more balanced. But she's a Kapo in a camp, and she's wearing a striped pajama and she's certainly a bit too chubby for the role. There, that's it. And Rivette says: "The man who, at that precise moment - at the moment when she dies - does a forward travelling shot to fit her more nicely in the frame is worthy of the deepest contempt." Rivette wrote that, as Rivette can write, very jansenist, and I remember, I said "Obviously! Obviously he's right: you don't do that, you just don't do that!" It's... For me it's really the absolute crime. So you say it's really the interests of a cinephile gone crazy. It's the absolute crime, someone who does that... For years, I forgot that, because it seemed to be the obvious truth; and the idea that it wasn't quite done first came back to me when I saw some film-makers redo the Kapo travelling shot, without people yelling. So I told myself, well, you're the one being hyper-moral about this, who doesn't tolerate it, who might even be personally blocked on this, on this scene, on this primitive scene. That's maybe my primitive scene, something that happens in the camps, and maybe a lot of people from my generation, even if they don't realize. But after, we don’t know. For the younger people, we don’t know. Because we don't have much information, I don't have any information on the historic imagination of a twenty-five year old boy. When they make films, even when they're not bad, they talk about their friends, they talk about lifestyle. That's fine, that's what you do in general at that age. And then, maybe not much information on the original scenes: are they still in history, or does it apply to me and already not for them anymore?
Anyway, that's an aside. The fact remains that I asked myself the question of Kapo again when I saw other types of images arrive. For example, computer-generated images, and for example I saw on television all the charity things, Band Aid, all the first things on... Singers who passionately listen to themselves singing with eyes closed and smiling to the angels, so that we don't see instead the little children with the big tummies. I.e. the swapping of the market for charity. And of course that disgusts me, even if I have nothing against... I like Stevie Wonder a lot. But I find it a bit sad that we're reduced to this, that we're reduced, really, to charity and so the type of images, the type of aesthetics, that goes with charity, which, precisely, isn't cinema. Maybe cinema, from a Christian point of view, was in relation with compassion, at least with empathy. I have a lot of compassion for the Japanese middle-age peasants who get killed in Mizoguchi's films. Because he has a way of filming them - in the 12th century, they speak Japanese and I don't understand a thing - so that I know that it's true. There, I know that's it's true, that that's how it happened. That the movement is true. Not the scene, not the costumes. That the movement was true, that the camera movement Mizoguchi does then - a sort of slightly sad Buddhist, cynical, Mizoguchi - the movement is correct. As long as cinema does that, I'm a citizen of the world and even of the world that's past, of history. The day I don't have that anymore, and not in Japan, at home, in my culture, the day when I have the singer showing himself singing so that we don't see that it's still a horrible sight, I tell myself, do I want to watch him? I'm willing to pay not to see him, I'm very generous, I'm willing to pay not to see this worthless singer singing a song, pretending to believe in it, so that I don't see... I.e. we're already in a sort of third non-image: we no longer want to see the state of the world, whereas we have the means to see as we never have, the state of the world, i.e. a lot of not very nice things. They replace the state of the world with the charity of the state of the world, it makes show-biz work, it makes television works. I've said, I don't want to see that. Maybe I don't have the courage to watch the state of the world today. Children dying of hunger is very sad: they all look alike, it's a very bad show, it's very monotonous. The first who does it, wonderful, it’s an act of courage; the twenty-third, it's some poor chap on television saying "Oh, man! Enough, let's go home!" You can't resent him, you'd do the same. The one who edits doesn't even watch, he doesn't even watch. And the one who shows, he doesn't even show. Well, all this is a finished economy. It's an economy of, there's still a fellow man, there's still an Other.

RD: Ultimately, the visual, what you call the visual, it's what is used to not watch the world.

SD: There. I call visual the image of the singer instead of the children. I call visual - for me, I'm trying to put a little bit of order into this - the image that comes instead of another, that you don't want to see anymore - I'm not saying I'm better than the others and I want to see it - but that you don't want to see. Because it wouldn't be effective any more. It's lost - it's like the Ciotat train. It's not only the Ciotat train which has lost, today trains are less scary, and the TGV doesn't look like the Ciotat train.
Sadly, children dying of hunger or illness looks a lot like what it was a century ago, it doesn't change that much. So it has lost a lot of its strength. And the cameras are everywhere, you can now film death in close-up, and it's disgusting because obviously it's worthless, it's a bad show.
Even death, you had to deal with it, people in the Middle Ages made a show out of it, they lived with it and they had more courage than us because they weren't scared. At the same time, they laughed because they knew it was part of life. Today, we're forced to tell our kids who saw Le Grand Bleu and, to our great dismay, find it good, because we find it not good, that, "it's great: death exists, we'd completely forgotten to tell you, it exists, it's even desirable." That's even why it exists, why a child can understand that it exists. The child doesn't understand death, he understands suicide. One day he understands that you can want to die, any child has been through that, and that's when he understands death. Le Grand Bleu is a kind of praise of suicide, what's more enticing, and modern. Cinephile parents - I don't have any children, but I would have been no better - say: "It's not a good film, you're rebelling against society, little one, then go and see Zéro de Conduite." No, that's a repertory film, it shows in film clubs! Vigo's force is lost, it's a real shame. And the little one isn't rebelling, he's saying death exists, there is the Other.
And really a great Other, with a capital O. You want to tell him, yes, there is an Other, but anyway it's non-negotiable, everyone will die sooner or later. And there's also a smaller Other, you're friend, who is of course your worst enemy. Your parents, very important, but you'll spend your life fighting with them. And there are the Belgians, your neighbours, but we could stop despising them. And then there's, there's Ethiopia, and then there's China. To wrap up my Doctors- Citizen of the world thing. When I travelled, I tried not to disturb, I really wasn't a bothersome traveller, I travelled in 4th class and I said there, I made them a gift of my plain humanity, of someone who's trying to expiate his parents' colonial crimes. We did what we could; it didn't impress them too much.
They then, incidentally, became crazy. But it's the "there is an Other" aspect. And today, I call visual when you can't stand to see the Other because you know him too well - it's true that we've had the time, for a century, maybe even thanks to cinema, to see him, and to see what he looks like, it's true that, at one point, we had a lot of cheek, in cinema, to play with fire. We showed very ill people, we showed people dying, we showed corpses, we trampled Hollywood's code, which was very puritanical. We showed sex in close-up shots, and we realized that it was very boring, and at the same time that we wanted to watch that. I mean, now you have to assess all of that. Well, in all this, the Other has disappeared a bit, and there's an enormous enterprise, which goes through television a lot, but which maybe goes beyond television, which will tell you: there's a market for replacement images. For example you like such and such a singer, he's nice and on top of it he's like you, he cries when he sees the children dying of hunger. Look at him. And it's free! And all the ads will come. I want to say, it's disgusting. Let him sing alone in his bath, and let him try to... And, when he sings for television, let him be filmed well. Obviously, it seems trivial, in relation to the emotional blackmail of "Oh, but if you say that, it means..." I want to say, I have AIDS, you could do an AIDS rally. But no, instead I'm ready to pay so that you don't do it, to tell you how much - because I don't want to see Poivre D'Arvor. I've seen him enough as it is, he's a flunkey, I don't want to see a flunkey. So I'm faced with these images. So we can call that visual. We could also temporarily call visual, the sum of the replacement images for very precise reasons. No replacement because we would have the choice and the fun, for playful reasons, it would be wonderful if we could know about such and such a situation, that we can make this image, but also this, but also this, but also this. That's not what happens.
In all the events that happen in the world, there's an image that very quickly comes to cover up all the others: so what happens on the television news, when suddenly the images... Even the most beautiful image we've seen recently, which is the little man in front of the tanks in China, which makes me cry. For once, there was an image of liberty - of liberty. But even that image, it ended up preventing all the others from China. Now China is that. It could have been worse: when it's Yugoslavia, we can't even manage to make one. So then, there's none at all. There's none at all. There you want to say, it's been useless, cinema: because we have people close to us, we have a powerful television - it's there, under fire, it gets killed, and in fact it's very heroic. There's Dubrovnik, which is also very beautiful, so we could also invest in the tourism yet to come. And then no, because suddenly you don't understand anything anymore. And when you don't understand anything anymore, when there's no conception of where the Other is and where I am as an Other - because I am the Other of the Other, of course - when the question of the Other is gone, all the images are gone and all that's left is the visual.
So the visual can be anything. So you zoom. It's the zoom. The zoom is masturbation, what masturbation is to love. So a bit of masturbation is good, I'm really not - but there's more than that, we are a little, a little Big Brother. So the cameramen zoom. They zoom. The Pope, they zoom. The Panzani pasta - no, Panzani no, Panzani no, because they've paid a lot, so there there's someone who knows you mustn't zoom, because it was written somewhere. The holy scriptures, the only ones left, are advertising storyboards. To sell Panzani pasta. How could we be proud?

Translation and transcript by "nletore & newland @ KG" with only minor edits by me.

Serge Daney on PBS!

2011-02-17T20:47:00.004Z

Sorry for the shallow post, I can't help it.

Serge Daney appears briefly in this short extract of Histoire(s) du cinéma as part of film critic Ignatiy Vishnevetsky's choise of "movies that made us critics" on Ebert presents at the movies.

It's the episode 2A (Seul le cinéma) (Daney appears 1:10 minutes into the video)

I looks like it aired on February 11th.

Historic.

Journey of a Cine-Son - Part 1 (with transcript)

2011-02-17T09:51:00.002Z

As mentioned a few days ago, here's the translated transcript of the video interview with Serge Daney which has just been published on Vimeo. Prologue and Part 1 (The Cahiers Period) only. I'll publich the rest of the transcript later.

Prologue

Regis Debray: Serge Daney, you were born in 1944. We know you as a moralist of images, or a sociologist of the times, I believe one of the best. But we don’t know you yourself, i.e. you don’t talk about yourself in your articles, the times narrate themselves through you. Once you called yourself a cine-son, cinéphile / cine-son, as if the image had been your ancestry, your family. Can you tell us something about the images that looked at you when you were a child, and the way you looked at them, as a child and a teenager?

Serge Daney: I think the first image that counted for me, almost the definitive image, wasn’t a cinema image, it was the geography atlas. I thought about it recently and I realized that it was the image that looked at my childhood, literally, in the sense that at home there was a map which was the map of the world. Or the maps from school, still very colonial, all multi-colored, with the idea that each country is a different colour and that the more names on the map, the better. I very quickly had an extraordinary propensity to memorize names, I think I’ve always known the capitals of the world, I’ve always known Honduras’ was Tegucigalpa, always. I can’t remember a time when I didn’t. All this to say that it was the enigma of the map that was the first image that gazed at my childhood. There were no images at home, there was no culture, very few books. The other formative space was radio. I am a child of the radio, since there was no TV, and still, cinema came in third, cinema was my mother and my aunt, especially my mother, who would say, “Oh, let’s not wash the dishes, we’ll do it later, let’s go to the cinema and we’ll take the child”. And so very quickly I was dragged along, happily, in the neighborhood cinemas of the 11ème. There were loads of those cinemas, a good dozen. And I went to see the films that adults went to see. The only favor they would do me was to go and see swashbucklers, I loved swashbucklers. I didn’t even realize they were Italian then, for me they were my favorite, and my mother of course preferred melodramas. Actually, it was always Italy, I realized later, much, much later. So the formative, in terms of images, I think it’s a fundamental image, is the atlas. So it’s not a face, it’s not a portrait, but it works as any true image, like a face or a portrait. Because any true image, in the final analysis, is a face, and any face, in the final analysis, is a gaze. So something gazed at me from the geography maps. I think it’s very important, I’m happy I thought about it recently, because it’s one of those questions people often ask and every one comes up with their list of the ten childhood unforgettable emotions… No, I think the first image was the map in so far as it was a promise. It’s a promise that I, grandson of poor people, born at the boundary between the 11ème and the 12ème, where I live now, so really a Paris kid, 1944, in a terribly impoverished and disqualified France, profoundly disqualified, where the Algerian war will soon happen, I have the feeling – so obviously maybe now I’m reconstructing a lot – to have been the child of those times (obviously I’m not the only one), and to have developed very slowly my relationship to what we call images, especially cinema, under the auspices of an image more important than all others, the geography map, the small Larousse atlas. And then later the bigger atlases, and when I could buy the most beautiful atlases, well, I bought them. And for me no map was ever complete enough, and as soon as I found a mistake it was discarded, and so on. It’s a child’s thing, it’s a visual thing, because the map isn’t the territory, as Korzibsky says, but still, from a certain point of view, the territory looks an awful lot like the map. When you take the plane for the first time, you realize that maybe what you see is the map. And I think that gaze of the map upon me is programmatic. Because it was always the map of the world. I wasn’t chauvinistic. Really not, from birth. So the far-away countries, the weird and complicated names, the strange drawings made by borders, the names that changed, when Urga becomes Ulan-Bataar, I had the feeling that something happened that wasn’t talked about, I was rather furious. So for me cinema is the same, it’s a promise, a promise to be one day a citizen of the world.

RD: It’s a travel that continues?

SD: It’s a travel that continues, but it’s mostly the promise of travel. I’ve travelled a lot, thanks to cinema in fact, film critics travel. I also travelled of my own free will, out of fancy, out of some kind of mystique of the walker, very fashionable during the 70s. But I get the feeling that this promise was mostly kept, because I’ve lived from it. I’ve lived from that world map, it’s only now that it’s fracturing, that it’s becoming politically obsolete. It’s only now that I look at the map of my childhood, which in fact was Yalta but I didn’t realize-

RD: Now you have to take the pre-1914 maps.

SD: Yes.

RD: Grand-father’s maps are very good.

SD: Exactly. And my map has run its course. Today, I’m not interested in geography, except by… And that’s where I see that there’s a life of the past, because whether Croatians are independent or not, whether they’re drunk on their Croatianness leaves me absolutely cold. That there’s a new country with a new color called Croatia or Slovenia leaves me stone-cold, whereas when I was small, really small, a new country was like someone being born. Whence the fact that it was pretty easy for me, as a kid, to be for the independence of Algeria. I didn’t have the slightest trace of a political idea. It seemed obvious. It was like… the more, the merrier, and the more images there will be. And anyway it doesn’t change a thing since we’re citizens of the world.

RD: And you can escape society with images. I.e. to find the world you have to run away from home. How does it happen, this flight, is cinema a refuge, a uterus, a protection for the adolescent?

SD: It’s well before adolescence, it’s childhood, cinema. It’s not adolescence. It’s childhood. I.e., it’s a much more intense, much more care-free feeling, and much more serious, of not being part of the world. Or to only just be tolerated by the world as it is. And you know by the age of five, like Duras quoting Queneau saying that a writer knows he is one by the age of seven. If he hasn’t written by the age of seven it’s not worth pushing it. It’s excessive, but true. It means you know from the first time you go into the courtyard, on the first day of primary school, that there are people with whom you won’t be friends, and that there’ll be a group of three or four in a corner, the introverts, maybe later, as for me, the homosexuals. In any case the cinephiles, obviously, and they won’t share their treasure, they know they belong to another version of the world, or of humanity.

Part I: The Cahiers period

SD: It’s not escaping. I’ve never escaped, I have no imagination. So people who escaped, teen-agers, kids – there are lots of ways of escaping: in fantasy, in science-fiction, in a better world: utopias. Political utopias, or religious. It never interested me much because I have no imagination. I always find the world as it is wonderful, and I find it wonderful that I was able to inhabit it, in the end, and without losing too many feathers since I more or less did what I wanted. But the idea was: we will have this world, but we will inhabit it at last. That’s, for me, the essence of my cinephilia: we will inhabit it at last, and it will be the world, never society. Only horrible things are to be expected from society. Well, that is something that may come back, because I think about it a lot at the moment, and I think the situation in France at the moment, this Vichy-like climate which is with us again, gives me a strange feeling. I suddenly have the feeling of living through what existed before I was born, really just before, the feeling that I, who was born in 1944, am closing the loop with 1940-44, i.e. with an already familiar feeling of French spinelessness, to which all of the French 20th century is more or less…
France, nothing to write home about, is not the greatest country of the century. Am I exaggerating now, after the facts? Have I ever had the feeling, as a child might, that I will never be a part of this world that wants to make me believe that Pierre Fresnais is the absolute ideal of masculinity, of heroism, of moral grandeur, with which a ten-year-old child might identify? For that’s what was going on, in the 1950s: Gabin, Fresnay or Fernandel, they were the ones who were offered as monsters of humanity, of complexity, of Frenchness, of great actors. Still, they were very reactionary, violently anti-youth: French society in the 50s, when you see the films – I don’t quite know about literature, but it can’t have been that much better – it stank. It stank for a long time, and there were things that had become unbearable: a certain entombment in French as a language, which carried on in the cinema of “French quality”, very literary, i.e. full of admiration for literature but not sufficiently admiring of cinema. A cinema that I didn’t like very much, because what’s more, I had my childhood interests.
I would have preferred, like any child, to identify with attractive people. So yes, attractive people existed, they were called Cary Grant, Gary Cooper, Henry Fonda. They were all American. And they were attractive. Even today, even having lived a lot, when I see North-by-Northwest, I think that Gary Grant is still an ideal for the Ego. It’s a beautiful story, Gary Grant. You’d rather look like Gary Grant than Raimu, even if you think Raimu is a monument, or Michel Simon, who is a breath-taking actor.
As children, not yet cinephiles but children of cinema, we were presented with monsters with which to identify. I’m not talking about the "auteurs", I’m talking about the actors, it’s much more interesting. To say, at the age of ten, “Michel Simon is a great actor!” – are you nuts?! At the age of ten, you say “How I’d like to look like James Stewart! He is tall and thin like me, but he knows how to use his fists, and he can dance, so he’s better than me in every way.” Jimmy Stewart was American! I didn’t even see that he was of the people, that he was a very popular character. I loved these people, without, for all that, loving America. America is something else. I was fine with being in France.
It wasn’t that. I haven’t had a miserable childhood. I was poor, but loved, so protected. I’m trying to see the implicit landscape that was in me as a child. I think that children think a lot, they understand everything. The problem is, they don’t yet have the structures, and nobody listens to them.
And I’m trying to rebuild what must have happened then, when I wasn’t particularly cinephile, rather I’d read an incredible amount of books, as all children do at that age. And literature has always seemed to me greater than everything, even now. And I realize that somehow, it’s not possible to tremble, as a child, in front of Danielle Darrieux. Now, I like her a lot, Danielle Darrieux, because I’m old enough. But Danielle Darrieux had already terrified us when she did Marie-Octobre. And we could sense that she’d made film with the Germans, that there was something fishy, that they didn’t tell us.
And that poor Harry Baur, whom nobody talked about after the war, even though he was a hugely popular actor, who ended up in a camp. Harry Baur, when you see his films today – unfortunately he didn’t work with the great "auteurs" – he’s a deeply moving actor.
So I think that a child always knows everything, always. That’s why I liked psycho-analysis, later, because psycho-analysis supposes that you always know everything there is to know. The problem is that you don’t know how to say it, that’s something else.
So yes, there is a moment when you become a cinephile. We can go forward a bit, it was in 1959, you can put a date on it, it’s an important moment of my life. And maybe, at that moment, France really entered its economic boom. De Gaulle, whatever you may say, it’s not the Fourth Republic. Maybe the modern world is arriving. After all, the country’s getting richer, even if we don’t realize. All that probably played a part. And there was the New Wave. The New Wave appears to be a young movement, whereas in fact it’s made by people who are “oldies”: from a psychological standpoint, they’re not yé-yés. Nevertheless, they have this utterly simple idea: we’ll film our friends, and we’ll film Paris as it is. And filming Paris as it is, when your name is Godard in 1960, gives you Breathless: he saw that there were glass doors, and that a lot of things were white, and that you shouldn’t go for a dark picture just because art is dark. So obviously, everyone yelled about “the bad editing”, all of that. But what he was aiming for was realism. Cinema is a realistic art or it is nothing. It is an art destined for realism, and which will have the limits of realism.
So at some point, these people, from the generation just before mine, who wrote for the Cahiers, only yesterday they were writing there, they make their first film. They’re against all the idiots – who are those we have always identified– and they simply film their generation. For all that, they don’t become politicized. They don’t become what people hoped: not only good film-makers, but sublime political and social consciences. Those consciences exist, but they had no talent for cinema. They existed next door, at Positif. That’s how it happened: I was completely synchronous with it. It’s now that I wonder again about the cinema I imagined with the normal films I saw as a child, and with the image of France it carried, and I realize that I didn’t really know what to do with the image of France. I’m someone who talks softly, I hate people who shout. So I’ve spent my life avoiding them or trying to beat them in some way or another so that they wouldn’t make a din. I was very sensitive to that. That’s the fear of society. The world is a rumor, it’s a rustling, it’s a symphony. The music of the times also promised the world.
And the second absolute revelation is that yes, cinema is something extraordinary, it can film things, it can bear witness. The only trouble is that it bore witness between 1914-1918 – great testimony, unforgettable, the beginnings of cinema – and the Second World War. I’m afraid that it doesn’t bear witness to anything much after that, we’ll come back to that. As for the Second World War and its true metaphysical accident, which wasn’t the war itself, there have always been wars, but it’s the history of the camps. Seeing Night and Fog at the Lycée Voltaire ciné-club at the age of ten, is not falling under the charm of “So, Mr Cinema, you were a little cinephile and you jacked off to Ava Gardner!”. Yes, but afterwards! And not in the same world! More now, in fact, I find Ava Gardner more moving now than I did then. I chanced upon the capacity that cinema has to say, this happened. And it’s so monstrous, that in a way, we’re fine: “It can’t happen again”. I don’t think so anymore at all. I think it will happen again.
A lot of people have always thought so. Brecht’s phrase, we would recite it stupidly like a catechism, “the bitch that bore him” and bla-dee-bla, actually Brecht had seen nothing, he would have done better to shut up, it’s not the best example. And secondly we said it, we didn’t believe it. Just as when we cried “Fascism will not pass!” in the 60s and 70s, it didn’t pass anywhere, there wasn’t any. It only existed somewhat in China, where we thought that it was good. Today, it’s everywhere, but no-one is demonstrating anymore.
So I have the feeling, indeed, that an old map of the world is coming back, that maybe I miss cinema and that we will miss cinema because cinema promised a world. Whereas the world wasn’t complete. It was 70% American. But America was world-wide, America was… It was quite a hodge-podge, in terms of peoples and immigration. It was the cinema of Hollywood, the American cinema, that made us. For what other cinema could have made us, after the war, if not American cinema, which was at its peak of happiness, of the capacity for happiness, of grace. Of grace in that boorish culture that ended up producing Dallas fifteen years later.
But at the time, in the films of Douglas Sirk, America is beautiful to behold. When Fred Astaire dances, it’s beautiful. And they only danced over there, they didn’t dance in Europe. All this, we knew it with certainty. It was a promise of a world, even if the world was very Americanised.
For America has been the only country that, for a very long time, used the mythologies of other peoples, told stories that weren’t theirs – King Arthur, the French Revolution – with their ideological interests and their American bumpkin idiocy. But they did what nobody else did. No-one’s ever seen a French Western: it would be a cultural parody, instantly. So Americans, at the time, had – thankfully or not, I can’t decide – have always had an absolutely unique place in the world. The problem is that they don’t have the means to keep that promise anymore, or to keep the promise of the promise of the world. So much so that today they are, after all, quite despised, while all the time being totally dominant culturally. Which is a very, very bad… A very, very unhealthy situation.
But, at the time, in the 50s, Americans had all the reasons they needed to have finally decided to liberate the free world – they didn’t understand that much about Nazism –, they gave chocolate to everybody and poured out their films. The studio system was on its last legs, and still it produced magnificent films. Our great naivety was that we took terminal things, which were called Rio Bravo, North-by-Northwest or Anatomy of a Murder – these are formative films for me, founding films – we took these for the normal routine of cinema – of cinema, not of American cinema – when in fact it was the end.

