The politics of catastrophe movies 1

Being busy with my new baby boy, I’ve found a new advantage to Daney's articles: I can read exactly two of them while putting my baby to sleep. Since I do this every three hours at night, I've been reading quite a bit of Daney lately, especially his early writings.

And since I’ve noticed a pattern in Daney’s remarks towards catastrophe or horror movies, here is a selection of quickly translated quotes from his 70s articles in Cahiers du cinéma. Interesting if not always original; rather typical of how Daney stayed loyal to pure cinephilia during the left-wing tendencies of the time.

Grey Matter – Jaws by S. Spielberg

(…) This “Booh! Scare me!” is therefore heavily related to a “How to reassure them?” and to a “What is the price to pay?” A misplaced desire (the young people smoking by the beach that the fiction will promptly get rid off) will be replaced by a more social desire, the desire to end the horror, the desire to return to normality. This is the function of catastrophe-movies. It is not the only one though, for what is given to desire is the norm. And in this way, this cinema, at its limit, is fascist.

What can scare more than three hundred thousands spectators in one week? And what can reassure them? The mise en scène of violence which, as Alain Bergala rightly points out “guarantees the precise conditions of the spectator’s pleasure and his subsequent adhesion to any form of counter-violence.”

This is the same old shout of “I only want to see one head in the rank!” Nothing must stain: one body (military or social), full, sleek, homogenous. A body that can be compared to a circle closing on itself – except in one place where there is a gap. This place is where the shark comes forward: the shark is what Lacan calls the obturator, the a object. Who is the shark? Nothing more than the actualisation – from a hallucination – that there is something rotten inside which attracts the fish.

(…) A normative imaginary, which must be staged, simply. It means shooting (events, extras) from two – and only two – points of views: the hunter’s and the hunted’s. There is no other point of view (spatial, moral, political), no other place for the camera, and therefore for the spectator, than this double position. We talk lightly of “identification” in cinema if we haven’t seen that in these types of movies, it is identification to the hunted/hunter couple, with speculative oscillation, bypassing of knowledge and point of view, loss of any reference, getting under the other’s grey skin, and in a word: everything that leads to a total irresponsibility. Flapping between these two points of views, the camera is with the swimming child for whom the shark is only a dark rectangle, and it is with the shark is in the next frame, for whom the child’s leg is only what stands out from the surface of the water.

in La Rampe, 1983, my translation

Various Daney news

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

Reversibility of the camera

Found in a recent browse of Google book search, this short but interesting quote of Daney's comments on the ethics of documentaries in his review of Antonioni's 1974 documentary of China Chung Kouo:

The reversibility of camera in Television Drama: Realism, Modernism, and British Culture, John Caughie, Oxford University Press, 2000, p. 112

I copy the quote below:

"In the scene in The Passenger in which the old African chieftain grabs the camera and films Jack Nicholson, one can see quite clearly what is at issue: the sudden possibility of a reversibility, of the camera passing without a word from hand to hand to the great confusion of the scene and the actors. This, in China, was simply impossible.

(...) those for whom there exists no reversibility, no chance of becoming themselves "filmeurs", no possibility of participating in the image which is made of them, no hold on the image. Mad people, children, primitives, the excluded, filmed without hope (for them) of a reply, filmed 'for their own good' or for the sake of science or scandal: exoticism, philanthropy, horror."

In the article, Daney actually identifies three types of situation when someone is filmed. I translate the full extract below:

"1. The filming happens within the framework of the industry of cinema. It is then symbolically covered by the type of contract (wage, one-off fee, benefits participation, unpaid) agreed between the production and the actors. In the name of this contract, the filmmaker will be able to demand a certain acting or performance.
2. The filming happens within the loose framework of a documentary, of a socio or ethno-logical essay, or of an investigation. Most often, actors do not have the capacity, total or relative, of controlling, technically or intellectually, the operations to which they lend their bodies and voices. We then enter the domain of morals and risk: to film those for whom there exists no reversibility, no chance of becoming themselves "filmeurs", no possibility of participating in the image which is made of them, no hold on the image. Mad people, children, primitives, the excluded, filmed without hope (for them) of a reply, filmed 'for their own good' or for the sake of science or scandal: exoticism, philanthropy, horror.
3. There is a third type of situation (the one that interests us here): when the filming is done by a filmmaker or a crew who have decided to put their camera and their know-how at the service of. Of a people, of a cause, of a fight. In these conditions, the non-reversibility has other causes (under-development, lack of equipment, need for foreign help) , but generates new kinds of problems."

