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

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

Prologue

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

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

RD: It’s a travel that continues?

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

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

SD: Yes.

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

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

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

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

Part I: The Cahiers period

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SD: 68…

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

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

RD: After La Religieuse was banned?

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

[pause]

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

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

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

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

Journey of a Cine-Son

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

Journey of a Cine-Son (video):

• Prologue (transcript)
• Part1: The Cahiers days (transcript)
• Part 2: From Cahiers to Libé (transcript)
• Part 3: The Channel-Surfer's Gaze (transcript)

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

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

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

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

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

A ritual of appearance (Mitterrand)

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

A ritual of appearance (Mitterand)

Source: Institut national de l'audio-visuel (INA) 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A ritual of disappearance (Giscard)

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

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

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

A ritual of disappearance (Giscard)

Source: Institut national de l'audiovisuel (INA) - zoom-out starts at 7 min 25

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cinemeteorology: Too Early Too Late

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

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

Serge Daney in 2010

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 Kino Slang)
• 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 Kino Slang)
• 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!