RD: To come back to you, Serge Daney, you studied literature. How does one become a film critic? I suppose you weren’t happy with texts, with literature, you wanted something else…

SD: As for that… Well, to answer the most concrete question, let’s say: you don’t become a film critic. It can’t be a vocation, it’s barely a job. I’ve managed to live off it but without wanting to. Apart from the fact that it’s dead, according to me, the question’s not worth asking. When there really were film critics, the few who counted had a funny pathway: as if, I don’t know, they had forgotten to do something else and they found themselves enjoying their position as mediators, or transmitters of something. So there was something to transmit. Bazin had something to transmit, Jean-Louis Bory had something to transmit, or even, for a while, Michel Cournot. They weren’t people with sure taste, but they were borne by the times. And in film criticism, like all mediation, there is the love of cinema, but you can’t explain it. You see billions of films, and so you have a certain culture. There are those who keep it all to themselves, they exist, even among the most serious cinephiles. There are those who make films, who transfer. And there are those who end up like me, having to tell the story of someone who spent his life watching what others had done. So what the others had done at the time had to have some value and it must have been worth it to use it and produce little written objects – still, quite well written – or to belong to the turbulent but in the end unique existence of that thing called the Cahiers du Cinéma, still one of the greatest periodicals of the century, even though I’m in a good position to know that it’s also only a poor little magazine. There was something to transmit. For me, the choice wasn’t between literature and cinema; I think that the choice of cinema, was maybe, as you suggested earlier, a way still to live in society, still, because you can’t exist outside of it. That way, if you’re going to be part of society, you might as well be part of the base, and the base goes to the cinema.
Luckily, it so happens that cinema – I found out later – was born on two legs, a popular leg, basic, trivial, imaginary, and a cultivated leg, complicated, philosophical, elitist, that called for criticism. And so choosing cinema was, without realizing, from an intellectual, theoretical point of view, choosing a culture, a house with two doors: a door that everyone uses – and that you have to use, or else you understand nothing about cinema - and a hidden door, through which people, from the beginning, asked absolutely extravagant things of cinema. All you need to do is read the texts Abel Gance wrote as a young man. He was, after all, an intellectual.
Well, I didn’t realize it then, but I think it was the right choice. Because choosing literature, or another art, but for me it would have been literature, that was obvious – maybe I didn’t have the courage.
I was a man of communication, like many people from my generation, and I preferred communication in society – which is quite something for someone asocial – to isolation and maybe to the courage needed to produce a work by yourself. Producing a work in painting, literature, music, from 1945 onwards, it’s choosing either a chic deception, or a somewhat intransitive true solitude, which I’m not sure I wanted. That’s what I tell myself now. All this to say that it was wonderful and that I don’t regret having chosen cinema, since you could go in with everyone else or by yourself.

RD: I’m wondering if you haven’t defined the Cahiers du Cinéma as much as cinema by talking of elitism and populism, that bizarre mixture, let’s say elitism, the respect of writing, and populism, the American B movie aspect. Would you agree to say Chateaubriand plus Samuel Fuller equals New Wave, or equals Cahiers du Cinéma? How would you now define the Cahiers du Cinéma from that era?

SD: The Cahiers that I started reading, I started reading the Cahiers du Cinéma like a bible, in 1959. But I didn’t understand a thing that was going on. I’ve reconstituted the history well enough by reading the recent books that were written on the history of the Cahiers. It was much more complicated and interesting than what I imagined at the time. I wasn’t a child any more then, so I had less of an excuse, I was a teen-ager, and what didn’t interest me… I wasn’t curious. The fetish of the yellow Cahiers, those sorts of bold statements that the Cahiers would produce with phenomenal nerve, and at the time I didn’t realize, but you could sense that it was problematic. I started reading the Cahiers when they almost became right-wing, and even far right, because of Rohmer and the people he’d let into the editorial staff, that famous Mac-Mahonian school, which we’re talking about again a bit now. Who were people who were all on the far right politically, even though none of them had a political career. And none of them was a creator, either. But they gave us a few quite strong texts, that had a great impact on me, and part of which, I would still say, is correct.
For example, cinema is realist. Cinema is of a realist essence. Every time we realized that a film-maker we took to be a visionary, a creator of lyrical spaces etc, and we saw twenty years later that his films held fast, we realized that his films were an absolutely banal description of what he was faced with at the time but that only he saw. Today, when you see Fellini’s films, to take a film-maker who was often credited with a sort of imaginary baroque and a gut vision etc. It’s not true! And his films that were made that way are the bad ones. On the other hand, Ginger and Fred, magnificent film, slightly under-rated I would say, deeply moving film on media, and television… That’s Rome as it is today. It’s very inferior to what Berlusconi’s Italy is today. In realism. So I think that cinema is realist. The difference is that when I started reading the Cahiers, there were people who wrote in it and who weren’t Cahiers, fundamentally, but who occupied the space and said, for example: “Fellini films Giulietta Masina: she’s ugly! So…” So they had a racial conception of that, which was… Even I reacted, I thought, we’re not going to discredit someone just because they’re ugly. I thought that wasn’t nice. I’m talking of the precise moment when I started reading the Cahiers, 59-60. In 1961 it was already less – I can now reconstitute it because we know the whole story – for sure there was a putsch and some pushed for modernity, for avant-garde, for openness, for what was simmering in French culture, in that France of the 1960s which was also coming out of its post-war period. It was the first texts of Pierre Schaeffer, Pierre Boulez, and Roland Barthes. Rivette said “I don’t understand a thing, but let’s go, we’ll talk about cinema to Boulez or Barthes!” They didn’t say anything interesting, because it wasn’t their thing, but they started making us more world-wise. I followed all of this passively. I had a relationship of love with that yellow thing that was the Cahiers, which I could feel they were already an institution, already a long story. I saw, with satisfaction, the old critics becoming good film-makers: two of them at least, well three with Chabrol, Truffaut and Godard, who were a hit, were successful. And two others had more problems, Rivette and Rohmer. I found that absolutely normal: it’s extraordinary how adolescence is not at all curious, whereas childhood is curious. It lasted until 1964, years which for me were absolutely stupefying, where I can’t remember what I thought or lived through at the time. I’ve got a black hole of a few years in my life. I know that my day started at the rue d’Ulm cinémathèque, at six. We would watch films one after the other, and since we didn’t have a penny to spare, we would go and eat sandwiches. We would miss the last metro and we would cross Paris talking about the films with three or four friends, alter egos. We lived as absolute zombies. And then the idea of going into the Cahiers made its way, but it came slowly, very slowly. I think now that I was so certain it was my magazine that I didn’t hurry.

RD: There’s a man who counted for a lot, who died in 58, with whom you’ve sometimes been compared, who was André Bazin. André Bazin was a Catholic. And by the way, someone should tell why so many Catholics got involved in cinema. But anyway, who is André Bazin, for you, today?

SD: It’s strange, because Bazin, one, I never knew him because he died in 1958. Two, it was first a name and there was a lot of respect and emotion surrounding him, and he was good-looking. Bazin’s texts, I read them very late, I didn’t read them as a young cinéphile, even though it was part of a sort of household cannon. I could feel he wasn’t like the others. Firstly, he was a bit older. There was also that thing with religion that was bothering us more than anything – yes, but he was a left-wing Catholic. And then strangely, I read Bazin – seriously, as you read to study or write – much later, in the 70s, when we’d become very politicized and we wanted to wring the neck of idealist conceptions of cinema, which at heart were Bazin’s. That was when we unearthed, in the Cahiers, after 68, a sort of very violent theoreticism, that we unearthed that other aspect of the Cahiers du Cinéma culture – which wasn’t mine either, which is the other fellow aspect, I would say – the Russians: Eisenstein, Vertov. It was Godard who forced us to watch Vertov, who for us was only a name in Sadoul’s history of cinema, and like everything Sadoul-ized, was slightly suspicious. And Eisenstein, yes, he was overwhelming, but apart from that, he didn’t speak to us that much.
So there are two traditions: that of Bazin, but problematic, because of the religion, which we weren’t at all ready to take up, and the heritage of the Russians. Bazin already had his tug-of-war with that. It was a good period, intellectually, now that I think of it, the debate about depth of field and continuity on the one hand, montage and heterogeneity on the other. When you see the smartest people of the century, like Godard, he didn’t reconcile the two. He’s always going to and fro. He’s a marvelous editor, and also a marvelous musician, because he’s a true artist. Now I can live with the idea that both exist. But still, we didn’t start with the montage aspect, because otherwise we would have ended up with semiology and advertising. We would have been dead. When we talk about the procedures of mastering, and the smart-alec aspect of things, and Eisenstein was more than a smart-alec, he was a genius at manipulation, i.e. he was only interested in manipulation. Eisenstein died relatively young and castrated, i.e. broken. “Eisensteinism”, if it had existed, and it did exist, in cinema, it gives masters, little masters. And there’s nothing worse in cinema than mastery. Cinema is something which obviously needs a bit of mastery, but not too much. In which sense it’s not the other arts, where I think, in other arts, maybe in painting, mastery has a meaning. I don’t know. But I wouldn’t say it of cinema. Which is to say just how much cinema is an art from below. It’s an art of life.
I hated theatre as soon as I went. I think I was taken to the Comédie Française, and I ended up on the top floor, or on the contrary on the front row at children matinees, all of a sudden seeing the starlets arriving from the back of the… and who howled, like mad-men, supposedly natural dialogue that was supposed to make us laugh, Molière’s comedies which already didn’t make us laugh that much anymore, I have a real panic, and the noise of the boards, the noise of people on the boards is a traumatic sound for me. Even today, I’m reconciled with the idea of theatre, the idea of theatre is deeply moving – and a good deal of cinema is endlessly paying homage to theatre – but the praxis of theatre, maybe because the theatres hadn’t been rebuilt for a new generation of French, who were slightly taller than the others, so it’s unbelievable how uncomfortable the theatre was. For me it was society, theatre was society. Well I didn’t see it that clearly, now I see it, theatre was society, cinema was the world. Well I belong to these people and I’m probably not the only one, maybe I was more conscious of it than others and I was very determined, I said no to theatre equals no to society.
Which by the way wasn’t smart because when society re-claimed me through… When society cornered me, in 68, of course I was part of the group that took the Odeon. I, who didn’t give a damn about the Odeon, I never went, these Italian-style theatres frightened me, and I even occupied the Odeon, so we even went through being trapped in a claustrophobic place. It’s not my fault, and in 68 it was an absolutely theatrical even, absolutely not filmic. But keeping 68 for later, so now let’s say in 58, cinema is my home because people don’t yell. The music yells, but we’re used to that, the music… The people don’t yell, you can murmur at the cinema, and there’s no recitation. It’s a popular art, an art from below.

RD: On popular myth level, cinema is America. So I suppose that you then went to America. How did your discovery of Hollywood happen, of the New World? When was it, and what for?

SD: It was in 1964. I was twenty. I left with someone who at the time was very close, who is called Louis Skorecki. We really left like neophytes, penniless ragged kids, on a charter that took twenty hours to cross the Atlantic, that nobody wanted to insure, and we ended up in Hollywood in the home of the Cahiers correspondent, Axel Madsen, who kindly hosted us – he wasn’t that rich either. And – now that I think of it, I find it quite moving – we had a list of people to see, with the idea that some of them had never been approached, that there was no interviews of them, and that that was a good way to bargain our way into the Cahiers, to go and publish in the Cahiers – that was the idea. I was very shy, my English was bad. Skorecki was more outgoing, he wanted a piece of the action. He was the motor, I was slightly zombie-like, I think. I was twenty. What is amazing is that we were carried by our certainties. Our certainties were that – which came from a very deep immaturity – we thought that what we had loved in American cinema in the last five, six years was part of an eternal essence. We didn’t see that Hitchcock, Hawks were old. So we’d say: “they’re going to make their last film, which is going to be as beautiful as Beethoven’s last quartets or the Titian’s last paintings.” We admired old people. It was a slightly strange period. And we were certain that they were, of course, enchanted to see us. So actually it was still a period when the studio system was still there. Each had its Foreign Press department where there’d be someone saying: “Listen, there are two completely weird people who’ve just arrived from the Cahiers du Cinéma.” It had made its way to Hollywood that there was an impossible group of French who had twisted tastes and who preferred Samuel Fuller to Robert Wise – which of course they were right to, but at the time it was scandalous. So the Americans did their job, they’d say, “No skin off our back”. They had the means to ask this or that film-maker if he would kindly receive two young French journalists for an hour. Everybody said yes. So that we ended up all proud, with our completely misplaced questions, completely intellectual, completely foundational, seeing Howard Hawks.
Hawks was the guy who had made Rio Bravo, it was the first film I’d written about and it’s stayed an essential film all my life. It’s a film I could talk about for hours because that film has accompanied me. There is a film that looked at me, which saw me as I was, I, as a teen-ager, and which knew a lot about me, much more than I thought I knew about it. So Howard Hawks was for me my favorite film-maker.
We had hierarchies, lists, we’d tear each other to shreds as soon as the lists didn’t match. We had all the defects of party members, even if we weren’t part of any party. So we ended up in front of Howard Hawks who completely recited his lesson, what he had always said in interviews with the French – in particular the one with Jacques Becker and Jacques Rivette, where their microphone didn’t work, so you see, they weren’t that much better than us, even ten years earlier. He said “I handle comedy scenes as drama, and drama scenes as comedy, that’s my secret”. And we’d say “Say it once more!”, whereas it had been published dozens of times. But it was Howard Hawks. And I even remember our little tape recorder, they didn’t have transistors yet, and it broke down half-way through. We could have cried. Hawks tried to repair it, he knocked himself, it didn’t work, we had to get a big machine from the studios so that the people from the Foreign Press could get their interview with Howard Hawks.
But we saw Buster Keaton. We didn’t think, “Keaton is old, he’s going to die, nobody wants him.” We said “Keaton is a genius! Genius? Genius! One of the greatest auteurs of cinema.” We went to see him on a scorching hot day in the Californian valley, and he was going to die two years later. He was having a ball of a time – he had a governess taking care of him – and didn’t understand the first thing about our questions. We’d say, “And solitude?”. “Ahhhh,” he’d answer. We’d ask him to tell us about a joke in a 1910 film with Fatty. He remembered everything. He remembered the joke. He could have drawn it. We were silly, but we had the strength of silliness: we really thought that those people were brilliant – and I still do. We had stupid questions but they were kind, because there was still a certain professionalism – a real one, not what it became afterwards – and they let us do our thing. Only Sternberg said “Tell me your questions on the phone, if they’re worthless, I’m not accepting you.” We ask some stupid questions on the phone: the theme of the woman, miserable things about Sternberg. Sternberg answers “Not that brilliant, but come over anyway.” He must have wanted to talk. We go to his place. He says “No tape recorder!” and gives us a whole lesson about how he’s brilliant, and only he is brilliant. We rush to the drugstore and write everything down from memory, and we publish it in the Cahiers, thinking “he treated us like dogs, let’s have our revenge.” That’s how we saw people who all died later. We were even the only ones to have seen McCarey, for example, and Leo McCarey, he’s not very famous, but he’s one of the greatest American film-makers, one of the greatest inventors in cinema.
And we went through all that absolutely like zombies. We could feel that we weren’t adequate, that it wasn’t quite right, but it worked. But that’s maybe the surprising aspect of that period, more than maybe our youth, it was that between Hollywood, which after all is sinking, well, which is beginning to have a fair amount of problems, because it’s the end of the B movie, television is going to really take power… There are people we went to see over there, like Samuel Fuller, who never made any films in America again, we find them again here, twenty years later, we become friends. So we didn’t see that, we didn’t understand it. But that’s what was happening, objectively. And when I think of that again, when I see us, when I imagine us, arriving on Sunset Boulevard, we didn’t have a car, we didn’t drive, in Los Angeles we took the bus, completely ridiculous, I tell myself that we were extraordinarily naïve.

RD: 68? The revolution, the confusion, the commotion let us say, starts at the Cinémathèque.

SD: 68…

RD: The Langlois case. Where are you, at that point? Because before Cohn-Bendit, there was this curious file, Truffaut versus DeGaulle. How did you experience that?