The original article is "La remise en scène (Ivens, Antonioni, la Chine)" in Cahiers du cinéma, number 268, July 1976, reprinted in La rampe - Cahiers critique 1970-1982, Ed. Cahiers du cinéma-Gallimard, 1983.

Stavros Tornes - Karkalou

Many thanks to Andy Rector for pointing this translation of a short (and truncated) abstract of Daney's comments on Greek filmaker Stavros Tornes. A small but good example of Daney's interest in world cinema and his love for travels.

Thessaloniki 1984 - Greek cinema is awaiting its law
Originally published in Libération, October 16th, 1984 and republished in La maison cinéma et la monde, vol. 2 "Les années Libé 1981-1985", pp. 747-750.

Daney introduces his report on the Thessaloniki film festival this way:

"Last straight line. Waiting for the new cinema bill (very much inspired from the French example) to be voted, the whole world of Greek cinema got together for the 25th Salonica film festival - very excited. On the cinema side, nothing to report, execept the excellent Karkalou by Stavros Tornes."

Daney on the World Cup

I cannot resist publishing (without authorisation - I hope to be forgiven) this short text by Daney on the 1982 'Mundial':

Mundial 1982 – Slow motion

In front of the small image, the TV spectator has a handicap. Or a privilege (depending on his degree of perversity). At certain moments in the game, he subconsciously asks himself a question which until now, only concerned cartoon lovers: is the 'injured' player going to get back up again? Regularly, a body, doubled up with pain, is left on the field. Everything is possible. Real pain (and we expect the game to be stopped, we look for the medics, we are upset with the camera for moving casually to other things). Exaggerated pain (the player gets back up again, drags himself for one meter, limps for two and sprints for three). Put on pain (as soon as he is off screen, certain of having failed to move the referee to pity, he gets up and runs like a gazelle). It is a game between the players and the referee of course. And it is too bad that the camera doesn’t know how to film it well. Nevertheless: for a few seconds, there is what makes cinema happy, its powerful force: indecisive shots, enigmatic pictures, bodies under threat.

This text from Libération, 19 and 20 June 1982, features in Serge Daney, La maison cinéma et le monde (P.O.L., 2002), translation by Laurent Kretzschmar.

Daney's quote on Alain Tanner

I just spotted this quote by Daney on Alain Tanner's No Man's Land:

“I looked at the landscapes of No Man’s Land and was not disorientated. I felt at home. I had seen it all before in an earlier life punctuated by the nine other films of Alain Tanner (…) I even knew what it consisted of: frontier posts with a French and a Swiss side, slowmoving bicycles and tidy little cafés, ruminating cows and drawling accents, roads into the mountains and paths leading nowhere; I knew the characters, too, having seen them come and go: they were flawed and bad in ’68, then armchair idealists, then, in ’85, embittered, dissatisfied hippies, that’s all.” Then, having expressed his deep sense of familiarity with the world of the film, the critic voices a doubt: “It struck me that all the things that – thanks to Tanner and other Swiss filmmakers (Reusser, Soutter, Murer) – I had come to see as familiar, all this mildly clean, mildly sinister, mildly beautiful Swiss cinema, with its cows and its traffickers, its calculated slowness and vague storytelling, might be on the way out.”

Reference: Serge Daney, Libération, 30 August 1985, quoted in Ciné-journal, volume 2, Petite bibliothèque des Cahiers du cinéma, Paris, 1998.

From Movies To Moving

The blog o signo do dragão has the translation of this seminal text by Serge Daney. A must-read.

From movies to moving
Serge Daney, translated by Brian Holmes and published in documentadocuments2, 1996 - first published in French in La Recherche photographique, no 7, 1989.

Another (excellent) translation of this text is available from the July-August 2002 edition of Film Comment. The title is "From projector to parade" and the translator is Chris Darke.

Postcards from the cinema

An entry has appeared on the UK website of Amazon and on the website of Berg Publishers confirming the upcoming publication of a translation of Persévérance . The translation is by Paul Grant and the release date is set for December 2006.

Postcards From The Cinema, Serge Daney, trans. Paul Grant, Berg Publishers, 2006, 160 p.

