Serge Daney in 2010

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

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"

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

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

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

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)

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

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!

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

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

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"

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

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

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

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

More from L'exercice a été profitable, Monsieur:

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

More from L'exercice a été profitable, Monsieur:

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

More from L'exercice a été profitable, Monsieur:

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