SD: It’s Truffaut-DeGaulle, and rather it’s Godard against Malraux. For Godard had written a very beautiful letter to Malraux, whom he admired a lot, and whom he still admires a lot.

RD: After La Religieuse was banned?

SD: After Rivette’s La Religieuse was banned. The first time we got politicized was the story with Rivette’s La Religieuse. And we entered into a state of wrath, on top of it all it was a household product. We didn’t have much power, but all of a sudden the people from the Cahiers woke up, in 64 or 65. In the same way, the Langlois case was for us a trailer for 1968.I haven’t mentioned Langlois earlier because I think the myth is complete, I have nothing to add, other than I consider myself one of his children, if we remember that he was a pelican-mother-like figure, crazy, but it was unforgettable, of course, for those who lived it. Even if with hindsight we can say that in the Langlois case itself, there was a case, also, for the anti-Langlois side, but it was out of the question, considering the way he had been educated. And I don’t know, maybe also the climate, the fact that there were so many of Langlois’s children. The whole New Wave was there.
So we marched off to war, but as absolute neophytes. And I remember, because it was very funny, that in Courcelles Street, at a demonstration, we did a sit-in. It was the first one in my life. We sat down on the ground. We were very, very excited at the idea that we were doing what the others did, that we were capable of doing what the others did, the things you saw in films: demonstrations, shouting. I was incapable of shouting in a demonstration, it seemed to me the most vulgar thing, but I was incapable, due to shyness. And we realized that no, we could. So that was the Langlois case, that was our case, that was the cinephiles’ case.
And we did this sit-in and there was a guy who was always taking the stand, who monopolized everything and who visibly was good at organizing things: it was Cohn-Bendit. I remember we hated him for half-an-hour: “Who’s this guy? We don’t know him, he doesn’t come every night. He’s not part of such and such a group. He hasn’t seen Murnau’s films.” There was an element of that. “Who is this efficient red-head?” And pretty soon we understood. We also understood that it was a mass movement, that there were people who were very good at that, whereas we were rather very bad, but completely devoted. There, so the Langlois case, we didn’t at all worry about the actual contents of the case, it was settled: “No one touches Langlois.” Earlier I said that Godard, who had always admired Malraux, but had already attacked him about La Religieuse, by writing this beautiful letter that ends with “I write to you from an occupied country, France” He started again with the Langlois case. It was quite painful to him, because when you know Godard quite well, you realize he’s really a direct heir to the conception of Art that Malraux had. And so are all of us, I would say. All of us, me first. But without being very honest with him, because the De Gaulle minister figure got on our nerves, and he’d become quite erratic and cocaine-addicted, we didn’t know that yet, but we realized.

[pause]

SD: That’s why we were able to pass from a sort of completely apolitical zombie-ness, which was often held against us – well, not against me, but the people who were at the Cahiers before me – to an absolutely demented politicization. So to answer your question a little late, about Bazin. Bazin was the man of that node.
Bazin was the man who wrote every day for Le Parisien Libéré, so really for the consumers of film, who wrote for Esprit and for the Cahiers, who didn’t stop. But who, at the same time, had absolutely no populism, no smutty sentiment, of those anti-elitist or anti-intellectual feelings that drape themselves in a so-called love of the people, just to finally set everyone against each other. That’s what I hated so much with the Autant-Laras, the Duviviers, the Clouzots, and finally it was, and it’s coming back, it’s coming back now with the Claude Berris, all of that, it’s coming back. It was a way of saying “We’re smart, we’ve got no illusions, we’re professionals. No-one pulls a quick one on us. We’ll shed a tear for poor childhood, trampled underfoot, the poor illusions, trampled underfoot. Yeah, that’s funny, that makes us laugh.” I’ve always hated that. I was never cynical. And I think, without taking too big a risk, it’s something deep in order to understand the longevity of the Cahiers, with the ups and downs, no cynicism! There was never any cynicism at the Cahiers. The cynics quickly went over somewhere else, or they found themselves a career.

RD: Why didn’t you take the step of directing? Like the others, at the Cahiers. Why didn’t you make a film?

SD: Like the others, let’s not be too hasty. There’s one absolutely extraordinary generation at the Cahiers, which weighed on us terribly heavily, which definitely inhibited us a lot – that’s to answer about “Ciné-son”, because that’s what “ciné-son” is, we are “ciné-sons”. That generation is absolutely exceptional in the history of cinema. Apart from a few German film-makers ten years later, and the people from the Popular Front in the thirties… The studio system didn’t allow that kind of group, so Hollywood: out. Maybe the Russians in the twenties… There must have been, five or six times in the history of cinema a pack, with all the flaws and the qualities of a pack – and a pack, mind you, not a clique, not a group, not a school. It so happened – which caused a bit of trouble – that just before us, there had been Godard, Truffaut, Rivette, Rohmer. At least those four, plus the fellow travelers, who counted for a lot: Demy, Resnais, Rouch, Franju. Uncles: Melville… A lot of brilliant uncles, very marginal. That’s a lot. Those people stepped into action after having written, which was already exceptional. In general, it was frowned upon, and considered impossible that a good critic could become a good film-maker. But the New Wave proved that that wasn’t the case. Truffaut was a good film-maker from the outset, and he was a very good critic.
We came just after that, and I think that firstly, we were inhibited by that, secondly, in my generation, my generation of people from the Cahiers, it’s not true that everyone went on to directing. Or, I won’t give any names, with results that weren’t very convincing. No great film-makers in my generation. No, in my generation, one great film-maker, Philippe Garrel. Distant fellow traveler, but the Cahiers’ little brother, because we’re the ones who discovered him in 1968. To my mind the only great film-maker, who made works that someone can today study in a university, study as you would study a serious artistic work. A lot of good film-makers – I won’t give any names, they’re people who are too close to me – but nothing comparable to Godard, even to Truffaut, who is a film-maker, I think, who with time is taking on an importance which people didn’t grant him when he was alive. Those are the vagaries of history.
The second reason for which the people of my generation became film-makers less often, and less good film-makers, is that it befell us to re-politicize, i.e. to take up this rather thankless thing – which had already happened before in cinema, but at the time cinema was stronger – of the relations between cinema and politics, therefore of commitment. Can cinema be useful? This question is ridiculous again now, but at the time it was very strong, and we found ourselves quite helpless. Which is why we became interested in Eisenstein and people like that, we started reading Brecht and we discovered Benjamin. We were great late beginners. It took us a lot of energy, because we had to manage the magazine as you would manage a bulletin that gives regular news from the frontline. And even if all this is derisory, it’s not an energy that went towards cinema. Another reason, is that in the meantime, cinema had become somewhat obsolete. I now think that the people from the New Wave – not only in France, the new waves in the whole world, there were some everywhere, for about ten years, but it started in France – they certainly were, not the iconoclasts that we believed, but the first and last generation to have remained film critics and film historians, to watch films by others, and to, strangely, still have the ability to make them themselves. I think that after them, we didn’t have enough energy to maintain that balance and besides, the social demand was weaker.
That’s important. Television had already grown very strong, and actually it’s not so much television as advertising. Advertising became, in the seventies and eighties, the great aesthetic matrix for everything, that cut through all the forms and a fair share of cinema. As arrogant as it thought itself and sold itself, it was in fact applied television. We howled like madmen against that. The whole story of the Cahiers is “let’s not mix up advertising procedures in, I don’t know, Louis Malle or Bertolucci, to take examples that aren’t worthless, and cinema.”
The final reason, and here I speak personally, is that I’ve been on some film shoots, for little roles, or for a report, but it’s a type of energy I don’t have at all. That’s why I’d say that I protested a little against the word “image”, at the beginning. Because if, in the scenario in which you try and fit people, my passion had been images, nobody would understand that I didn’t want to make any. Well my passion is, I don’t know, also speaking, writing a little, it’s the fact that in cinema there’s something to listen to and to watch at the same time. It’s lots of impure things in relation to the idea of image, of pure image, but the idea of pure image comes from advertising. Advertising has created, especially in young people, the idea that there’s a sphere, a realm, called that of the images, that it’s a question of technique, of creativity – what a horrible word – of invention, of money, and that there are people who pay for that. It’s a worthy conception; in fact, it exists throughout the history of the West: there are images that are sold and sold into prostitution, and there are some sublime ones. Only there’s not only that in cinema, painting or the other arts, there has also been something else. There are film-makers who make images that don’t sell anything. When you see a film by Rivette, maybe not the last one, which is a bit… But let’s say the Rivette films no-one has seen. Rivette, it’s beyond his control, he’s a guy who lives outside of consumerism, he lives as a sort of peripheral saint. He’s a guy who observes, with an intense curiosity, the life of his contemporaries. He’s not angry at all. He’s a pure cinéphile, what I said at the beginning, “we’ll never be part of…”, Rivette is the purest example. When you see Le Pont du Nord, to take one of Rivette’s most beautiful films, there isn’t a single shot in the film that could sell anything: that could sell the actress who plays in it, the quality of the sun. Nothing, because it’s used for something else, it’s used for building what: for building time. I was very, very liberated, very, very personally liberated, the day I realized that what I had expected from cinema, what I had loved in cinema, and what cinema had given, was the invention of time, starting with mine. Inventing a time in which I might live, but which is also somebody else’s time, and not the image, very much. In fact, I’m not very good with images. For example, the thing I see last in a film is the Director of Photography. For me, there are people who say “Le Rayon Vert, it’s wonderful, but what’s he doing with 16mm, Rohmer’s crazy, it’s not professional!” I want to slap them. I tell them, “Go back home. Cinema isn’t that, cinema is time. If you’re not sensitive to the fact that Rohmer invents times that only he invents…” Obviously, he also does it with images, and he’s got a rather good imaginary. I have nothing to say! All right. But it took me thirty years to understand that. So the simplest things in life are the ones you take longest to understand. The film-makers who are pure image-makers, pure imagists – there are some great ones – bore me to tears, everything that is decorative in cinema bores me to tears.
All of this to say, there’s a type of energy that’s very linked to speech, I speak a lot, to writing, I like to write quite quickly, which for me became a reality, for example, quite strangely because I’d never thought about it, to anticipate on the Libé chapter, in journalism. To write quickly, under the impulse of images and sounds, but together, images and sounds together. I’ve always liked that, it makes me make time, life time, often survival time. It’s got little to do with procedures of how to make a professional image. So I leave that to television, and you can see what it does with it. If there’s no money it doesn’t make it. So it’s an image worth… I watch music videos a lot on TV, it gives me a sociological information. I switch off the music, that doesn’t interest me, but I look at the bodies a lot, the eroticism – that’s all there is. On television, it’s only in music videos that there’s any eroticism, otherwise, it’s compulsory ugliness. We can wonder why by the way. But I say, all right, now I’m looking at visuals, I’m looking at images. We’ll come back to it, all this to say that I don’t have the patience you need to make an image, to make images you need an angelic patience. When you’re on a shoot, there are people, there’s a little man who sometimes talks to no-one and looks as if he’s drowning, it’s the director. He has the time to give birth to an image. With the others, with the others’ work, with their presence, with the vagaries etc. When I went on a shoot, to write a report for the paper, I wasn’t a good observer, because I said that on a shoot you don’t see a thing, or only anecdotal stuff, or funny stuff, but on such and such a technician, or such and such an actor, but which tell you nothing about what the film will look like later. And I was bored. It was a chore for me, to go on a shoot. I was bored, because I thought that firstly, you shouldn’t bother people who are working, secondly, you see nothing, thirdly, all the papers, all the reports on the film shoot are the same, it’s not going well. If something happens, we don’t see it. It’s between the actor, the director, it’s a tiny thing and that’s what you go and see. I’m used to seeing it when it’s done. It doesn’t bother me to see the fait accompli, I can see it quite well. When it’s finished, when it’s up to me. I don’t like coming in on top. Whereas, according to me, to make films, you have to like it. You have to like that wasted time on the film set, you have to like that thing that looks enormous but is actually, tiny, or let’s shoot lots of scenes and then scrap them when editing, because… Even though we went to such pains. It doesn’t correspond to me. Yes, sometimes I’ve told myself, but don’t you have the energy, everyone’s making films, why not you?
But it’s not my thing, my thing is to watch the images that others have made and say “There, there’s a true time, there it doesn’t work”, because I’m a good topographer. It’s like tennis, which I like a lot, I write about it. I can see straight away what’s going on on a court. What I mean to say is that in a film, I see what’s going on straight away. In a Lang film, I straight away see the empty space, behind, which calls on the shot. I see it since I was small, that space, I was born like that, but I’m not capable of making it. To make it, that space, you need time, an extraordinary patience: which Lang had.
And something else, is that my hatred of anything social turns against me. To make films, is to deal with things social. It’s to deal with others. And I’m in a situation that’s absolutely… A bit hypocritical. One of the reasons, but I’ve known it very early, for which I loved cinema, was that it also protected me from, let us say, modern art, well modern art in the sense that you end up four of you in a chapel, and which still maintained for me a connection with my contemporaries. And for that, I found wonderful that cinema, which might be an art, not sure, and that dealt with money, with narcissism, with betrayal, with time, delays, shooting. All those basic things of humankind, all those basic things of society. It’s not because I’m not very good with society that I haven’t read Flaubert or I haven’t read Balzac. I know that great films are based on stories of sex, not necessarily, but also, incredible love stories, and that it shook up all the rest, and thank god that it came through. And I was saying, cinema, you need a crazy energy, you need to be young. It’s an art for young people. It’s a young art and it’s an art for young people, you need lots and lots of physical energy. You can’t doze off. There are things that you don’t do, past a certain age. You film.

Translation and transcript by "nletore & newland @ KG" with only minor edits by me.

Journey of a Cine-Son

2011-02-14T08:46:00.014Z

In the absence of official translations, Jonathan Rosenbaum once compared the sharing of Serge Daney's texts in English to "offering pornographic postcards to strangers passing on the street". Here's one of these "postcards": the translation of the long filmed interview Serge Daney gave in 1992 just appeared on Vimeo:

Journey of a Cine-Son (video):

The original film (Itinéraires d'un ciné-fils) is a 3 hour interview of Serge Daney by French "intellectual" Regis Debray, filmed in January 1992, a few months before Daney died of aids. It was aired on French television as part of the magazine "Océaniques" in May 1992 and was released on DVD by the excellent Editions Montparnasse in 2004.

The film is one of the two main documents (with Daney's posthumous book Postcards from the Cinema) showing Daney, ill and aware that he might die soon, providing a kind of prefect summary of his life as a cinephile, and aligning his story with the history of modern cinema. The film also shows Daney's fascinating and continuous discourse (it's more a monologue than an interview) which he was so famous for (apparently, only Rivette could sustain a conversation with Daney).

I still feel strange that these late 'crepuscular' texts are the first ones to be available in English. In France, we discovered them after Daney's death and after having read his film criticism and daily columns for years. These documents came as incredibly condensed and systematic thinking from someone who produced a fresh idea on cinema or television on a daily basis, someone who tried something new all the time and challenged readers to follow the extraordinary pace of his thinking. But even if to my eyes they are a bit too 'perfect' and they lack some of the experimentation and freedom of Daney's best writing, there's no doubting their amazing lucidity, power and relevance. It's very puzzling to see that Daney's latest ideas or concept (like the 'visual') seem frighteningly relevant in today's digital age.

I'd love to hear reactions from English readers who discover this interview with less knowledge of Daney's writings. Any views? This would make for a great debate on Girish's blog.

[I must confess that the authors of the translation and the subtitles ("nletore & newland @ KG") have been in touch with this blog. A big thank you to them for completing this project. They have also shared the complete translated transcript of the interview, which I hope to publish on this blog soon.]

A ritual of appearance (Mitterrand)

2011-01-16T10:00:00.000Z

Part 2 of a double post. Part 1 is here.

A ritual of appearance (Mitterand)

Source: Institut national de l'audiovisuel (INA)

First, the pre-credits sequence: a man leaves the crowd and walks towards us. The camera captures him the moment he climbs up the stairs of an imposing building. He’s filmed from a low angle, alone, very alone. He’s well dressed, a bit stiff, but he knows where he’s going. The camera is then placed further and lets the actor arrive: it keeps see him coming. His footsteps resonate, (classical) music is heard: the sound reverberation lets us imagine a large building. The man moves closer. Does he know he’s being filmed? Will someone tell him it’s a candid camera? It’s not sure. Will he speak? Even less sure. In any case, he’s holding a flower.

Entered from the left of the frame, he logically exits from the right, once the camera has panned to uncover a pile of marble and statues with these simple words: National Convention. The man glances at them. Is he hesitating? No, but he moves away and disappears from the image. Clever, the camera gets ahead of him and frames an opening of soft golden light where our actor suddenly appears.

A closer shot shows him immobile, meditating. The suspense would be unbearable if it didn’t unravel abruptly: the man makes one step on the side and lays the flower – it’s a rose – on a block of stone where these simple words are written: Jean Moulin. Emboldened by his gesture, he repeats it on two other tombs: Victor Schoelcher’s (“who abolished slavery in 1841” explains a surtitle) and Jaures’. We are in the Pantheon. When the camera lingers on the six letters of the engraved word “Jaures”, the music gets louder. The effect is arresting. With no more flowers, the man leaves as he arrived: alone. End of the pre-credits sequence, beginning of the film, i.e. the seven-year presidential term.

This short film is not without merit, even if, in the dignified and monumental style, it’s neither Ivan the Terrible nor Land of the Pharaohs. We find out that Serge Moati is its author and Mitterrand its unique star. It’s a real film, with rehearsals, body doubles, prop managers (for the flowers) and everything. The great moments of cinema are in Cannes this year but on the 625 daily lines of our TV sets. For this little film is Mitterrand’s response to Giscard’s media challenge.

We remember that the latter had attempted to invent on air a ritual of disappearance: Mitterrand had to take up this challenge by inventing another ritual, one of appearance of course. A ritual of arrival in the field, of the camera and of history. By saying “Good bye” to France from a television studio, Giscard had implicitly assimilated France to French television – a dangerous metonymy. Once already he had made the mistake, talking to viewers, to call them “Mes chers téléviseurs (My dear TV sets)”. It was his “idea of France”, a limited and cynical idea, with no memory but not without a certain irony. It would have been a mistake for Mitterrand to remain prisoner of this decor, to come back exactly to the seat left empty by Giscard. So he too has attempted something: to force television to come to him, to film him, where it never goes, in the Pantheon, i.e. among the dead.

The message is clear, and there’s no doubt it was heard. A need for legitimacy, a desire to fit in the history of France (a double history, of the winners and the losers), a desire to choose his own ancestry by choosing “his” dead, to go point them out, not with his finger (it’s not appropriate) but with roses. In all mythologies, the hero must present himself alone in front of the dead but under the dumbfounded eyes of the living. You need to be three to create a symbolic event. Moati’s film created Mitterrand’s temporary loneliness, snatched from the living then released to them after a trip with the dead under the electronic gaze of the camera. It changes from Giscard’s amnesia, his inability to any pathos. This revival of the Republican mythology is rather perky, even if it can quickly lead to really pompous aesthetics (which the film gave a foretaste of).

But why wouldn’t we accept a bit of academic style? For the moment, there is emotion, at least in this desire to touch or to be touched which was characteristic of the whole ceremony. Then, we’ll have to see if this idea that television is a cool media is that true. We’ll see if television inevitably de-realises, de-ritualises, desecrates. It’s Mitterrand’s new challenge to McLuhan. To be continued.

All this was what we could see on television, the evening before yesterday. Later, on the same channel, I felt that the same film, the same trip to the land of the dead, was happening again: a young man moves forward, as if magnetised in a dark and bleak decor, he meets a friend that he thought he had lost a long time ago and they start speaking with strange voices “coming from elsewhere”.
- You look rather pale... and you smell like earth...
- You too...
- Are you going to stay here long?
- Forever...

We found out that it was a dream. One of these dreams that Luis Bunuel sprinkled in the film on Channel 2 that evening: The discreet charm of the Bourgeoisie.