This book will contain a revised translation of Daney's last text - The tracking shot in Kapo - and a long interview conducted over three days between Serge Daney and Serge Toubiana in 1991.

It was first published by POL Editions in 1994.

Montage Obligatory

Rouge has just published a translation of Daney's 1991 piece on the television coverage of the Gulf War which made him give up writing about television. It's one if his last articles for Libération before he left the newspaper to found Trafic.

Montage Ogligatory, Rouge, #8, 2006

Original article is "Montage Obligé - La guerre, le Golfe et le petit écran" published in Libération in April 1991 and reprinted in Serge Daney’s Devant la recrudescence des vols de sacs à main, cinéma, television, information, Aléas 1991, reprinted 1997.

Upcoming new translation of Persévérance

Paul Grant has kindly been in touch and has confirmed that he is finishing the translation of Persévérance. It includes a revised translation of the Kapo article and the full translation of the dialogue between Daney and Toubiana which make up this book.

No date for publication yet but I will announce it as soon as it is available.

Jonathan Rosenbaum has already mentioned these "plans to publish an English-language Perseverance" in a paper for the New Left Review, July-August 2005.

The screen of fantasy (Bazin and animals)

"The Screen of Fantasy (Bazin and Animals)" (now available on Steve Erickson's website) is translated by Mark Cohen in Ivone Margulies ed., Rites of Realism: Essays on Corporeal Cinema, Durham: Duke University Press, 2002

Original text is "L'écran du fantasme", page 30, Cahiers du cinéma, issue 236-237, March-April 1972.

You can also read the English translation if you play with Google Book Search.

From projector to parade

Chris Darke has translated this excellent text and has also written a good general introduction to Daney.

From projector to parade, Film Comment, July-August 2002

Originally published as "Du défilement au défilé" in La recherche photographique in 1989.

I've asked Film Comment to make this translation available for free as part of their "online exclusives" but they told me they don't have the rights to do so and I had to request this from Cahiers/Le Monde. Strange and too bad. I have yet to approach Le Monde group to ask them about the policies about Daney translations.

Nanni Moretti piece?

I've received a note from Steve Erickson mentioning a piece from an art anthology about Nanni Moretti and images of motion in his films. Does anyone have a precise reference for this text or, even better, electronic copies?

Quotes and bits

Some will say that this attempt to find Daney in English is getting desperate but here's a collection of bits and pieces:

This Chicago reader article by Jonathan Rosenbaum on Jacques Tati's Jour de fête contains a short translation of Daney on Tati from La rampe.

This book on Contemporary Australian Television contains a translation of an extract of Daney's “Le sport et la télévision”, Cahiers du cinema, #292, pp. 38-43. You can read it using Google book search. It's on page 64.

Movies and Methods: Vol. II, edited by Bill Nichols, University of California Press, 1985 has a different translation of an extract of the Salador text. You can read it with Google book search, page 46.

Television Drama: Realism, Modernism, and British Culture, by John Caughie, Oxford University Press, 2000, has a translation of an extract of "La remise en scène" published in Cahiers du cinéma, #268, July 1976. Use Google Book search. It's on page 112.

Jonathan Rosenbaum's review of La maison cinéma et le monde in the New Left Review has translations of an extract of a 1982 Libération piece, ‘Like Old Couples, Movies and TV have Wound up Looking Alike’ and of an extract of ‘Obligatory Montage: The War, the Gulf, and the Small Screen’, Daney's piece on the TV coverage of the Gulf War pusblished in Libération in 1991.

Interviews

An interview of Daney by Bill Krohn is available on Steve Erickson's site:

"Les Cahiers du cinéma 1968-1977: Interview with Serge Daney", The Thousand Eyes, no. 2, 1977, p. 31.

And here are a few interviews conducted by Daney:

Taking Chances - Interview with Lea McCarey by Serge Daney and Jean-Louis Noames (Louis Skorecki)

Daney interview “Godard Makes [Hi]stories” in Raymond Bellour and Mary Lea Bandy eds., Jean-Luc Godard son+image 1974-1991, New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1992.

Daney's texts in English editions of Cahiers du cinéma

Several English language editions of Cahiers du cinéma contain translation of Daney.

Daney starts writing in Cahiers in 1964 and regularly does so until 1981 when he leaves Cahiers for the newly created daily newspaper Libération. He is the acting editor of Cahiers from 1974 to 1979.

