Saturday, March 05, 2022

Serge Daney's bibliography

The written work of Serge Daney consists almost exclusively of short texts published for the most part in Cahiers du cinéma and in the daily newspaper Libération as well as in some other magazines and books.

Daney published four books in his own lifetime, all collections of articles. He was working on a book project at the time of his death in 1992 (later published under the title Persévérance) and he is also believed to be the author of a little-known book, Procès à Baby Doc, Duvalier père et fils, a 1973 polemic text against the Duvalier regime in Haiti, written under the pseudonym Raymond Sapène.

The rest of his written work has been published posthumously in French:

  • Persévérance, Daney's big legacy project of a cine-biography of which he only managed to write the first chapter (The Tracking Shot in Kapo). The rest ended up as the transcript of a long interview recorded by Serge Toubiana. This book has been translated and published in English as Postcards from the cinema.
  • L'amateur de tennis, a collection of his sport articles on tennis matches written for Libération.
  • L'exercise a été profitable, Monsieur., a collection of notes he kept in his computer.
  • La maison cinéma et le monde, a four-volume anthology of texts not previously published, covering nearly everything from his first articles in a high school film magazine to his late years interviews. The first volume is due to be published in English in 2022 as The Cinema House and the World.

Over the years, many texts have been translated, including from Daney's own four books. But because they are scattered around the internet, it's not easy to understand how much of each book is actually available. So here are links to the table of contents of each book, with links to all the translated articles.


La rampe. Cahier critique 1970-1982

A selection of his writings for Cahiers from 1970 to 1982, published in 1983.





Published in 1986, the book contains all kind of articles (film reviews, festival coverage, analysis of TV broadcasts, etc) written for Libération which Daney joined full time after leaving Cahiers du cinéma in 1981. 





Published in 1988, it captures nearly all the texts of an eponymous chronicle about television that Daney wrote in Libération between September and December 1987.






A three-part book containing articles written in the last years of his life, from 1988 to 1991. Published in 1991 (one year before Daney's death).


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