Originally published in Libération on 23 May 1981, reprinted in Ciné-Journal, Cahiers du cinéma / Seuil, 1986. Translation by Laurent Kretzschmar.

A ritual of disappearance (Giscard)

2011-01-14T11:50:00.001Z

Two posts (today and in a few days) for a double text by Serge Daney on two television events of the 1981 presidential elections which have become absolute classics in France (it's the stuff of dinner conversations of the political elite and of a few PhD theses).

Published two days apart in Libération, Daney brought these two texts together in in his book Ciné-Journal with these words of introduction:

MAY 1981. FLASH-BACK. THE MEDIA HAVE BECOME MAINSTREAM. POLITICIANS PLAY WITH THEIR IMAGE. IN SUCCESSION, GISCARD AND MITTERRAND INVENT A RITUAL.

A ritual of disappearance (Giscard)

Source: Institut national de l'audiovisuel (INA)

There are some rare things on television. An outgoing president getting himself filmed while leaving, it’s rare. An empty shot on television, it’s rare. An empty and silent shot, it’s even rarer. There was a great moment Tuesday evening, shortly after 8pm, between the instant when Giscard’s tall figure left the frame (on the left, towards the top) and the pompous sounding of La Marseillaise. An unexpected and well-executed moment of television, new and interesting, authored and acted by Giscard. For you had to be at least Giscard to impose to television what it refuses by essence: silence, emptiness, nothingness. You had to have the power of an outgoing president, to have it for a few more seconds, to attempt to invent a ritual in front of France’s dumbfounded eyes. A ritual of disappearance, nothing less.

In an old film by Cecil B. DeMille (I can tell you the title, it’s Unconquered), Gary Cooper amazes naïve Indians by suddenly appearing in a cloud of smoke. Giscard managed something like that, but in reverse.

It’s not what he said that counted. It’s not his weak “Good luck France!” which will impress viewers, it’s this empty shot, unbearably empty, it’s this man slowly walking into the depth of field, getting nearer to the edge, and disappearing “off-screen” as we say in the jargon of cinephiles.

Since May 10th, there was “Giscard beaten!”. Suddenly there is “Giscard off-screen”. Off-screen, Giscard is truly beaten. At 8 o’clock, the woman speaker still hesitates: “Monsieur Giscard d’Estaing, President of the Republic”. At 08:05, she wouldn’t have hesitated.

It’s during his seven-year term that mass audiences have become less naïve and smarter in front of the media. The audience knows that things may exist, that there may be wars and men to fight them, but that all this is nothing without the television baptism of fire. Things and people start to count the moment they air on television, when they become unreal, hyperreal through prolonged exposure to this rectangle of light.

Nevertheless, until now, the stakes, the supreme goal, was to occupy television as one occupies a territory, as one guards something, less to transmit a message than to prevent the transmission of any other messages. To obstruct rather than communicate. A few years ago, Godard bitterly noted that only the head of state had the right to talk on television for an hour long, and that it was the most tangible sign of his power. This is why story tellers are not loved on television: they are a menace, they might give us back the taste for duration. Because television is like disco, like our brain, it must give the feeling that it never stops, without ever giving us the feeling of duration. Television has no duration. Emptiness, an emptiness that lasts, silence, a silence which settles in, represent sheer horror, an abomination. So with his empty frame, Giscard breaks, in extremis, something of the false good health of television.

This shot – it must be said – is beautiful. The deserted office, the bluish curtains are beautiful. We, cinephiles of the late 20th century, have a prodigious memory of these types of effects of mise-en-scène. We have seen many of these in filmmakers mad about off-screen, those who eroticise the edges of the frame, who make them an object of delight and horror. In? Out? Leaving? Not leaving? The empty screen, emptied, still full of the echo of the actor’s presence, like a crime scene after the criminal has gone, we can feel in all this a filmmaker’s trick.

Between cinema, television and advertising, there are flowing currents, silent exchanges, bits of common rhetoric. We will have to increasingly mix these, to mix rags and towels, television rags and cinema towels. Until now, we needed the caution of the great visionaries – from Walter Benjamin to Marshall McLuhan, from Eisenstein to Godard – to assert this idea, now well-rehashed: that the mise-en-scène, the “windowing” of a leader, a star or a product, is nothing more than a rhetorical matter.

In 1981, it’s significant that in his desire to give back a bit of dignity to the political show, Mitterrand, a dreadful actor, took in his hands the staging of the TV debate with Giscard, and that, with good advice, he imposed the technical modalities and therefore the aesthetical effects of the debate. Having imposed the form of the clash, he won it, less because of what he said than because of his choices as filmmaker: no reverse shot, the camera always on the one who speaks, no off-screen, and especially no electronic manipulation of the image.

Compared to this desire to stitch everything, Giscard’s little one man show is rather impulsive. Like someone saying “if it’s like this, I’m leaving, so there!” But it’s this “so there!” that is historical.

Originally published in Libération on 21 May 1981, reprinted in Ciné-Journal, Cahiers du cinéma / Seuil, 1986. Translation by Laurent Kretzschmar.

Cinemeteorology: Too Early Too Late

2011-01-06T21:45:00.002Z

Jonathan Rosenbaum just published online his translation of Serge Daney's review of my favourite Straub-Huillet film. The text was already available on Steve Erickson's website but it's good to have it published directly by Jonathan who has long been the most vocal about the need to translate Daney in English.

Cinemeteorology: Too Early Too Late
Originally published in Libération, February 20-21, 1982. Translated by Jonathan Rosenbaum.

Serge Daney in 2010

2011-01-03T06:00:00.001Z

It's time for the usual annual review of news about Serge Daney in English (which celebrates its fifth year of existence).

Keeping up the interest about Daney in the English-speaking world was a bit of a solitary exercise this year. As far as I know, there were no translations outside the blog. I kept posting quick translations of minor texts to show how amazing a proper book of translations would be. I managed to translate about six texts:

The world seen from above
Wings to attempt to land
The Dumbo case (extracts)
The raw and the cooked (triggered by a rare find by Adrian Martin)
Saint Zelig, Pray for us
Tron, the film

Not much then. But there are some interesting signs to avoid being gloomy...

A theatre play was created in France about Serge Daney. It is enjoying an extended run at the Théatre du Rond-Point. I've heard some good things about it (including from my mum and aunt who liked it a lot). A video of the show is here (in French). Serge Toubiana blogged about it. Will this trigger a renewal of interest for Daney in France? It would be fantastic if POL would finally start the work on the final volumes of Daney's complete works.

2011 looks more promising with the likely publication of a book about Daney in Dutch (when will English publishers realise they are missing a trick?) and the project of a translation of Journey of a Cine-son. More on this blog soon.

The audience of this blog is broadly stable. Just as last year, about 1,000 different people enjoyed this site (if I only count unique viewers coming more than once and staying more than 10 seconds - there are a lot more hits but probably not worth counting). There is a small group of people methodically checking every update (just under a hundred). The only interesting pattern is the increasing proportion of traffic coming from referring sites: all those blog posts, lists of links and tweets which direct readers to this site. They accounts for a third of traffic to Serge Daney in English. So thanks a lot to @thedailyMUBI and all for picking up my blog entries and revealing them to your (much wider) audience.

And many thanks to all for your interest and loyalty.

Happy New Year!

Tron, the film

2010-12-23T12:40:00.003Z

Serge Daney's 1982 review of Tron. Daney never took to animated films or electronic images but he kept writing about them. Wondering what he would say in a world of CGI, 3D and VOD is anyone's guess but is surely a fascinating endeavour. Would he actually say anything different? As someone who considered that the essence of cinema was somewhere in the "art of showing", he certainly understood the dilemma: "How do you show a computer-animated image?".

That didn't stop him liking the first Tron:

Tron, the film (Tron, Steven Liesberger)

Walt Disney (the man) died in 1966. Walt Disney (the company) keeps surviving him. Walt Disney (the mythology) is an unsinkable iceberg, even over centuries. Beliefs, beasts, fears, and a factory of fine craftsmen: this heritage of traumatising treacle is returning, at the end of 1982, in three forms. Spielberg (E.T.) rediscovers the family sentimentalism of Walt Disney. Don Bluth (a dissident in the Disney factory, author of The Secret of Nimh) resuscitates the drawing technique, image by image. Steven Lieberger (Tron) revives the pioneering spirit of early Disney. Beautiful remains, but the factory is coming back from the brink.

We tend to forget that when Disney (the man) died, the company went through a deep black hole. At the end of the 60s, the surprise comes from insolent and edgy independents (Yellow Submarine, Fritz the cat). From the 70s, there’s a great worry among the Walt Disney conformists. Drawing techniques are stagnating; the secrets of story-telling are getting lost. Cut to the quick, the old house has chosen the headlong rush: to return to the early Disney, the amazing inventor who signed, before the war, films like The Cookie Carnival or Broken Toys.

But in the USA, Tron is kind of a flop. A failure that we are tempted to compare to the success of E.T.. Let’s succumb to the temptation. E.T. balances admirably the well-known parameters of American cinema. Tron must invent a new mix of these parameters. In making Tron, the Disney studios must have thought that today’s kids, their eyes riveted on their video-games, already live in a nice electronic world, sleek and cold, with low contents of mythology: naivety. Spielberg knows that they still live with their warm worn teddy bears: intelligence. But the charm of Tron – it has an eminently likable aspect – is precisely this unfathomable gap between the sophistication of the image and the humility of those living in it: the story and the “actors”. On one side, the simple emotions of the pinball player, on the other, the abstraction pinched from old B series.

The last time a man managed to interrogate head-on the story he’s telling and the new images used to tell the story, it was in 1969, in this genius of a film: 2001: A Space Odyssey. And Kubrick’s heritage has little by little been revived, cropped, domesticated and sterilised. Curiously, Tron is today the film that is taking up the uninterrupted thread. This required that the last traces of the spirit of the 60s disappeared, the illusion of independents, their ideological insolence, etc. There’s now nothing in the scenarios of E.T. and Tron which can’t be found in toy shops, or video-games, or in the imagination of those (little white men) who can afford them. It’s the other lesson from Tron: innovation, once again, comes from above.

Libération, 15 December 1982. Reprinted in La maison cinema et le monde, Volume 2, POL Editeurs, 2002. Translation by Laurent Kretzschmar.

English version of "Journey of a Cine-Son"

2010-12-21T08:33:00.004Z

I've just been alerted of a project for an English version of "Itineraire d'un cine-fils", the long filmed interview that Serge Daney gave to Regis Debray a few months before he passed away.

I'm awaiting more details on this. Watch this space.

Journey of a "Cine-Son" (excerpt) from ibeescus on Vimeo.

Saint Zelig, pray for us

2010-12-13T22:02:00.004Z

Small Christmas gift to all the readers of this blog. So the year does not end without one last translation.

I didn't chose this text for any particular reason. It's from "Le salaire du zappeur" (literally: the wage of the channel hopper), a book where Serge Daney brought together the texts from the daily column he wrote for Libération while watching television every day for 100 days from September to December 1987. The collection of articles contains great texts and some smaller and minor ones. Here's a minor one, clearly written on the day, although still pretty good...

Saint Zelig, pray for us

Where it’s clear that only a filmmaker can give some meaning to what television does without thinking and that we owe Woody Allen the hypothesis of the embodied zapping.

First came euphoria, a dream of ubiquity finally within reach of the hand (then of the thumb, a part of the hand). Thanks to television, being everywhere would cease to be the privilege of the sorcerer’s apprentices akin to Orwell or Mabuse. Once surveillance was democratised, the spectator’s eye started to scan, faster and faster, several strata of images. From the raw documentary of the news to the quiet family shows, from the black and white stock shots to the bright colours of the weather maps, from the MGM lion to the successive test patterns of national public television (1). In the meantime, the ear was adjusting to several types of voices: discoursing or teasing, commenting or stuttering, dubbed or original. “The world at home” was what it was all about.

All this existed especially when there was only one television channel. The multiplication of channels has slowly created the reverse feeling of a fundamental “unity” of all images and sounds on television. As if too much diversity was detrimental to the very idea of diversity, and if too much choice rendered trivial the act of choosing. The practice of zapping probably came from this desperate desire to anticipate a nausea certain to arrive. An ambiguous act, zapping carries two contradictory desires. Sometimes we are trying to prove that “elsewhere” (i.e. on another channel) is just the same. Other times we want to enjoy – even for an instant – the appearance of diversity and to dream that it’s more than an appearance. In the first case, we angrily conclude to the prominence of the medium over the message, and in the second case we still seek the moments (a few seconds is all it takes) where our habits are tricked by a show temporarily new. But, like those who want to run faster than their shadows, or who count their chickens before they are hatched, we end up forgetting that an image is made to be seen.

Does the Same, multiplied by the Same, equals the Other (like the multiplication of two negatives makes a positive)? It’s too serious a question to be left to the television people (too busy pretending to be unique and confuse variant and difference). Inversely, it’s a question for the reverie and jurisdiction of filmmakers. Only filmmakers can calmly “analyse” what television is only proposing as a hysterical synthesis. Cinema – and this is not new (Vertov, Rossellini, Welles, Godard, etc.) – is the conscience of television. It’s often its last dignity left. Filmmakers, because they anticipate a process which will eventually escape them, have the time to think about it and make it their own personal concern. But those who inherit from these processes often have the upstarts’ stubborn presumptuousness. Let’s be precise. With Fritz Lang the idea of surveillance is fascinating (The Testament of Dr. Mabuse) and with Rossellini, the idea of fictionalised news is overwhelming (Paisa). With Welles, the idea of de-programming is staggering (Mr. Arkadin) and with Godard (or Bresson) the idea of forced and indifferent choice is close to anguish. Artists will always be truer than media-people.

And it’s with Woody Allen that the idea of zapping eventually becomes emotive. To watch one morning (on Canal +), drowned amongst other images, a movie like Zelig (1983), is to find to this film a depth that it didn’t have in movie theatres, in front of an audience too enlightened, too “second degree”. Television is the true environment of this film. If the bases of Woody Allen’s films are almost always robust or ingenious ideas (a real history of mediation in the 20th century, going through the de-sublimated star system and the moving evocation of radio), they rarely have a strong enough inspiration to make real films. But only a filmmaker could invent Leonard Zelig, this mutant whose body is zapping through history and through the different ways to film history.

Who’s Leonard Zelig? A nice boy who wants to be loved by the others so much that he finds nothing better than to physically look like them. Zelig is like the cursor of the word processing machine this article is written with: where he is, it’s the Same, and everywhere else is elsewhere. He moves from a body to another just as we hop from channel to channel. He becomes tinged with otherness. He has recourse to mimicry, like these animals which fascinated Lacan. His body (a strange body, good for science, a body made of acetate or nitrate) adapts to the environment, eventually dissolving into it. That’s the true novelty. Unlike the great disguised characters of the past (who dressed up, like Tony Curtis in The Great Impostor by Mulligan), Zelig slips naturally in the skin of others. That’s how we discover him, a scandalous object in the immediate entourage of the Pope or Hitler. This is how he realises our dream of ubiquity (the famous “little mouse” since then become heroin of some personal computers).

We know that cinema would not exist without the persistence of vision. With Zelig, there is another persistence: of a role into another, of a channel into another. Zelig symbolises our desire to be everywhere at the same time (incognito) and our refusal to lose the endangered “thread” of our nomadic life. But we or Zelig no longer travel around the wide world but through those countries which are the different genres of known images of the world: through the interview, the current affairs documentary or the Hollywood film. A chemical world is leading to chemical bodies, and chemical bodies lead to new types of metamorphoses.

The culture of narcissism (a theme long addressed by the Americans) leads to paradoxes in which Woody Allen visibly revels. In the past, a mirror was enough (“Je ris de me voir si belle en ce miroir”, etc.). Today, it’s through the superficial diversity of the TV-things on display that we want to catch the trace of our imaginary presence, even in the (rather minimal) form of the gaze. What we see returns our image, the image of those who, as John Berger said, wanted to “see the seeing”. So for once, Zelig devotes himself out to “represent” our gaze in the country of things watched. We then found ourselves on both sides of the screen and concluded to the “crisis” of cinema.

(1) “ORTF” in the French text: Office de Radiodiffusion Télévision Française – the old state-owned public broadcaster which dominated French television up until 1974.

Originally published in Libération on October 6th, 1987. Reprinted in Le salaire du zappeur, Éditions Ramsay, 1988. Translation by Laurent Kretzschmar

The raw and the cooked

2010-11-17T10:30:00.000Z

Adrian Martin (a.k.a. the man behind the most anticipated website in the cinephile world) sends a surprise that he found when "throwing out boxes of old stuff": an new English translation of Serge Daney done for a magazine called France Information in 1981.

I had never heard of this piece and got quite excited (sad, I know). But when I tried to trace it back to the original French text, it became quickly apparent that the magazine Adrian uncovered proceeded to a shameless "collage" of several texts, highly edited, incomplete and assembled together with little regard to what Daney tried to convey in each text... France Information was perhaps one of these industry publications or perhaps an official magazine from the Ministry of Foreign affairs more focused on promoting France abroad than on film criticism. I'm not sure what they were trying to achieve with these texts but they certainly butchered the main article by Daney.

Undeterred, I'm publishing my translation of the complete original text "The raw and the cooked": a review of the state of French cinema in the early 1980s which resonates strangely with today's division between arthouse/festival movies and the mainstream production.

The raw and the cooked
(The state of French cinema, 1980)

For French cinema, the 1970s were the post decade: post-New Wave, post-68, post-modern. No ground swell, no new movement, no new school: almost an aesthetic desert. We don’t know how this decade already looks toward the 1980s. We won’t know until later what it has prefigured of the 1980s. While we wait, we must propose a description: neither hot [immediate] nor cold [with hindsight] but tepid.

Authors, but which ones?

Something is undeniable however: French cinema is unique, it resembles no other. Some (and not the least ones: Rohmer, Moullet) say it is the best in the world. As if it was in France that the old “seventh art”, the cinema-art-of-the-twentieth-century, was giving away the least amount of ground, or at least not as fast as elsewhere. As if it was in France that the dialogue between “art and industry” (to talk like Malraux) or between “culture and capitalism” (to talk like Musil, who wasn’t French but wrote – it’s not known enough – film criticism) was obstinately continuing.

This specificity of French cinema can be summed up in one word: it is an authors’ cinema, rich of all the literary connotations of this word: author. The famous politique des auteurs wasn’t born in France by chance and it ended triumphing to the point of covering with one word what was kept separated by many others: metteur en scène, director or even producer. As a result, we no longer know very well what this word, an author, means.

If there was a crisis after 1968, it was the crisis of the other cinema, mass market cinema, the cinema of traditional producers, many of which – we tend to forget – took part in the early days of the New Wave adventure. Confronted to this situation (the disappearance of dialogue, even stormy, between producer and author), filmmakers became (were forced to become?) everything for their films. Throughout the decade, those who could call themselves authors were the ones who, by dint of calculations, tenacity and also egocentrism, simply managed to get their films to exist – and eventually be seen. To do this, they had to be everywhere: upstream and downstream of the film, producer, director, promoter but also tumbler, financier, bursar, delivery man. Many damaged their health and squandered their talent in the venture: how many interesting first films not followed by a second? How many not uninteresting second films not followed by a third? Only the toughest and maddest (about cinema) held out: cinema’s a jungle.

And being everything for a film, is a bit too much. Worse: it’s no guarantee that the film will be personal and will have original ideas of mise en scène or a real thought about cinema. That’s why it’s not enough to talk about an authors’ cinema, whether to praise or criticise it, one must say how the authors, most of whom come from the New Wave or were influenced by her, travelled through this “post” decade. In brief, one should explain this: a politique des auteurs which triumphs in a system where producers have no longer any politique, transforms authors into producers or, more exactly, in small producers. Production, in a wide sense, is therefore the strong idea of the decade.