Volumes III and IV of the Cahiers du cinema books contain texts by Daney. The volumes I and II don't.

Cahiers du Cinema - Volume III: 1969-1972: The Politics of Representation, edited by Nick Browne, Harvard University Press, 1989

• "La vie est à nous, a militant film", co-written with Pascal Bonitzer, Jean-Louis Comolli, Jean Narboni and Jean-Pierre Oudart, pp. 68-88, originally published in Cahiers du cinéma, issue 218, March 1970.
• "Work, Reading, Pleasure", pp. 115-136. I think this is just another name for the "On Salador" text which is on Steve Erickson's site. It was the title of a section of Cahiers du cinéma #222 which had two texts: Salador by Daney and another one by Oudart.
• "The name of the Author (on the 'place' in Death in Venice)", co-written with Jean-Pierre Oudart, pp. 306-324, originally published as "Le nom-de-l'auteur" in Cahiers du cinéma, issue 234, February 1972.

Cahiers du Cinema - Volume IV: 1973-1978: History, Ideology, Cultural Struggle, edited by: David Wilson, Routledge, March 2000

• "The critical function", pp. 56-71, probably the translation of two articles untitled "La fonction critique" published in the numbers 248, 249, 250 and 253 in of Cahiers du cinéma in 1973 and 1974. You can read it entirely using Amazon Inside this book search function. Type "Function" as keyword and turn the pages from 56 to 71.
• "Theorize/Terrorize (Godardian Pedagogy)", pp. 116-123, originally published as "Le thérrorisé (pédagogie godardienne)" in Cahiers du cinéma, issue 262, 1976.
• "The Aquarium (Milestone)" a review of Robert Kramer's movie, pp. 152-156, translated by David Wilson, originally published as "L'Aquarium" in Cahiers du cinéma, issue 264, 1976.
• "One more bear (Dersu Uzala)": a review of Kurosawa's movie, pp. 289-295, originally published as "Un ours en plus" in Cahiers du cinéma, issue 174, 1977.

CAHIERS DU CINEMA IN ENGLISH - an attempt to bring a translated version of Cahiers - also has texts by Daney. The ones I know of are:

• Chimes At Midnight (Orson Welles) - Translated by Bridget Lyons. Originally published as “Wells au pouvoir” in Cahiers du cinéma, issue 181, August 1966, page 26-28.
• The Great Race (Blake Edwards), published in English in CAHIERS DU CINEMA IN ENGLISH #3, Trans. Jane Pease, Rose Kaplin, Nell Cox, 1966, pp. 26-27. Originally published as “Les corps étrangers” in Cahiers du cinéma, issue 175, February 1966, pages 62-63.
• The Family Jewels (Jerry Lewis), published in CAHIERS DU CINEMA IN ENGLISH #4. riginally published as “Un rien sur fond de musique douce” in Cahiers du cinéma, issue 175, February 1966, pages 36-37

Gilles Deleuze - Letter to Serge Daney: Optimism, Pessimism, and Travel

Updated post as I just found out that you can read the full text by using Amazon "Inside This Book" search function. Just search for the key word Daney and turn the pages (from 68 to 79).

This is an essential text by Gilles Deleuze on Serge Daney:

"Letter to Serge Daney: Optimism, Pessimism, and Travel", Negotiations 1972-1990, New York: Columbia University Press, 1995, translated by Martin Joughin, pp.68-79.

Original text is Deleuze's preface to "Optimisme, pessimisme et voyage: Lettre à Serge Daney" for Serge Daney, Ciné journal 1981-1986, Cahiers du cinéma, 1986.

Itinéraire d'un ciné-fils with English subtitles

Paul Grant reports that a copy of Pierre-André Boutang & Dominique Rabourdin's 1992 documentary/interview with Daney is available with English subtitles. This was screened in 2003 by the Harvard Film Archive as part of a Daney festival.

Original is available in DVD in French from Montparnasse editions.

Documenta texts

Several translations seem to appear in Documenta catalogs:

- "Baby seeking bathwater" in Documenta Documents 1, Kassel, 1996, pp. 22-31. Original text is "Bébé cherche eau du bain" published in Libération in 1991.