Those who resembled their time

Towards the middle of the 1970s Godard attempted to get a cleaning lady to sing on a TV program. He wanted her to say a forgotten sentence in The Internationale: “Producers, save yourselves”. This sentence sums up and politicise the question that film-makers faced because of the crisis of traditional cinema. And those who best crossed the desert of this joyless years were the ones who asserted themselves – or were confirmed – as authors by saving themselves as producers. Let’s take three film-makers as different as Godard, Vecchiali and Rohmer: they never stopped filming. Better: they never stopped experimenting; an absolute luxury at a time where others, more dependent on traditional production, found themselves obstructed in their work. Facing a system where they no longer knew how to measure (can one measure himself up against the Advance on box office receipts scheme? Not really; one can only hope and put up with it), they managed to continue their own production machine or, as Rivette says, their “micro-system”. A machine designed to produce a film, but more importantly, to produce the possibility of another film after that – a machine to reproduce. The idea of series has haunted nostalgically this decade doomed to the racing of prototypes, to hits without tomorrow. These micro-systems were named Sonimage, Diagonale, Les Films du Losange, and others.

They condensed, often like a parody, everything that cinema has always been made off: fleeting time, violent affects, money flows, power struggles, erotic situations. Godard, Vecchiali, Rohmer – these three names act here as emblems – were tempted by the family business, they lived off the system (without necessarily respecting it), they thought “small is beautiful”, there were, to borrow Deleuze’s beautiful expression, “very populated within themselves”. They had to be since traditional cinema, mainstream cinema, Qualité France and Show-business cinema were then singularly desert (this is about to change).

In these micro-systems, which are also dreamed mini-majors, there was the whole of cinema: a fabulous cinephile memory, false stars (in Vecchiali’s films), false extras (in Godard’s films), war economy, the sense of good management and, last but not least, the love of money. Their strength, at that time, was to love the trade, whatever small, and not to depend mechanically on the laws of a shrunk market.

I mentioned, because they are exemplary, Godard, Vecchiali, Rohmer. I could have said: Truffaut, Duras, Moullet, Straub, even Garrel: Truffaut because he managed to set up Les Films du Losange between France and the USA, Duras because she knew how to be double, Garrel because, at the degree zero of the economy, he managed to last. What differentiate these machines which are so different from one another is not their size (in general, they are small), it’s their ability to allow swerves: to move from a budget to another, from a duration to another, from an experiment to another – yet another luxury. For example, Godard, after 1968, turns his back to his career to follow his time even in its cul-de-sacs (militant cinema and its critique, television and its critique), Vecchiali allows himself to add to his body of works a film with a truly pornographic side (Don’t change hands), Rohmer can alternate without waning (and rather flourishing) a great and a small film (Perceval and The aviator’s wife), etc.

What counts is less the content or the formal choices than the plasticity of the machine which produces them. In front of the naked law of capitalism requiring that those not advancing must decline and those advancing too fast must fall from their heights (a law which is returning in anger in the French cinema of the 1980s, threatening younger film-makers like Jacquot or Téchiné), a handful of film-makers started to work with varying speeds. This was a new luxury (even small-budget films had a certain dandyism, Moullet’s for example). Because the true richness is time, the time an artist needs to work a material, to accumulate experience.

What to say then of the filmmakers who were less tempted (or totally unable) to create their own production machine? Clearly, Demy, Pialat, Rozier, Eustache or Resnais are not – far from it – less important authors. But they haven’t lived through this decade as well: they worked less, experimented less than they had wished – and they probably suffered for it. It allowed them to express their time with acuteness, every time they encountered it (The mother and the whore, Nous ne vieillirons pas ensemble). They produced X-rays of their time but they didn’t resemble their time. That’s the difference.

For this “post” and disenchanted decade wasn’t just random. There was 1968, beliefs, speeches, utopias: French society was shaken. Remember: the end of militancy and the beginning of feminism, the success of the minority idea (…), the value of the local, of the hic et nunc, of the “do and learn”. The cinema micro-systems were mirroring these post-leftist years: small (desiring) machines, stubborn (and spread out) resistance, different labour divisions (between men and women, manual and intellectual). We won’t find this in the late and politically correct hijackings by mainstream cinema (from Boisset to the left-leaning sociological and naturalist fictions) but in these authors-machines who, for a few years, have resembled their time.

French cinema, itself

The 1970s micro-systems make for a small cinema (too French, restricted, non-exportable, desperately white, etc.): it’s already been said. But it’s also a cinema with a very fine taste. I don’t know if the French cinema is the world’s best, I know that the French cuisine is the world’s best, and I also know, irrefutable syllogism, that there is a cuisine of French cinema, and an old one too.

Look at Méliès, what does he do? Not only card tricks or stencilled-coloured Passions, but he films the trial of Dreyfus: he re-enacts the event on the spot with an actor who plays like Mounet-Sully! Every thing is already there in Méliès’ gesture, and less in the famous opposition to the Lumière brothers than in the presence of Lumière-effects in Méliès’ films, and vice versa, in this unique mix of burning news and cold rules. Afterwards, French actors have always had this way to maintain together but disjointed, i.e. united yet separate, what other countries’ cinemas had either united or separated. Between documentary and fiction, the crude and the coded, the hazards and the devices, in a word between the raw and the cooked, there has always been a short-circuit, a striking shortcut, impurity.

The raw easily becomes cruel, obscene, sadistic; the cooked easily becomes too cooked, burnt, perverted. But there is no happy middle. Godard said recently that he fond “average American cinema infinitely superior to average French cinema”. But this is precisely about “average” cinema. We could turn the proposition on its head: non-average French cinema is generally superior to non-average American cinema. It may always have been that way, and one might even say that the only tradition of French cinema resides in its modernity, its unique capacity to house singular experiences in a normal industrial and commercial framework. Modernity: the great French films are more or less documentaries on the state of the filming material, always a two-stage, dialectical, operation. Hence today, French cinema appears better armed than others (in Europe) to face the future while remaining the place of aesthetic works.

For there are two faces of French cinema. On the one hand, the prodigious actors’ cinema, this “Saturday night” cinema, more or less dead today, and whose ghost has not ceased to haunt the 1970s (especially Vecchiali, Mocky, Truffaut). And on the other hand, a certain number of heretical experiments conducted by authors who were often authors in two ways (Pagnol, Guitry, Cocteau, Renoir, Duras are also writers) and who share this fundamental idea that one mustn’t adapt the written for the image but, on the contrary, play with their heterogeneity. To the point that, to study the authors of French cinema, the cautious micro-systems of the 1970s, the 1960s boom (New Wave), the great post-war moderns (Bresson, Tati), the ever great moderns (Renoir, Gance), is to spot every time the demarcation line that they create between what is, for them, the raw and the cooked, the non-cinema and the cinema, a raw material and a crafty device.

This line, which never stays at the same place, is inevitably linked to the fact that, for 50 years, cinema is now talking, even talkative. French cinema authors have in common to have worked the image and to have been worked up by speech. That’s how they changed the cinema, that they modernised it. The emptied body of Bresson’s model, Duras’ writing in voice over, Pagnol’s delirious over-speaking, Tati-Hulot’s rumblings, Eustache’s redoubling stories, the wind in the bushes in Straub’s films, Godard stuttering in front of chattering children, Demy’s bourgeois’ “sprecheesang”, Pialat’s idiolects and Rohmer’s sociolects, Moullet’s statistical reciting, Rivette’s or Vecchiali’s controlled yet absolute freedom of improvisation, Rouch as a white sorcerer, all this – all this raw and unknown material – makes noise. A noise – to stick to the culinary metaphor –, that shall not be reduced.

We often reproach to French film critics no to love the cinema of their own country, to act like snobs towards it, to underestimate it, to love national cinemas which move better (because, the dance here, is all about the forclusion!), etc. The problem is that this reproach almost always comes from those who think that French cinema is too static, too literary, not enough constructed, etc. Whereas this is precisely this that is unique (and lovable): its passion for the language, its lightness and its moralising, its digressions and its authors’ dark narcissism.

Initially published in Cahiers du cinéma, issue 323-324 in May 1981. Also published in Serge Daney's first book: La rampe. Cahier critique 1970-1982, Cahiers du cinéma – Gallimard, 1983. Translation by Laurent Kretzschmar.

If anybody is interested, the bibliographic reference of the 1981 "translation" is FRANCE INFORMATION, no. 115 (1981), pp. 23-25.

Dumbo

2010-11-07T18:49:00.002Z

Nap time. My kid is watching a DVD of Dumbo. Serge Daney was never fond of animated movies, openly admitting he didn’t get them and famously claiming he never saw Bambi. But he was still able to write good pieces of film criticism such as the extracts from this text about Dumbo in 1989.

The Dumbo case

Dumbo is firstly a hymn to the night. Whether it’s the circus train, the female elephants raising the big top under the rain, the shadow cast over the destroyed big top or the isolated hut where Dumbo’s mother – now a “mad elephant” – is crying, the great moments of the movie happen at night. It’s at night that the mouse whispers to the man the idea of the show where Dumbo will be the star, and it’s at night, after the disaster, that the elephant with too large ears and his mouse friend fall in a well of champagne. Dumbo is this strange animated movie taking place in half-light and the strange story of this fake elephant (1).

(…)

The film is perhaps more beautiful if we look less at Dumbo’s revenge than at a process described in many mythologies: the hero’s double birth. First birth: from day to night. Second birth: from night to day. At first, Dumbo would be wrongly cast in the role of the baby elephant that he isn’t, and then he would be revealed as Dumbo, the unique specimen of a unique species with only one individual: the dumbo. Light ends up revealing the true nature of this celestial entity, after a long and difficult series of nocturnal tests. In a word, Dumbo would not be an elephant.

Why this surprising thesis? Because there is an extraordinary moment in Dumbo. Before he finds himself up in a tree, ready to fly, Dumbo spends one last night on earth, and there, in all innocence, he gets copiously drunk. Amateurs of animated movies, of happy fantasies, or simply of graphic invention, all know Dumbo’s booze-up with its procession of pink elephants on a black background. But this great moment of madness is not without its logic. From the black background against which the laughing elephant-like figures stand out, to the pink clouds of the dawn of Dumbo’s first day, there is a true rite of passage. And it’s a whole series of figures which parade, dance and jig, laughing and grotesque figures which only retain their trunk, or the concept of a trunk, as a distinctive elephant sign. Carnival bipeds, carefree and lewd, with black holes instead of a mask, camel-elephants, pig-elephants, gondola-elephants, car-elephant, all happy to be improbable, true cage of forms of a pagan ritual, joyously watching over the true birth of one of them: the Dumbo. Suddenly, we’re very far from the strokes and the mothers of the beginning of the film.

(1) The author, who has little taste for animated movies, saw Dumbo for two reasons. He was really bored in Malta and he like elephants. He saw the movie in a filthy and empty theatre.

Originally published in Libération on 2 January 1989 and reprinted in Devant la recrudescence des vols de sacs à main, Aléas, 1997. Translation by Laurent Kretzschmar.

Wings to attempt to land - Wings of desire (Wenders)

2010-09-29T15:30:00.001+01:00

How common themes and new concepts emerge from Serge Daney's writings over time is one of the most fascinating and rewarding aspect or reading his film criticism. Here's a small example on the theme of the sky in cinema. You need to read in parallel the review below of Wings of desire (Wenders, 1987) that Daney wrote when watching it on television and the text I translated a few month ago on airplanes (The world seen from above). Although the two texts were written four years apart, they read together very well.

Wings to attempt to land

We often hope the same thing will happen to movies as to planes: that they take off. But when we see them on television, on a background of wallpaper, we worry that they fall onto us like peeled off paper, disappointing and even sticky. We should change our metaphors and, to stick with aerial ones, hope that movies land well and touch down elegantly on the grey runway of the small television screen. Movies made for the cinema land on television as coming from above, from a screen high up or from the sky, from a real sky with black and white clouds and rains of fallen angels, like in a Wim Wenders’ film, one of the first to have made the sky return as one of the objects of cinema (1).

How to make a movie take off when its characters have only one goal: landing? That’s the impossible equation that Wenders has laid down, if not solved, in Wings of desire (1987). A strange and unique film, yet laborious, whose ideal spectator would be a floating Cartesian devil searching, between the boredom of the sky (Himmel) and the prison that is Earth (Berlin), a ‘strange place’ (über), to witness the aerial encounter between Damiel the angel and Marion the trapeze artist.

For the movie to function in the weightlessness of suspended desire, Wenders must navigate between two nostalgias: of the sky (and the era when silent cinema wasn’t afraid to film the sky) and of the Earth (and the era when talking cinema wasn’t afraid to lay down everything at man-level). A professional melancholic, Wenders knows he needs an increasingly heavy and complex machine (as heavy as Peter Handke’s pretentious texts and as complex as Henri Alkan’s beautiful light) “to be able, at each step, at each gust of wind, to say: Now”. What happens to the hic et nunc when nunc is jetzt and that’s the snag?

Wings of desire has something akin to Mission: Impossible: a desire for a desire which gets lost in a theory of wings; wing beats which get lost in a theory of desire. As if, to dare advance one step in the world above, we had to make the whole world below parade one last time. That’s the common fate of today’s (good) filmmakers: the present (jetzt) in their films is just the mystical short-circuit between a past and a future which are equally anterior. Among the filmmakers that Wenders admires – Ford and Ozu –, past and future were not yet anterior. Their films told stories. It was before fiction regressed towards the fictitious and the fictitious returned to the virtual, i.e. the programmable.

Something cruel happens to Wings of desire which is confirmed when seen on television. The film is never as beautiful and moving as at the beginning, when angels are doing for us a fantastic scouting of locations over the city of Berlin, this magnificent microcosm. Why? Because we don’t know yet who is who and who wants what. The desire is still on our side. When it swings over to the other side – Damiel’s – we no longer know how to make this desire ours and we start, before the film, our descent towards the ending (even if the director finishes the movie with “to be continued”).

It’s not that the movie lack emotions, it’s just that, in this movie, Wenders has managed to invent a world without contradictions, with no hate nor desire, solitary and reconciled. The erroneous French title mentions desire when it’s really about pleasure [jouissance]: pleasure to be here, neither to take off nor to land, with a bleeding body who knows the taste of coffee and who can feel “his framework advance when walking” (2).

This is why this fascinating and overestimated movie is essentially exotic. True exoticism (and Wenders, as a great traveller, knows it well) doesn’t mean opening wide eyes like a stupid tourist simply because he feels dépaysé, it means entering an unknown world as if we’ve always lived in it, less to see it than to feel with one’s body the effect it has on those who are not born in it. And if exoticism is the truth of this film, it is logical that the spectator experience it with the angels, and that he finds it more absorbing than the experience angels have with him.

Wenders may well never think evil but there is nonetheless a minimal threshold of voyeurism below which cinema is no longer worth it.

(1) The sky has become again an object of cinema in the 80s. Two moments: the beginning of Passion (Godard) and of Ran (Kurosawa).

(2) Something doesn’t work in these subtle and sensitive movies that are Woody Allen’s The purple rose of Cairo and Wings of desire. Why? Why is the return to Earth betrayed by cinema?

Published in Libération on November 3rd, 1988. Reprinted in Devant la recrudescence des vols de sacs à mains, Aléas éditeur, Lyon, 1991. Translation by Laurent Kretzschmar.

The world seen from above

2010-07-31T14:00:00.000+01:00

Ten years in London and I just found that the library of the French cultural centre has a very decent film section. I had little time to scan the bookshelves, so I quickly borrowed the issue 37 of Trafic ("Serge Daney, after, along"). Trafic is the film review founded by Daney in 1991, a year before his death. Despite Daney only able to contribute to the first three issues, the review has carried on since.

The issue 37 was published in 2001 - 10 years after its creation - and all the articles are about Daney. They are a strange mix of testimonies, memories, reflections and development on Daney and his work. And for some reason, it doesn't work at all. Commemorating Daney, who himself was so focused on the present, seems strangely out of place. It really lacks the immediacy, sharpness and wit that characterises Daney's writing. I even found myself hoping to find little-known personal anecdotes to report in this blog. Thankfully, there are none.

There are a few texts by Daney himself. Here's one:

The world seen from above
Serge Daney

Film making with planes: easy. Taming space, this strange environment: not so easy.

One evening in Tokyo, an anthology of Japanese B series films (ghost stories) is on television. At some point, a samurai’s decapitated head starts to fly, crosses the screen several times from left to right and, at the end of its mad flight, bites another surprised samurai. A head cut off, a flying machine whose passengers are (bloodshot) eyes, a mouth twisted at the idea of being dead, teeth, a nose. And hate as the engine. An airplane if you want.

Man, we are told, cares for his dream. Flying is one of them (from Icarus to Valentin the birdman). Recording real movement, and in real time, is another. A few years before the century, planes and cameras began to make noise at the same time. Then two world wars (and many others, less global) allowed them to expand their field manoeuvres and destructive off-field. Synchronicity.

But before fitting a camera on an airplane, cinema had made a (little) plane of our eye, allowing it to climb up, to move in space, and to become a missile, a rocket, a voyeur-kite, a bird gliding at low altitude. All of us, before we’ve even taken the plane, we've had the experienced of a crane (Dolly or Mitchell) and of this extraordinary invention: the "camera movement". The golden age was perhaps silent cinema. Not yet hampered by the necessity to also record sound, cameras fly around in an extraordinary world. What ultra light plane will have the elegance of a tracking shot by Murnau or Keaton? Our eye has taken the plane on its own and, even if it didn't go very far, we have travelled with him, by proxy.

The plane as a machine to see differently. The plane, an object made to be seen, exposed, made fetish. On the ground (insect) or in flight (bird), later a calm cetacean in space, or imprudently left to barracks comedy (Rellys!), falling into a tailspin, in flames. The plane is only an object and, as such, joins our toy collection. It doesn't create big problems for filmmakers. Some, not the least, are also plane pilots. The most famous, in the U.S., is Hawks. The airplane movies made by Hawks are among his most beautiful (The dawn patrol, 1930, Air Force, 1943). But the title of one of them (Only angels have wings, 1939) says it all. Hawks' cinema was famous for always placing the camera "at man-level" – not "at angel-level". And even when the aviator goes high in the sky and becomes this attractive leather ball fasten to his seat and clenching his joystick, Hawks doesn't get lost. In his films, air is not just another element; it is the element that makes possible the purest of movements. But these movements are still those of the ground.

That is why American war movies (those we know best) are the most "classic". The ground is targeted, time is measured, it is already the video game. There is no time to wonder, once "high up": that's another world! There's no high and low but an infinity of highs and lows, no sea but something resembling a large elephant skin, no earth but a patched up fabric, no sky but cotton wool between us and the sun! It is really strange that planes have become familiar objects but the amazing beauty seen from a plane has not stopped filmmakers filming the sky as if it was a two-bedroom apartment in a movie studio (think of DeMille's mundane comedies like Madam Satan (1930), it is the same thing).

This was the case for a long time. But from times to times, there were breaches, jumps in the unknown, bright spells in this all-too-balanced world. How could we forget the Spanish peasant who gets on a plane for the first time in his life and, suddenly, does not recognise the land for which he is ready to die: the peasant separated from his land in Malraux's Espoir (1939)? Or Wayne's and Janet Leigh's dangerous tailspins in Sternberg's Jet Pilot (1957)? The empty cockpit at the end of Mr. Arkadin (1955)? Dr. Strangelove's atomic bomber (1964)?

At the movies, the plane object is a matter for the props manager, but space, air, is a matter for the artist – those artists crazy enough to have a cosmogony and to make flying an adventure of perception, a new deal in the image we have of ourselves. They may be aviators (Hawks), or suffer from airplane phobia (Kubrick).

Space became an enigma again when the spaceship replaced the airplane. We started to fear meteorites, to meet wrecked spacecrafts, to populate space (including with the horrible “Alien”). The end of Icarus’s dream and the beginning of a new kind of nightmare: weightlessness. With 2001, Kubrick opens a new era (1968). Others followed. In the USSR also, we went from Hawksian classicism (Youli Raizman’s The Pilots, 1935 – a little known masterpiece) to panicked questioning (Tarkovski’s Solaris, 1972) and, more secretly, to someone like the Armenian Pelechian who in Cosmos* (1980) puts the spaceman not in the middle of the cosmos but at the centre of his diving suit, of his sons and of his vision as a stressed guinea pig.

It is a strange story, with three characters: the target, the plane and the gaze. We easily identified with the plane, we (sometimes) identified with the ground seen (bombed) from a plane; we are starting to forget both and to put all our drives in-between: the child of the 80s identifies with his own gaze as a projectile in the video game. For this, he no longer needs real skies, nor good old airplanes.

* The French title for Our Century.

Originally published in a “ciné-avion” supplement of Libération, 8 December 1983. Republished in La maison cinema et le monde, vol. 2, P.O.L., 2002, pp. 531-533. Translation by Laurent Kretzschmar.

Le ragazze!

2010-03-26T12:37:00.004Z

Two videos appeared recently on youtube showing Serge Daney at the launch of Trafic in 1992. They were posted by Jean-Paul Hirsch who works at POL, the publisher of Trafic. Serge Daney founded Trafic in 1992, shortly before his death in June that year. He only wrote in the first three issues.

For a long time, particularly when I was working for Libération, I thought you had to talk about the image in general. Those were the days of crosscurrent approaches and I didn't like the way film appreciation was wrapped up in itself. We talked about advertising, video - no privileges, we proclaimed, let's treat film on the same footing... Trafic breaks with that. We only talk about the art of cinema. (Serge Daney, interviewed in Art Press, issue no. 182, Dec 1993)

Launch evening on 28 January 1992 at Terrasse de Gutenberg (Paris) with Serge Daney, Jean-Claude Biette, Raymond Bellour, Sylvie Pierre...

POL Edition stand at the Paris Salon du livre on 21 March 1991 with Serge Daney, Jean Claude Biette, Sylvie Pierre, Patrice Rollet et Jacques Rozier. The cameraman asks who they will vote for in the upcoming regional elections.

Serge Daney in 2009

2009-12-30T11:12:00.003Z

Happy New Year everyone. A quick look back at Serge Daney in 2009.

Despite a bunch of new translations earlier in the year, it sort of dwindled down. And there's no sight of new attempt to translate Daney, if anything, I'm hearing less and less about book projects. There has been a much larger audience on this blog. Unfortunately, despite having a few translations on the way, I struggle to finish them, so the pace of publishing will get even slower. If anybody is keen to help, do shout.

There were 8 new translations online this year:

Preface to Here and Elsewhere (Bill Krohn's and my translation at Kinoslang)
Minnelli caught in his web (in Joe McElhaney's Minnelli book)
The Pirate isn't just decor (in Joe McElhaney's Minnelli book)
The Critical Function (old translation on Steve Erickson's website)
Last Thoughts; birth of a journal (thanks to the generosity of Vertigo)
A Genealogical Approach (thanks to Film Studies at King's College London)
The smash of rage (my translation at Kinoslang)
What Out of Africa produces (my translation for Steve Erickson's website)

Somehow, around 1000 of you (from 80 countries) managed your way to this blog (and did so several times in the year and stayed more than a few seconds). I consider you my true audience. It's kind of a big number and is enough to convince me this blog is worth continuing. I actually feel chuffed. So thanks a lot and happy new year!

What Out of Africa produces

2009-11-14T22:49:00.002Z

Steve Erickson just published a new translation of Daney's review of Out of Africa. It was written in 1988 for the French newspaper Libération and is all about television, advertising and cinema.

Daney spotted a very odd moment, where John Barry's soundtrack actually covers diegetic Mozart. It actually sounds incredible. Maybe not a Kapo moment, but certainly a great find. I've not been able to check the actual scene.

What Out of Africa produces
Originally published in Libération, 11 October 1988. Reprinted in Devant la recrudescence des vols de sacs à main, Aléas, 1997. Translation by Laurent Kretzschmar.

Serge Daney a "key thinker"

2009-10-27T11:14:00.002Z

Serge Daney is included in a new book bringing together "the key thinkers who have shaped the field of film philosophy": Film, Theory and Philosophy.

Garin Dowd's article on Serge Daney has no new translation but provides a good, thorough overview of Daney's work and how it fits in the field of philosophy.

And the inclusion of Daney among prestigious other thinkers (Adorno, Cavell, Deleuze, Barthes, Bazin) clearly highlights the lack of translation of his work. The high regard that Deleuze had for Daney is also made pretty clear.

...and there's even a footnote mentioning this blog. Thanks for that...

Cinema and 20th century memory

2009-10-11T11:43:00.003+01:00

I'm feeling melancholic this autumn Sunday and I just found this interview where Serge Daney, commenting on the launch of his film review Trafic, does his usual trick with a brand new perspective: which of the memories from the 20th century will be filmed memories (as opposed to written memories) and what that means for cinema. It could be a good discussion thread for Girish's blog.

Jean-Michel Frodon: To say that cinema has hosted the memory of the 20th century implies this memory is not in the other arts.
Serge Daney: It's also partly in popular music, and it was there in jazz before it closed itself again, but not in the same way as in cinema. Cinema is the only "art" where, through the actors, we have watched ourselves grow old. That doesn't exist in painting, not after Duchamp. Nor is it in music after Schonberg. Nor in literature which seems to have resisted only within empires - the USA or Russia: the memory of the gulag will be a written memory (via Solzhenitsyn who is more a journalist than a writer). Cinema will only have caught some posthumous fragments or asides. Cinema is obviously not an exact memory of the century, but it's the only one that we will really miss. Because, by accompanying movements, even mass deliriums, it could try to work with "mass mournings". It did it in some rare countries, in the USA, in Italy.

JMF: How has cinema fulfiled this function of a guardian of memory?
SD: Probably because it camped between the subconscious and the conscious, on the side of what Freud called the pre-concsious for a time. That means it's not really a language but it's still a territory with rules. Cinema provides an account of what is about to come out. To come out of the bodies, of actors, of a situation, of a society. It reveals it by recording it. A great filmmaker is only someone who's better than others at giving birth. Jacques Tati didn't invent the world in which France was already absorbed in 1967, he saw it and he invented the ability to show it. It's Playtime, the last French film with a true grandeur. Cinema is not an art of visionaries, it's a nudge carried out with recording machines (camera, sound recorder) and recorded machines (the actors, the stories). It allows to move from the subconscious of society to a certain consciousness of the singularties that populate society, but nothing more. Too much consciousness kills desire, kills art. You can see it every time the militant or propagandist concerns come back to the fore. Cinema only allows to precise, no more and no less. It has helped many people to start their journey to a certain truth of time - and of themselves withing their time - through images, even if this truth didn't reside in the images.

Interview published in French in Le Monde on 7 July 1992. My translation.

Freeze-image / Arrêt sur l'image

2009-06-18T08:00:00.004+01:00

Last translated extract from L'exercice a été profitable, Monsieur.

Serge Daney's concept of "arrêt sur l'image" is a tough one to grasp and is difficult to translate. It's a pun on "arrêt sur image" (the French term for "freeze frame") but means much more than this. To translate it, I've been hesitating for some time between "stop on the image" (which I've used in The Tracking Shot in Kapo) and "freeze-image" (which I'm trying here). Daney develops the concepts more fully in 1989 article From Movies to Moving.

Hopefully, the text translated below - Daney's 1988 computer notes for the 1989 article - will help.

6 April 1988 - Freeze-image. We were immobile in front of images that moved. We move along immobile images. Immobile like those men and women who "walk the streets" and who, for that matter, strike a pose. "Propositions" (as we say in fashion). The more an image is in simultaneous competition with all the others, the less it has to move (the street corner, the ad 'space' is expensive, one has to occupy his space and be his own logo). To watch again in this light Fellini's films (City of Women) and the idea of 'parading' in his films and in Godard's (Here and Elsewhere).

A history of the freeze-image would be instructive. For me, it starts with the final shot of The 400 Blows. But there's also a fantastic freeze-image at the beginning of Capra's It's a Wonderful Life (a fascinating film). The freeze-image (return to the inanimate - death drive) means that there are images beyond which movement does not continue. They can be one of the 24 ordinary moments in a second of recorded film. But at one point they are no longer ordinary at all: they are - by essence - 'terminals'.

The 'terminal'-image is the signifier which demands its due, a petrified movement, a pose, an image with no Other (another image, off-screen), it is maybe in that respect a pious image. In reverse, cinema knew for a time how to welcome and organise unfolding images. In the two poles formerly seen as opposites (let's say Rossellini-Eisenstein) there was the same concern to articulate (famous question: how to move from a shot to another), to modulate time, to pay attention to the metamorphoses of an image into another, to accompany the movement while reorienting it slightly (movement of the words as well, metaphorical, literal). To see something move was therefore the best bit of my love for cinema: to see it endure as itself while transforming itself for good. Pushed to the limit: the absolute gaze of the one who sees each thing progress at its own speed (from the clouds to actors, from ideas to emotions). That's why, even in bad films, the "gimmick" of time passing-by and of the actor made up to look artificially aged always touches me (Cavalcade, The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, Giant, Paradis perdu, etc.).

Today's image is bound to immobility, to freeze. It's not because it's animated that it is "in motion". Television is the realm of animation, not movement. TV sees the animation (as little as possible) of emblems, figures, logos, brands. These have no specific future, apart from being replaced by others. They can't evolve much because it would be detrimental to their "image". They are used until they're no longer useful. The best that can happen to them is to "be an image" and become transcendent to their support so to be always recognisable. It's the meaning of Andy Warhol's genius stroke with Marilyn "and" the Campbell soup.

But more generally, the image is not subject to anthropomorphism. By presuming that images have adventures, gather speed, develop their own story and organic development ("our friends the images"), we make images the equivalent of the characters (real or fictitious) that the image used to provide. Known situation: to tremble for what happens to the character, then for what happens to the image of the character. Possible morality (Godard as always).

Today, we are more and more dealing with a virtual moment in a simulation. It's, even in future perfect, a freeze-image which will have allowed to eventually actualise such or such stasis of a process from which it is possible to anticipate. "looking" no longer comes first but, in the best of scenarios, second. To see first (mystical?), to see after (pragmatical?).

pp. 38-40, POL, 1993, my translation

Twin Peaks

2009-06-10T08:00:00.002+01:00

Online coincidence.

Jonathan Rosenbaum just published on his blog his 1990 review of Twin Peaks as I was finalising the translation the notes Serge Daney took on his computer when the series was broadcast on French television a year later.

Both reviewers see something in Lynch's young characters. But where Rosenbaum admits being "bored stiff by most of the teenagers in Twin Peaks" and prefers "the adolescent eye trained on the other characters", Daney feels an "intense curiosity for the way young and seducing beings, boys and girls, seem to succeed under our very eyes at the passage from the fashion catwalk to the psychological TV series."

And where Rosenbaum refers to Peter Greenaway, Daney mentions Hitchcock and Tourneur.

Anyway, I let you make the connections. For more by Daney on David Lynch, see his review of The Elephant Man.

25 May 1991 - Lynch. I saw, a bit by chance, with S.P., an episode of Twin Peaks on TV. I had already seen one and had been intrigued (in a good way). Same feeling yesterday. Same pleasure to let myself into the "chain" of the film, once I am (vaguely) related to the plot and once I am in the passage, always stimulating, from a scene (a shot) to another. Ah! Here's some cinema, one notices. It constantly articulates something.

It makes me doubt (a bit) about certain of my dictates. A certain number of things suddenly seem viable, a bit like movement is proven by walking. For example there's a possible use of advertising beauty in a story, outside the short scripts of advertising. I saw "advertising" to avoid saying "artificial". My old hate of the American-style artificial star (from Lana Turner to Dallas) is here transformed in an intense curiosity for the way young and seducing beings, boys and girls, seem to succeed under our very eyes at the passage from the fashion catwalk to the psychological TV series.

What is singular in them, is that their "look" stays the course, as we say a makeup or a lifting "holds on". It's the "perseverance in their appearance" which becomes the essence of these characters and it's maybe the liberty of the open TV series (and of a script that we lose sight of after so many de-multiplications) which allows to make us accept this.

I find two traditions behind these "looks". The tradition of Hitchcock and of a certain cloning specific to the B series (Tourneur). I've been thinking for some time that David Lynch seems to be a very serious heir to Hitchcock. The common points are obvious: same sexual obsession between bawdiness and phobia, same fluctuations between the unsavoury organic and the glaze of a smooth surface, same co-existence of dry logic and irrationality (which will remain so), same taste for the audience wherever it is (in front of the television), same talent of a visual artist generously releasing formal - or formalist - "ideas", same fashion designer's culture, same - sometimes zany - irony embedded in the form itself (it's the form that makes itself ironic - via a small excess, a minimal exhibition, just before it gets uneasy - and not the spectator that creates irony - from outside - with its cultural knowledge). The cop has the same acting rhythm as Gary Grant and I like a lot the way his caustic lines are lost to almost everyone. I like the French version of this (there's no particular desire to listen to it in English).

From B series, the film takes the Dana Andrews aspect of the same character (mineral, ultra-combed) and a certain cloning of the bodies. As if everything was seen through the star models of a unique catwalk, up to them to invent time, duration, acting that makes them last. This duration is subject to the blackmail of a suspense that mustn't be too diluted. But, for example, I like a lot the status of the flashbacks which come less to explain things than to play the role of footnotes or brackets in the middle of the text which, thanks to electronics, emerge and recede like attempts at Eisenstein or Vertov editing.

We enter Mannerism when we take (from inside) and we leave Mannerism when we animate (from outside). Mannerism is a game because it's very close to the pleasure of a child who plays at disemboweling his dolls or at dismantling his toys. Mannerism is therefore destined to a certain disappointment (no knowing how to put back together what has been broken). It's the moment when, from an aquarium - this cultural breeding ground and catalogue of existing effects - we pull out a few fishes and make them last a bit more, the time to watch them do a few movements outside their natural element. The proof is: what usually doesn't convince me in Lynch's films is precisely what I like in Twin Peaks. The spectacle of time is perhaps better "at home", where people waste their time in front of the TV.

These movements are very particular: convulsive, made as parody, self-generated and eventually deadly. Where the movement stops, it's enough to instill some from outside by treating them like inert toys, puppets, freeze-images (and that's perhaps what Pompier art is).

Two examples come to my mind. What I've written about Kurosawa's Ran: the energy stored in the bodies is made visible in their chaotic agony (the malefic-technical energy stored in the planet threatens this one). What I've written about Rumble Fish, a mannerist film, precisely with the two fishes taken out of their aquarium, the red and the blue.

L'exercice a été profitable, Monsieur, pp. 332-5, POL, 1993, my translation

A trip to JLG's

2009-06-04T08:00:00.000+01:00

9 March 1990 - A trip to JLG's. With S.T. in Rolle for the evening, in Nyons for the night (Beau Rivage hotel). Fifteen years ago, the two of us already (with A.C.) in Grenoble where JLG projected for us Ici et ailleurs on a wall (the emotion was so strong that I vomited on the way back). Today, the same ones, not that different. Only time brings us closer to the old monster from whom we no longer expect fine touches but rather almost a degree of affection. The ritual: Hervé D. (friendly, devoted and too close to the kitchen not to be critical) collects us by car in Geneva, then the hotel in Nyons, then rue du Nord in Rolle, then the the dark den and the engine room where JLG, alone, with tousled hair, puffing on a cigar, is alone with his images. Today the images of Nouvelle Vague which he is editing and of Rapport Darty which he has just finished. Chit-chat (he saw Pelechian's movies: very impressed), viewing, detour - unavoidable trip to the nearby restaurant where the unchanged menu promises fatty perch fillet, beer, expedited dinner, we leave each other in the Grand-rue: we can feel the solitude of the man, and in ricochet, ours, return to Nyons, Geneva and Paris.

The JLG-effect today. Before we even have a chance to breathe a sigh of relief, the image and its sensual and screaming luminosity, the undergrowth, the lake, the bodies of the "actors" who are there as the sound punctuation of the landscape and who talk, more and more, in original version between inverted commas. This time (according to Hervé D.) the "dialogue" is entirely made of quotes ("Life could be sad" is from Renan) but so close to each other that they generate anxiety. The third reel, the one we see, shows some human beings engaging in the rare "actions" that JLG finds interesting: exercising power, giving a phone call, talking to no-one in particular, letting oneself drown (literally) in front of each other, being living reproaches. Nature is superb and indifferent. Delon is one of the extras, no more no less. From now on, what remains of the acting of the actors consists in placing an intonation randomly in a sentence that is strangely naked or, contrarily, literary.

pp. 196-7, POL, 1993, my translation

Follows a fascinating text inspired by the restaurant discussion on the parade (cinema, a thing after another, always new) and the round dance (theatre, when things end up returning) comparing Godard with Fellini, Fassbinder and Woody Allen... too much and too difficult to translate now.

Points of view

2009-05-28T08:00:00.000+01:00

12 December 1989 - Old principle of "our" cinephilia: the point of view. For me, the "point of view" is precisely what comes in the place of a body which is elided in the image, what can be seen from the blind spot. The point of view refers to what could be seen by a character who would always be in the camera's place. To stick with this point of view immediatly means confronting problems of mise en scène (since there are forbidden images, which would not be consistent with the unique point of view). The question of the "point of view" comes down to asking who is looking. Who is the additional character? For example, in Depardon's film, another guard, a guard "who would know".

The cinema of the unique point of view is disappearing (in both senses of the term) in its (mystical, pictural) relation to the "real". It abolishes itself. It never has much success since it confiscates for itself what's imaginary (and deprives the audience of it: Antonioni, Depardon). Obsessive.

The cinema of the double point of view is popular cinema by excellence, since it firmly camps between the shot and the "reaction shot" (read Warren's book), playing the "objet petit a" between two objects caught in a power struggle (see my old idea on Jaws: the shark and the child's legs). It's popular because it creates a vertiginous identifying between two poles: active/passive, chasing/chased, torturer/victim, etc. Hysteria.

This leaves the cinema with n points of views, in the end the greatest. It sometimes is "popular" but not necessarily. It has to juggle with paranoia, law, madness. I can't imagine a greater film than The Night of the Hunter in this category, the category of polyphony, of carnival (along maybe with Ivan the Terrible, 2001, some Ford's movies).

Tiebreaker: is the cinema of zero point of view possible? No. We would need to analyse television not with visual but with tactile metaphores ("point of touch", tactile padding) and proxemics.

pp. 196-7, POL, 1993, my translation

Demy: Les Demoiselles de Rochefort

2009-05-21T13:04:00.002+01:00

23 July 1988 - DEMY (tv). The end of Les demoiselles de Rochefort. Stupid, devastated, definitive emotion. An emtion all the stronger that everything that I've always thought - and written - about Demy is still true. A hard film-maker, not at all sentimental, morbid and joyful.

Only one 'idea'. Melancholy is not nostalgia. Demy's world (mine too I suppose) is instant melancholy. There is no lost world, no ideal gone by, no previous state that we regret. For the simple reason (perversion oblige) that we want to know nothing of this world 'from which we come' (alliance rather than kinship, etc.).

Melancholy is as instantaneous as a shadow. Things become melancholy immediately, thanks to music and the music of the dialogue. It's the good mood with which the characters fail at everything (apart perhaps from the essential) which is terrible and moving at the same time. One does not fail at things because he didn't see them but because he found too quickly a way to empty them from their content, to circle around them, to dance. Darrieux learns who the sadist is and says: "And he was the one putting on airs while cutting the cake!"

The essential was love but it has kept losing its colours. In this film, already, the beauty of the 'last minute' because every happy ending is pure voluntarism. But later (Peau d'âne, etc.), it creaks more and more. And voluntarism is precisely the topic of Une chambre en ville.

Deny's absolute strength is to relate everything back to a prefect point of view: that of the mother. The mother who has never grown up, who is frivolous, who has forgotten to stop being a little girl. The world gets ordered from this blind task.