- Documenta Documents 2 claims to contain "Diverse articles by the French film theoretician and social critic Serge Daney deal with the image in advertising, with the moving image in film as well as with paradigmatic films by Godard and Rossellini." I don't have the detail of these. One of the articles could be "From movies to moving".

- Documenta X contains the translation of "Before and after the image" that is available on Steve Erickson's website.

Steve Erickson's website

Steve Erickson, a New York film critic, lists on his website many English translations of Daney's writings. This was (and still is) the original effort to make Daney available on the Internet. All credit to him for starting this effort and triggering many subsequent similar efforts (such as this blog).

Below is a list of the articles that can be found on Steve's website (and not available elsewhere) with the equivalent French reference:

• "On Salador"- Originally published as “Sur Salador” in Cahiers du cinéma, issue 222, July 1970, page 39, unknown translator
• "Godardian Pedagogy" - Translated by Bill Krohn and Charles Cameron Ball, originally published as "Le thérrorisé (pédagogie godardienne)" in Cahiers du cinéma, issue 262, January 1976, pages 32-42.
• "Beyond A Reasonable Doubt" - Translated by Steve Erickson, originally published "L'invraisemblable vérité" in Libération on July 18, 1981
• "Stalker" - Translated by Frank Matcha with Steve Erickson, originally published in Libération on November 20th, 1981
• "Coup De Torchon" - Translated by Steve Erickson, with assistance from Philippe St-Germain, originally published in Libération on November 6, 1981
• "The Thread (An Obituary Of Jean Eustache)" - Originally published "Le fil (mort de Jean Eustache)" in Libération on November 16, 1981, translated by Steve Erickson
• "Too Early/Too Late"- Translated by Jonathan Rosenbaum, published in English in a catalogue for a Straub/Huillet retrospective at the Public Theater in New York, originally published as "Trop tôt / trop tard" in Libération on February 20-21, 1982
• "From The Large To The Small Screen" - Originally published as "Du grand au petit écran" in Libération on November 16, 1987
• "Television And Its Shadow" - Originally published as "La télévision et son ombre" in Libération on November 13, 1987
• "Back To The Future" - Originally published as "Retour vers le futur" in Libération on December 24, 1987
• "Waiting For The Snow" - Originally published as "En attendant la neige" in Libération on December 24, 1987
• "The Godard Paradox" - taken from the book Forever Godard, Black Dog Publishing, 2003, originally written in 1986
• "CEDDO" - a review of Ousmane Sembene's movie originally published in Cahiers du cinéma, issue 304, October 1979, page 51-53 and republished in La rampe.

Cinema in transit - failed translation effort

Steve Erickson has found the existence of an unpublished attempt to translate Daney in English:

"Thanks to the graciousness of editor Paul Willemen, I've finally managed to get a copy of the manuscript for Daney's CINEMA IN TRANSIT, an unpublished English-language anthology acquired by the British Film Institute in 1994."

The scope of the effort is a great selection of texts from Devant la recrudescence des vols de sacs à mains and Ciné Journal (articles written for Libération between 1981 and 1991) but the quality of the translation is very poor and, until someone puts some significant re-work, it is probably best that this document is not easily available.

This blog's advice is to ignore this.

Max, mon amour (Max my love) - review

I'm not sure about the chances to get hold of this but the website of the Museum Informatics Project mentions that Daney's review of Nagisa Oshima's Max mon amour is in the press kit published by Greenwich Film Production S.A.

Philippe Garrel’s L’Enfant secret (1982)

Rouge (excellent film magazine by the way) has this translation of Daney's review of Garrel's L'enfant secret.

Philippe Garrel’s L’Enfant secret (1982), Rouge, issue 1, 2003, translated by Fergus Daly and Adrian Martin

The tracking shot in Kapo

Senses of cinema has a translation of one of Daney's last texts: The Tracking Shot in Kapo

The tracking shot in Kapo, Senses of Cinema, Jan-Feb 2004, Issue 30.

Originally published as "Le travelling de Kapo" in Trafic, issue 4, P.O.L. Editions, 1992. It was also published in Perséverance: Entretien avec Serge Toubiana, P.O.L. Editions, 1994.

The translation is by the author of this blog.

Introduction

This blog attempts to keep track of all the english translations of texts by French film critic Serge Daney.

If a link is not provided, then the article is not available directly online and I do not have a copy.

Please use the Comments for questions.

Good reading,
Laurent Kretzschmar