Dances: Gene Kelly.

pp. 102-103, 33, POL, 1993, my translation

The Verdict

2009-05-15T11:35:00.008+01:00

26 March 1988 - Yesterday, between evening and night, in front of the TV. I quickly abandon 8 1/2 even though I've never seen it but which exasperates me and find myself following until the end a movie that I objectively find badly made, badly told, bad everything: The Verdict by Sydney Lumet. Television schizophrenia: not only we watch what is not good (not well made), but we see it even better than at the cinema (editing for example), and yet we can prefer to see a badly made movie to a well made one. Or rather: the concepts of "well made" and "badly made" are not relevant on television. Either the movie has such a strength that it imposes itself, or we are in the relativity of a world of images, of a bath of imaginary, where everything is interesting. It depends on the mood of the moment. Yesterday, I preferred to watch Mason and especially Newman "compose" with age, with everything. Lumet is the archetypal filmmaker who films from the point of view of no one, hence an abstract effectiveness, so abstract that it is reduced to the nonsensical script. He speeds up where there's no reason for it. One beautiful moment. Newman has finally found the nurse who "knows" what happened. She takes care of children in Chelsea. She has the beautiful face of a union saint. She is in the playground, Newman who arrives from Boston is approaching clumsily. Close-up on the Boston-New York ticket which sticks out from his pocket. And there, a small cinema trick from the old Lumet, a little bit of true speed: reverse shot on Newman who is no longer showing off: "Will you help me?" She will help him, not because the script requires it, but because we have been put in her place (by the mise en scène) and her in ours and because the desire for her to help him has been inscribed into the movie. Old things but which exists, for goodness sake!

(...)

The example from Lumet's film, a few days ago ("Will you help me?") sums it up. It's unrefined but it is enough. The shot of Newman - of a Newman who asks for help and asks it twice: to the other character (off) and to me who - for a second - have been able to put myself in the film in the place of this character absent from the image. And he will get help twice: in the script and from me (at this moment, I accept to go along with the film, and therefore to make it work).

pp. 26-27, 33, POL, 1993, my translation

20 years to learn to watch a film

2009-05-09T15:03:00.006+01:00

I've just started re-reading L'exercice a été profitable, Monsieur - a book gathering the notes that Serge Daney kept as a diary. Here's a first snippet.

Straub's sentence: "it took me twenty years to learn to watch film." He said it with the irritation of a factory worker who insists on this difficult knowledge. What does it mean in the end? To see and to hear what is (visible and audible). To see for example - in the same glance - John Ford's shot, the actual shooting of this shot, the horse, the actor distinct from his role, the character distinct from the body, the human being distinct from its social function. To hear the music and know that a Jew from central Europe fleeing Nazism composed some sub-Schoenberg to make a living, to hear the direct sound, etc. It's obviously a limit but it's the only possible materialist approach.

This is a mad programme. It's also this intensification of the perception of the heterogeneous below the homogeneous which makes some criticism possible. The critic sees something "edited" (or manufactured) where the others see the homogeneous (the natural). Barthes again. The critic (let's remain Straubian) would be the one who could discuss the film with its authors if he was capable of this exra-perception. He would talk as a craftsman. But as an very knowledgeable craftsman, able to identify all the levels of a Mille-feuille. Straubian limit: culture precisely. They couldn't do [...] because there is a general history of cinema, an history that says that Ozu has copied from Capra.

pp. 23-24, POL, 1993, my translation

More to come...

Daney on tennis

2009-04-24T08:00:00.000+01:00

Serge Daney did not just write about cinema. From 1980 to 1990, he wrote extensively about tennis for the newspaper Libération. Several of these articles have been collected in a posthumous book: L'amateur de tennis, POL, 1994.

Andy Rector at Kinoslang publishes the first English translation of a text by Daney on tennis. The article was part of Daney's daily column on television "The zapper's wage" (le salaire du zappeur) written for Libération from September to December 1987.

The smash of rage
First published in Libération, 16 September 1987, reprinted in Le salaire du zappeur, POL, 1993.

To give an idea of the originality of Daney's writings on tennis (which is also revealing of the risks Libération took when it was a really innovative newspaper), I'm translating below the table of contents of L'amateur de tennis. Unfortunately a lot of puns gets lost in translation.

1980 - Roland-Garros

Connors saves two match points and ousts Caujolle
The birth of the tennis aficionados
The time factor
The peculiar sound of Borg's racket
Hana Mandlikofa easily eliminates Ivana Madruga
Gerulaitis unleashes himself against everybody
Women play seriously
Virtuosity paid
No pathos at Roland-Garros

1980 - Wimbledon

Borg-McEnroe or the beauties of pure reason

1981 - Wimbledon

McEnroe got almost madly angry against Frawley
Power change

1982 - Roland-Garros

Vilas' perpetual metamorphosis
Women's tennis: when one attacks, the other doesn't
The story of an acceleration that didn't come
Vilas is in the final, without losing a set
Tsetse final at Roland-Garros

1982 - David Cup

Noah-McEnroe: the aces of aces
Davis Cup: a tennis symphony in five movements

1983 - Davis Cup

USSR-France: great beach tennis against world-class
The immobile Soviet tennis
Davis cup: the French not as dull as the Russians

1983 - Roland-Garros

Entire afternoons on the central court
Roger-Vasselin, the smallest of the quarter finals
The Swedish syndrome
The French scripts
Vilas-Higueras: even the weather got depressed
The Wilander mystery
Wilander-Higueras: three hours without thrills
Noah-Wilander: 15h08 - 17h32

1983 - Wimbledon

And McEnroe found out the flaw
McEnroe has learnt to be bored

1983 - Davis cup

Davis cup: Noah goes through, Leconte doesn't
Davis cup: The French eat the grass

1982 - Roland-Garros

The privileged ones must sit down!
Where one can see the other tournaments in transparency
Bouncing emotions on red earth
On the eighth day, courts in-between raindrops
The image pit
Slices of today's matches
Lendl the executioner beats the elegant Gomez
Navratilova: grand slam in her sights
Lendl-Wilander: the hypnotizer trapped

1985 - Roland-Garros

High end Benhabiles
The two-head machine and the referee's madness
Refereeing: the year of all the troubles
3 hours, 5 sets, 49 games: Leconte is good
A too quiet day under Swedish influence
Leconte, check Mats
Connors: no suspense for the last elected in the four aces
A real big moaner in the dinosaurs' pit
Jimmy Connors is less terrestrial than Lendl

1985 - Wimbledon

Wimbledon: the final gives birth to a little genius

1987 - Roland-Garros

When cracks get their fangs out, little crocodiles crack.
Mats Wilander, listen to indifference
Tyranny in three acts
Mecir, non-standard exchanges
Graf pins out Sabatini at the finish
Mecir trips over Lendl's soft shots
Ivan Lendl: bis

1988 - Roland-Garros

Yannick Noah gets the audience on his knee
Henri Leconte, intermittent tennis
Yannick Noah fighting on red clay
Andrei Chesnokof gobbles up Pat Cash
Wilander carves a break for himself
Half pint for Henri Leconte's thirst
Leconte in final, cracking? No.
An afternoon in red white and yuck!

1990 - Bercy

Sad day with second rank players
A killer on the road, two victims by the roadside

Daney interview: A Movie Maven's Farewell

2009-04-02T08:00:00.003+01:00

I've just found an interview with Serge Daney conducted a few months before his death in 1992 and translated in English in Art Press. Not a huge amount of new stuff and too much of the melancholia which characterised Daney's last year (when he started to close more doors than he was opening). I've put some interesting snippets below.

Serge Daney Cinephilia: A Movie Maven's Farewell
Interview by Jacques Henric and Dominique Païni, published in Art Press issue no. 182, December 1993 (out of print). Translated by J. O'Toole.

There's another reason for launching Trafic. The cinema makes us write and think. There will never be a television review, impossible. Scholarly reviews can take television as a "poor object of little interest," you'll never have a review that runs on television the way you would say of a car that runs on gasoline or diesel.

For a long time, particularly when I was working for Libération, I thought you had to talk about the image in general. Those were the days of crosscurrent approaches and I didn't like the way film appreciation was wrapped up in itself. We talked about advertising, video - no privileges, we proclaimed, let's treat film on the same footing... Trafic breaks with that. We only talk about the art of motion pictures.

(...)

The avant-garde of the seventies? Garel, Duras, Straub and so on? They're modernists, yes, but not in the sense of avant-garde. The avant-garde is the twenties. And unlike Americans such as Mekas, who couldn't and wouldn't go to Hollywood, the Straubs had a cinema, and therefore a public space, to project their films in - even if the projection had an underground air about it and was tantamount to engaging in political activism. And they had a TV channel ready to fund and program their work. The underground is something else. Anyway, I don't think the cinema can go very far with solitude. With their well-oiled war machine, their sacred egoism, their fine vitality, too and the clear ideas they have concerning their work, the Straubs are probably the last to create a cinema for loners that can nevertheless be brought into regular theaters. They are squarely in cinema and I would have given up on them long ago with their garbled political ideas, had I not understood that they were the last great film-makers of the history of modern cinema, perhaps of the history of cinema, period. I harbor no illusions about the receptability of their work; they set out to teach people something and people will always hate them for that. People are partly right, moreover, to have kept that great bad memory of school. I'm a good pupil; I've always enjoyed learning.

The American underground and the now-dead French experimental cinema are not cinema for me. They belong to the sphere of the fine arts.

(...)

For me, image/writing is an unreconciliable pair that is very tolerable. Let's come back to Trafic: what's not written will not be published. Lots of people would have interesting things to say about the cinema, but they have no link to writing. Publishing interviews, for example, is out of the question.

(...)

Will the cinema disappear one day? Is it economically viable? Wouldn't too much solitude really screw it up? I repeat, the image is not made to be seen by an individual alone. As long as you're dealing with the audio-visual recording of the world, you're in an emission of light, your suffering is infinite. When we move on to video art, television and computer-generated images, nobody suffers. The fact of being in light belongs to the past. There are maybe four crackpots out there ready to sit through the Straubs' films, but that's important because all four come from the same light. What I'm saying there is a bit religious but that's my conviction. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, cinema and photography have represented the persistence of one question, why me? Why aren't I also in the bright light? Light implies making the body openly available. That can go very badly if the market suddenly answers no. As soon as you're working with light (is the fact that light sculpts a correlative?) you say, Why not me? To work with light and not be in that light explains maybe why all film-makers want to go to Cannes. Every single one. Straub, Boris Lehman, Godard... I'm beginning to be less of a blockhead than before: I used to believe that there was a certain number of film-makers who would say, "No, no, not me - just a little, me.

Those who get along the best are the director-actors. It's better to be Dubroux, Moretti, or Monteiro and to lay your body as it is on the line, at the risk of that being a flop, obscene. That's the question raised by Rivette's latest film: there's a man who is extraordinarily photogenic, has a beautiful face, admirable gestures, yet he doesn't dare put himself at the very center of his own world, as Godard has done a little. Rivette is in a blind alley because he is a pure director. He continues to film a world where light is essential, and he films it very well, but he continues to uphold (heroic stance) the idea that he won't figure there, that he'll remain in the position of a man in the shadows.

In the New Wave there was great resentment with respect to the actor. There's a question as well: at what point does an author wish the death of his actor? Of course Truffaut created Léaud, but when he shot La chambre verte, his best picture, it didn't occur to him to give Léaud the part. He played it himself and he played it sublimely.

I am convinced that the moment light disappears, the moment it is no longer a pertinent tool of creation, the moment it comes from somewhere other than the sun (as when you rework the computer-generated image), we lose a part of our humanity. All kinds of hokum are then possible.

Daney: Genealogy of the Nouvelle Vague

2009-03-16T08:30:00.000Z

Serge Daney on comparing the time of the Nouvelle Vague with now:

"In the present context we can see how much cinema has changed and shrunk: today it's misplaced to speak of a generation, a group, a school or even a pack. A young filmmaker now, from fear of being unnoticed, quickly becomes a fighting machine geared only to self-defence and self-celebration."

Daney wrote this in 1992. Has this changed today, especially with all the film writing happening on the Internet? Can a Nouvelle Vague-type moment happen again?

A Genealogical Approach
Originally published in French in Jean-Louis Passek (ed.), D’un cinéma l’autre (Paris: Centre Pompidou, 1998), translated by Jim Cook.

Many thanks to staff at the Film Studies Department at King's College London who have translated this text for their academic use and kindly accepted to put it online.

Daney interviews Rohmer

2009-03-13T12:37:00.003Z

This review at DVD times indicates that one of the features of The Green Ray DVD (much cheaper on Amazon) is an interview between Serge Daney and Eric Rohmer subtitled in English.

From 1985 to 1990, Daney hosted a weekly broadcast called Microfilms on French radio station France-Culture. He interviewed Rohmer in September 1986. The French recording is available from the French Audio Visual Archives.

Last Thoughts; birth of a journal (now online)

2009-03-05T19:33:00.002Z

Thanks to the generosity of Vertigo Magazine, this text is now available online.

Last Thoughts; birth of a journal
Translated by Tom Milne, Vertigo Magazine, Vol. 1 No.1 Spring 1993. Originally published in French in Trafic, no. 1, Winter 1991.

After leaving Libération and "television criticism" in 1991, Serge Daney's ultimate "positive act" (in his words) was the creation of the film review Trafic, which continues to publish today. This is the translation (of extracts of?) the text Daney wrote in the first issue.

I remember reading it with all the excitement of discovering a major new film publication. The issue contains texts from Godard, Monteiro, Robert Kramer, and others. Now, I find the text a bit too symptomatic of Daney's last writings. There's a lot of melancholy. But he still manages to explore further one of the concepts he was keen on: resistance.

Anyway, enjoy! And thanks again to Vertigo.

The Critical Function

2009-02-23T08:39:00.000Z

With all the debates on film criticism in 2008, I thought it was interesting to release this article by Serge Daney on problems film criticism thought it had back in 1974!

This text needs a word of warning though. It was written at a particular moment in the history of Cahiers du cinéma, at the end of an intense political period which led the magazine to an impasse and just before Serge Daney and Serge Toubiana took charge of the magazine and organised a 'return to the cinema'.

As Antoine de Baecque describes in his history of Cahiers:

"With the magazine facing the void, only Serge Daney is left. He accepts to take charge of Cahiers, publishing almost immediately, in the issue 248 which strangely is not dated (a sign of the malaise, the no man's land where the magazine is), a text rehabilitating the 'critical function.' All films are of course the ideological expression of the dominant culture, writes Daney, but to say only this is no longer enough. One must also describe how this bourgeois culture imposes its domination via films and how another (popular) culture could divert it, or extract itself from it. It is in the elucidation of this 'how' and its enunciation that lies the critic's work."

So, let's not forget to put into context the 27 occurrences of the word "bourgeois", the quotes from Mao and Engels and the dreary Marxist vocabulary. Daney was happy to see the back of that period when he moved from Cahiers to Libération and he didn’t include this text in his first book (La Rampe) gathering his articles from 1970 to 1982.

I find the third part, called 'Anti-retro (continued)', the most interesting. Daney's comments on the place of spectator in The Night Porter shaped his later thinking (up until The tracking shot in Kapo). And his analysis of who has the most knowledge (the spectator, the character, etc.) is at the centre of his views on advertising. Beside, who else could find Hitchcock's North by Northwest a fine metaphor in a Marxist text!

The Critical Function

Translated by Annwyl Williams in Cahiers Du Cinéma: Volume Four, 1973-1978 : History, Ideology, Cultural Struggle : an Anthology from Cahiers Du Cinéma, Nos 248-292, September 1973-September 1978, By Jim Hillier, David Wilson, Nick Browne, Bérénice Reynaud, published by Routledge, 2000, 323 pages. Originally published as ‘Fonction critique’ in three parts in Cahiers du cinéma issue 248, September 1973-January 1974, issue 250, May 1974 and issue 253, October-November 1974

And let’s simply hope that none of the film criticism written today will age as badly as this one!

Minnelli: Two new translations (now online)

2009-02-02T14:20:00.002Z

* * * Updated post with links to the texts via Google Book Search * * *

Surprise New Year present!

Joe McElhaney just announced via the comments on the last blog entry that his upcoming book Vincente Minnelli: The Art of Entertainment will contain new translations (by Bill Krohn) of two Daney articles:

The Pirate isn't just decor
Originally published as 'Pirate n'est pas que décor' in Libération on 15 October 1988 and republished in Devant la recrudescence des vols de sacs à main, Aleas, 1991.

Minnelli caught in his web
Originally published as Minnelli pris dans sa toile' in Libération on 21 October 1988 and republished in Devant la recrudescence des vols de sacs à main, Aleas, 1991.

With several others translations coming soon, 2009 is starting well!

Ici et ailleurs

2009-01-18T09:42:00.000Z

Andy Rector at Kinoslang just posted a series of texts and pictures around a 1977 New York film festival that Daney helped organise. It includes the translation of an unpublished piece by Daney on Godard's Ici et ailleurs. The text was unearthed from Bill Krohn's personal archives.

Preface to Here and Elsewhere

A big thank you to Andy for the idea and initiative and to Bill for helping with the translation.

Daney in 2008

2008-12-30T09:30:00.004Z

Happy New Year everyone.

A quick look back over 2008, a fairly quiet year in regards to Daney in English.

Five new translations:

Thank you to Steve Erickson and Andy Rector for their help with publishing these texts.

Some disappointing news. POL, the French publishing house who had begun releasing Serge Daney's 'complete' writings back in 2001 told me they have no plans for new volumes (leaving the years 1985 to 1992 in the dark - as well as all the texts they've missed out). And some tentative plans for English books of translations unfortunately didn't fall through.

This blog had just over 3,000 visitors however Google Analytics tells me that many of these came only once and spent less than 10 seconds on the blog. My core audience is therefore the 240 or so loyal readers who came more than three times last year and stayed at least a minute.

Whoever you are, thank you for you interest. I hope this blog and my translations are helpful.

Let's hope for more in 2009.

For a cine-demography

2008-12-01T09:44:00.002Z

A new translation of an article showing one of Daney's original perspectives on cinema!

A sort of history of cinema comparing the number of spectators and of characters in movies:

Classic cinema: a lot of people in a lot of movie theatres watching films with a lot of characters.
Modern cinema: fewer and fewer people in already too many movie theatres watching films with fewer and fewer characters.
Post-modern cinema: many people in just a few (large) theatres want to see films with just a few characters.

I've just finished the translation and it's available on Steve Erickson's website:

For a cine-demography
The French version was originally published in Liberation, 13 September 1988 and can be found in Serge Daney, Devant la recrudescence des vols de sacs à main, Aléas (http://www.aleas.fr/), 1997.

Since Daney's text is 20 years old, I'm wondering if the metaphor couldn't developed further. Something like a lot of isolated people scattered around the globe (in front of the television, DVDs, internet or at film festivals or in museums) watch many movies with small, minor, ordinary characters. No more heroes except for the fantasy super heroes of Hollywood (Batman, etc.).

John Ford for ever

2008-11-11T09:45:00.001Z

A new translation of a 1988 article by Serge Daney about John Ford following the showing of She Wore a Yellow Ribbon on French television. It's available on Steve Erickson's website:

John Ford for ever

Originally published in Liberation on 18 November 1988 and reprinted in Devant la recrudescence des vols de sacs à main, Aléas, 1997.

I'm still amazed by Daney's ability to capture a unique characteristic (rapid contemplation) of a filmmaker (Ford) in such a concise and simple manner.

Fort Apache was on British TV last Saturday afternoon and, as I exercised the usual Daney trick: count the first 10 shots of a movie to see "if it works", I spotted this amazing panoramic shot of a coach going full speed through Monument Valley: the camera follows the coach from left to right but then abandons it for a moment to look up a big rock formation before getting back down to the coach and the action. The coach actually disappears from the frame in the middle of the action... sheer magic.

Any other rapid contemplation anyone?

Baby Seeking Bathwater (now online)

2008-04-18T16:19:00.000+01:00

Thanks to a used-books seller in Germany and to Amazon , I've managed to get hold of this late text by Daney in one of the Documenta books. It's now available on Steve Erickson's website.

Baby Seeking Bathwater

Originally published in Libération in two parts on 30 September and 1 October 1991. Published in English in Documenta Documents 2, 1996, Cantz Verlag. Translation by Brian Holmes.

It's an important article, written less than a year before Daney's death, at the height of his social criticism for long pieces in Libération. And it's perhaps the text where Daney ventures the furthest away from cinema and television (a simple poster triggers the article) toward broader social criticism.

The article also played a role in Daney's decision to quit writing about television. See his comments in an interview to Les inrockuptibles: "There is one problem though: it doesn’t bite. There’s no feedback whatsoever. (...) If I write twenty thousand characters on Benetton Toscani, it’s not picked up on or quoted anywhere. It doesn’t trigger any debate. It’s considered as my own problem, my strange – and eventually likeable – whim. "

An image of the poster is inserted in the original Libération article: a photo of a woman with a baby in her arms standing in front of the giant Benetton poster.

The organ and the vacuum cleaner (now online)

2008-03-21T08:40:00.000Z

I've finally found some time to go to the British Library to get hold of this article. Thank you to Steve Erickson for publishing it online.

The article starts as a review of Bresson's 1976 Le diable probablement (The Devil Probably) before moving to unchartered waters.

The translation is not ideal but this is another long piece by Serge Daney from his first book LA RAMPE. And it's a good example of Daney playing with categories (see Adrian Martin's recent comment on how "Serge Daney invented three distinctions a day and would incessantly play with different distinctions"). I also like how the text shows Daney's acute attention to sound.

The Organ and the Vacuum Cleaner

Literary Debates: Texts and Contexts (Postwar French Thought, Volume II), edited by Denis Hollier and Jeffrey Mehlman, translated by Arthur Goldhammer, New Press, 2001, pp. 474-486.
The original text is "L'orgue et l'aspirateur (Bresson, le diable, la voix off et quelques autres)", pages 19-27, Cahiers du cinéma, issue 279-280, August-September 1977. Reprinted ,” in La Rampe: Cahiers critique 1970-82 (Paris : Cahiers du Cinema/Gallimard, 1983), pp. 138-48.

The dog and the rope

2008-03-12T08:08:00.003Z

This intriging text by Serge Daney on the evolution of the image has been published by Andy Rector on his Kinoslang blog. It's a good example of how Daney used pictures as part of his criticism, a practice he developed to its full extent at Libération when he played a lot with the "mise en page" of his articles.

The dog and the rope
Serge Daney, Cahiers du cinéma, hors-série spécial photos de films, 1978

It feels good to see people like Andy taking the initiative to discover some great yet little-known texts (even in France) by Daney and to publish them. It shows that there's is still much Daney to discover and debate.

Daney in 2007

2007-12-31T14:22:00.000Z

Happy New Year everyone.

Sadly, I finish the year on a hesitant note in regards to the future of Daney in English.

2007 seemed an encouraging year. It started with the first Daney book to be published in English and I was hoping for some more translations to follow suit. But Postcards From the Cinema - Daney's posthumous "biography" which contains little of the film criticism that made him famous in the first place - was always going to be an odd choice as the first book by Daney in English. And the publication didn’t seem to generate any surge of interest for Daney. Only a handful of new articles have been translated (The Serpent’s Egg, In Stubborn Praise of Information, Elephant Man as well as extracts from an interview).

If this blog is any indication of the interest in Daney, it received almost twice as many visits than in 2006 but only to a total of 3500 visits for the whole year. The only bit of good news is that there do seem to be a small but expanding core of interested people. a few hundred people visit this blog more than 10 times a year and visitors are coming from more countries.

Google Analytics, 2007

Perhaps the most encouraging fact of the year was that the publication of a Portuguese translation of La Rampe for the Sao Paulo International Film Festival which has generated a a lot of discussion in the Brazilian blogosphere and a strong interest for this blog from Brazil (the second country in terms of visits after the USA). I see it as the proof that a translation of Daney’s film criticism does generate interest and that the translation work in English is still needed.

Let's hope exactly this for 2008.

Kapo and Montage Obligatory articles - New translations?

2007-11-07T13:27:00.000Z

I just found that Sternberg Press in New York published an exhibition catalogue in December 2006 containing two articles by Serge Daney: 'The Tracking Shot in Kapo' and 'Montage Obligatory.'

The publisher's website does not say if these are new translations or if they have used existing ones. It doesn't mention the name of any translator.

As a reminder, The Tracking Shot in Kapo was published in English in Senses of Cinema in 2004 and Montage Obligatory was published in Rouge in 2006.

The extract of the Kapo article on the website leads me to believe that they have used the same translations but I thought I'd mention it anyway.

The exhibition looks interesting, taking "the distinction that French critic Serge Daney made between the “image” and the “visual” as a starting point for a selection of artworks, films, and discussions."

Does anyone have a copy and confirm if these are new translations?

The Serpent's Egg (now available online)

2007-10-24T08:32:00.001+01:00

Updated post with a link to the text, thanks to Steve Erickson.

The English edition of Cahiers du cinema has translated the special issue on "Two great moderns: Bergman and Antonioni" which has a translation of Daney's review of The Serpent's Egg (Bergman, 1977).

The Serpent's Egg
Cahiers du cinema, Special issue "Two great moderns", October 2007, pp. 35-36, Translation by Tom Mes. Initially published as "L'oeuf du serpent" in Cahiers du cinema, issue 285, February 1978, Page 45

Daney doesn't like the film but makes an interesting analysis on how this movie about the rise of Nazism takes the wrong approach:

"The entirely reactive The Serpent’s Egg is left-wing anti-fiction. The investigation, the will to solve the mystery is not driven by a hunger for truth, or by the desire to denounce and have clarity of vision, but by fear.

(...)

A film on the active nature of fear. As a form of resistance, it doesn’t amount to very much. "

Daney in other languages

2007-10-22T10:42:00.000+01:00

The lack of English translations of Daney has just become more apparent after I’ve found many books of Daney in other languages.

With Daney’s key texts available in German, Italian and Spanish, Portuguese and Japanese, one wonders if the English-speaking film lovers are the only ones missing out on his writings.

Spanish

Argentinean publishers have released Daney’s texts from three of his books (La Rampe, Ciné Journal as well as the whole of Persevérance).

Cine, Arte Del Presente, 2004, Buenos Aires, Santiago Arcos Editor
Perseverancia: Reflexiones Sobre El Cine, 1998, Buenos Aires. Editiones El amante

German

A book called “Of the World in Pictures proposes late texts and interviews, including Perseverance.

Von der Welt ins Bild, 2000, Berlin, Vorwerk 8 Verlag

Italian

Italian publishers have made the most consistent effort with no less than four books released since Daney’s death and covering his key texts from the time of Libération to Perséverance.

Lo sguardo ostinato, Riflessioni di un cinefilo, Editrice Il Castoro, 1995
Il cinema, e oltre, Diari 1988-1991, Editrice Il Castoro, 1997
Cinema, televisione, informazione, Edizioni E/O, 1999
Ciné Journal, Marsilio editori, 1999

Portuguese

The Sao Paolo 31st International Cinema Mostra is publishing a Brazilian/Portuguese translation of La rampe.

The English speakers are in fact in the same positions as Japanese speakers with only Perseverance – the only Daney book with no film criticism – available.

Let's have a thought for the South Korean students who contacted me to translate Daney from English to Korean. Publishers, one more effort. Please.

In Stubborn Praise of Information (now online)

2007-09-11T08:09:00.000+01:00

This text is now available online. It's a fantastic piece, one of a pair of articles written after the first Gulf War (the other one is here) which marked the time when Serge Daney decided to quit writing about television after years of doing so for the French newspaper Libération .

In Stubborn Praise of Information
Originally published as "Eloge têtu de l'information" in Libération on 31 October 1990 and reprinted in Devant la recrudescence des vols de sacs à main, cinéma, television, information, Aléas 1991. Published in English in Continuous Project #8, CNEAI, France, 2006.

It's one of the best translations I’ve seen along with Chris Darke's piece. It really conveys the sharpness of Daney's style in English

Many thanks to the anonymous comment on this blog pointing to this piece and to Seth Price, the translator, for allowing this text to be available online.

Book reviews of Postcards from the cinema - updated

2007-09-10T09:04:00.000+01:00

Update of this blog with Steve Erickson's review of the book published in the Fall issue of Cineaste Magazine.

Like the other reviews of the book, Steve's points to the limitations of Postcards From the Cinema (not the ideal introduction to Daney, lack of actual film criticism, difficult translation). But since Steve - unlike the other reviewers - has actually done quite a bit to increase Daney's recognition in the English-speaking world through his website, he brings some needed perspective on the lack of translations of Daney and I find him a little more credible in his reservations.

Steve is also startled by the fact that Daney never saw Kapo and accepted Rivette's comment blindly. I must say that I totally miss that point. First taking Rivette's word for anything sounds great fun. Plus a single glance at the shot should convince anyone that Rivette is indeed "absolutely right".

On the other hand, Steve makes really excellent remarks about what it would mean to apply Daney's approach to current cinema, television and other audio-visual forms.

Joining the choir, he also hopes there will be more translations.

POST AS PUBLISHED ON 28 AUGUST 2007

A number of reviews of Postcards from the cinema (the English translation of Serge Daney's last "book") have been published. I've been reluctant to post a blog commenting on the reviews of a translation of an interview, but it is the only way we have to assess the reception of the book. And the reactions are mixed. Most of them praise The Tracking Shot in Kapo article but have reservations about the rest of the book which is not proper film criticism but Daney's attempt at his cinema-biography in an interview with his Cahiers du cinéma friend and colleague Serge Toubiana.

In Sight & Sound, Jonathan Romney, finds the Kapo article "essential reading", showing Daney's "brilliance at extrapolating an argument from a single image" but finds Daney's interview not "of obvious interest from a strictly cinematic point of view". Much worse, Kent Jones, in Film Comment, has a strange rant at Daney, saying the autobiographical aspects of the book gave him the "heebie-jebies", considering Daney's account of a film he never saw (Kapo) "troubling and wincingly juvenile" and his "self-historicizing as musty and outdated as a radio ad jingle". Both called for more translations of Daney's actual film criticism.

Two kinder reviews are published online. Anna Dzenis in Screening the Past, finds "fascinating" these "insights into the life of a true cinephile." Tony McKibbin in Senses of Cinema pinpoints the irony of publishing a book by a film critic which contains only one article of actual film criticism (and on a movie the film critic didn't even see) and finds this a good example "that the lines between cinema, life and art aren’t easily drawn – nor would Daney want them to be". Again both called for more translations!

I'll update this post if more reviews are published

Daney on television

2007-05-17T11:42:00.000+01:00

Below are short extracts from an interview Daney gave to the French magazine Les inrockuptibles in March 1992.

Daney talks of the difference between cinema and television as the difference between projection and broadcasting (see also his "From Projector to Parade" article), of why he stopped writing on television (see also his piece on the TV coverage of the Gulf War) and what he meant when he was zapping between channels. It has the strange mix of assertiveness and bitterness charaterising the last months of his life. My translation.

Magazine: Is the death of the movie theatre necessarily the death of cinema?

Daney: No. For me, the love for cinema has never been confused with the love of the movie theatre. In the theatre, there was still too much society, too much consensus. I’ve always nestled against the screen. I have a relationship with a movie which is independent of everything, as if I had internally digitalised it before everyone. And I’m the only one by the way who has tried to see in detail how movies stood the test of the small screen. To say “you know, it’s not what we think.” One movie gains, the other loses out. For example, The Ten Commandments is great on television. Whereas India Song is made for an empty theatre. I was very happy with my paradoxes. And I had the hope, eventually a bit dashed, that it will trigger in people the desire to compare. No, really, I don’t care about movie theatres. I saw movies alone in a theatre. Well, it’s embarrassing. Especially comedies. To laugh alone, what anguish! The dilemma is therefore not between theatres and television, but between projection and broadcasting [“diffusion” in French]. And projection is not insignificant. To project oneself in a personal psycho-analysis, to have a project… Words are superb. What do young people have today? “Plans”, good or bad. The word “project”, they don’t dare pronounce it anymore. Personally, I have projected myself so much into the space of the image - this strange gaping hole - that I know something about projection that I will never forget. And I also know what it is to have a projector behind me.

(...)

Magazine: Is this why you say you want to stop writing on television?

Daney: I have the feeling of having closed a loop. No, not a loop: it would be too sad. I hope it’s only the first round of a spiral. Although… Television is a formidable thinking tool. You are like an analyst to whom society’s subconscious would be offered wide open… A rather raw subconscious (…) But if one is in good form and a good analyst, here’s a formidable machine to make you think and write. There is one problem though: it doesn’t bite. There’s no feedback whatsoever. If I attack Michèle Cotta [the news director of France’s main commercial channel], she doesn’t reply. If I write twenty thousand characters on Benetton Toscani, it’s not picked up on or quoted anywhere. It doesn’t trigger any debate. It’s considered as my own problem, my strange – and eventually likeable – whim. Me, Serge Daney, I have this strange whim which consists in writing on television with a film maker’s morality. They don’t hold it against me but I may as well not say anything.

Magazine: And the “Zappper’s wage”, your weekly chronicle in Libération?

Daney: The “zapper”, it was a very small niche, very narrow, which cannot be made a genre. Even “zapper” was a poor choice of word. If I zapped between channels, it was from one day to another. But I still watched the programmes from beginning to end. It wasn’t the video-diary of a TV addict under the influence of visual neuroleptics! I had kept my habits as a cinephile who likes duration and time in cinema. Anyway, after having been round the issue, from the news mass to advertising and decoration, I stopped. Serge July [Libération publication director] was annoyed. Because as an editor, he thought he had found a good gimmick, A grand child of Barthes. July has the original edition of “Mythologies” in his office and sadly still believes that it will help us understand our times…

For the sake of exhaustivity...

2007-05-03T23:16:00.000+01:00

Doing another of my regular Google searches on "Serge Daney", I found that the Bernadette Corporation art collective allegedly published translations of Daney in what seems to be a short-lived fashion magazine called MADE IN USA in the Issue 1 Fall/Winter 1999-2000. At least that's what the Bernadette Corporation website claims. They don't say which text they have translated.

If a member of this collective ever read this, please consider making these translations available online. If anyone owns a copy of the magazine, can you give us the reference of the text transalted?

The quest for english translations of Daney is becoming really mysterious... It's time for more translations!

Serge Daney talks to Wim Wenders

2007-04-24T21:03:00.000+01:00

Listen to a replay of one of Serge Daney's radio broadcasts where he interviews Wim Wenders at the time of the release of "The wings of desire." It's in French but we don't have many chances to listen to Daney's voice so I thought I'd mention it here.

Here's the blurb describing the recording:

"Serge Daney talks to Wim WENDERS, the German filmmaker about his movie "The wings of desire" which got the award for Best Director at Cannes. The interview is live and the conversation is held in French.
Wim WENDERS tells Daney that he invented the angel characters so as to reach humans more easily. His message isn't about being naively sentimental but about promoting kindness: "talking about Evil is a waste of time - time we could have used to talk about goodness; it's like talking about Jean-Marie LE PEN, you're giving him a platform he doesn't deserve".
Wim WENDERS explains to Daney that he invented the disembodied angels to show humans how lucky they were to be alive as opposed to immortals faced with the boredom of eternity. He tells about why he finally accepted to shoot in Berlin, after he understood that up to then he had been making movies trying to avoid "having to face his own country". He evokes the great changes undergone in Berlin which at last is coming to terms with its role in German history. DANEY and WENDERS both comment on the evolution of cinema.
Serge DANEY ends the interview by referring to the "rear-mirror" effect of WENDERS' cinema - a cinema which moves forward while it keeps looking back at the dissolving past?"

Daney's review of Elephant Man

2007-03-20T21:00:00.000Z

A big thank you to Cinema Scope for publishing my translation of Daney's 1981 review of Elephant Man. A good text which, when reading it in Daney collection of texts La maison cinéma et le monde, I thought was worth translating.

Thank you to POL editions as well for authorising the publication - although I felt they were not really eager to see many others.

By some coincidence, Cahiers du cinéma have published the French version of the text on their website (which now has an English version so I'm going to investigate if they want to publish translations of Daney).

The Monster is Afraid: The Elephant Man, David Lynch,
By Serge Daney
The text first appeared in Cahiers du cinéma, n° 322, Paris, 1981, and is reprinted in La maison cinéma et le monde, Volume 1 « Le temps des Cahiers 1962-1981 », Editions P.O.L, Paris, 2001, pp. 266-269.

Daney in Godard's Histoire(s) du cinéma DVD

2007-03-14T21:21:00.000Z

Keep your fingers crossed! It looks like Godard's Histoire(s) du cinéma are finally going to be released on DVD (region 2).

Since it will have English subtitles and since the episode 2A (Seul le cinéma) contains an interview between Godard and Daney, this means another English translation of Daney.

We've heard this news before only to see the release eventually canceled. Nonetheless, Amazon France announces it for March 20th and Gaumont has it on its website. I want to believe! I still remember watching the first broadcast on French television in the late 80s.

Godard deemed Daney worthy of featuring in his Histoire(s). Can there be a more definite reason to start translating Daney more consistently?

Good luck for reading the subtitles though. I'd hate not to speak French for this one.

Review of Postcards from the cinema

2007-03-05T13:36:00.000Z

I’ve just finished Postcards from the cinema. It really is a strange book, bringing the same mixed feelings I had when reading it in French 13 years ago. Daney talks intimately of his life as the absolute cinephile but almost does not do the one thing which made him famous: film and image criticism.

First, let’s celebrate: this is the first book by Serge Daney published in English. A small event in the film world. Better late than never you might say: Serge Daney died 15 years ago, and although he is still influential in France where the publication of his complete works has yet to be finished, elsewhere he is more talked about than read. So, credit where credit is due: a big thank you to Paul Grant (the translator whose interview was published on this blog in December) and Berg Publishers for this effort.

But it is a strange cunning of history that the first book by Daney that English-speakers will discover is the posthumously published auto-biography of a film critic they know little of and whose writings are mostly unavailable. Probably a sign that the proliferation of quotes and mentions have generated a stronger desire for finding out who this mysterious French film critic is than for the slow assessment of his work. But that still leaves the English-speaking cinephile with a question: Is this book so good that it’s worth reading even though you don’t know Daney? How interesting can be the life of someone who spent his time watching movies? Or, to say it differently, can you really be someone if you are a cinephile?

For Daney, the answer is yes of course. And what a life that was! For the rest of us, aspiring cinephiles, it sets the bar rather high. Have we had shocks as strong as his reading of Rivette’s article on the tracking shot in Kapo – a movie he didn’t even see? Have we explored what makes us watch so many movies as deeply as he has when realising he was searching for his father whose voice may be registered on a reel somewhere? Are we ready to claim that we were born and we will die with the only truly radical art: modern cinema? To see how much one can live through cinema, the book is absolutely fascinating. For Daney, cinema (and other images such as postcards or maps) determined everything: how he saw himself in the world, what politics he would adopt, which jobs he would get, where he would travel… And everything in his life seems to retrospectively make perfect sense: from his first years as a schoolboy to his travels or his tenure at Cahiers or Libération. You can definitely sense that the book was compiled together (Daney only wrote the first chapter, the rest is an interview partly amended by him) with a sense that these were his last words

My mixed feelings come from parts of the book which make me feel uncomfortable (the egotism of the one who knows he will die soon and the arrogance of the intellectual) and from my sense that this book doesn’t quite show Daney at his best. For all the fascination generated by this unique text, I find his short pieces of film or television criticism far better. There’s little trace here of the humour and the creativity of some of his writing. And some of the comments are disapointingly ordinary in comparison to the visionary aphorisms he used about the evolution of the image in the latter part of his career.

Nevertheless, the translation of any work by Daney is worth celebrating. Enjoy the book, test how true a cinephile your are, discover Daney and know that he is even better than that. So keep asking for more translations!

Note: Steve Erickson – the original promoter of Daney on the internet – will do a proper review of Postcards from the cinema in the Winter 2007 edition of Cineaste.