Serge Daney (1944 - 1992) was an influential French movie
critic who went on from writing film reviews to developing a “television criticism” and onto building a personal theory of the
image. Although highly regarded in French and European film criticism circles, his work remains little known to English-speaking
audiences, largely because it has not been consistently translated.
Biography
At the Voltaire High School in Paris Daney received his first film teachings from Henri Agel, one of the most respected
critics of the time. With two high school friends, Louis Skorecki and Claude Dépêche, he founded a short-lived film magazine
called Visages du cinéma which only saw two editions, on Howard Hawks (containing Daney's first published text - a review
of Rio Bravo called "An Adult Art") and on Otto Preminger.
In 1964, Daney joined the French film magazine Cahiers du cinéma with a
series of interviews of American film directors (notably Howard Hawks, Leo McCarey, Josef von Sternberg and Jerry Lewis) conducted with Jean Louis Noames (aka Louis Skorecki) during a trip to Hollywood. He writes
regularly for the magazine which was moving on from its "yellow cover” beginnings (the time of André Bazin, François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Éric Rohmer and Jacques Rivette - roughly 1951-1959) and was about to enter a period of heavy theoretical debates and
radical political engagement after 1968.
Between 1968 and 1971, Daney also makes a series of travels to India, Morocco and Africa and starts lecturing cinema at the
Censier University (Paris III). After Cahiers’ failure to create a “Revolutionary Cultural Front”, Daney took the
responsibility of the magazine in 1973, supported by Serge Toubiana. Together, they operated a "return to cinema" for the
magazine and also invited thinkers from outside the field of cinema: Michel Foucault,
Jacques Rancière and Gilles Deleuze.
In 1981, Daney left Cahiers for the French daily newspaper Libération, to
which he had contributed occasionally since its creation in 1973. Writing first about cinema, his focus turns more and more
towards television. In 1987, for a hundred days, he wrote daily about French television in a column called “The wage of the
channel hopper”. From 1988 to 1991, he wrote a column on how films look when they are shown on television. He also wrote small
pamphlets increasingly critical of television programs before he abandoned writing about television altogether in 1991, after a
critical analysis of the television coverage of the Gulf War.
Daney went on to found the quarterly film magazine Trafic in which he wrote four pieces before dying of
AIDS in June 1992.
Daney's general theory of the moving image became highly influential for the conception of 1997's documenta X, the tenth
installment of the world's most important exhibition for contemporary art besides the Venice Biennale. The curator of documenta
X, Catherine David, and her most important intellectual collaborator, Jean-François Chevrier, sought to integrate film and
television into a show that was meant to deliver a critical investigation of the contemporary state of the image, and found in
Daney's writings one of their guidelines.
Daney had other passions such as tennis and bullfights.
Bibliography
Daney published four books during his lifetime which are collections of his articles: La Rampe (Gallimard/Cahiers du cinéma, 1983), Ciné-journal (Cahiers du cinéma, 1986), Le Salaire du
zappeur (P.O.L., 1988), Devant la recrudescence des vols des sacs à main (Aléas, 1991). He also published a
little-known book called "Procès à Baby Doc, Duvalier père et fils" a 1973 polemic against the Duvalier regime in Haiti written
under the pseudonym Raymond Sapène.
In the years after his death, several other books have been released:
- L'exercice a été profitable, Monsieur (P.O.L, 1993), a collection of the notes he took while watching French
television in the early 1990s.
- Persévérance (P.O.L, 1994), Daney's last project for a complete book for which he wrote the first chapter - the rest
being the transcript of an interview with Serge Toubiana. It has been translated in English as Postcards from the Cinema
(Berg, 2007).
- L'amateur de tennis (P.O.L, 1994), a selction of articles he wrote in Liberation about tennis matches.
- L’itinéraire d'un ciné-fils (Editions Jean-Michel Place, 1999), the transcript of the eponymous TV documentary.
POL Editions have begun the publication of Daney's complete writings in several volumes called La maison cinéma et le
monde. So far volumes I and II have been released, covering the period from Daney’s first articles in 1962, to his writings
at Cahiers du cinéma and his texts for Libération until 1985.
Filmography
Serge Daney participated in several documentaries:
- Lettre de Paris à l'ami suisse no 7 (1987), 30min, directed by Maria Koleva
- Jacques Rivette, le veilleur (1990), 2h20, directed by Serge Daney and Claire Denis
- Damned! Daney (1991), 55 min, directed by Bernard Mantelli
- Océanique: Serge Daney - itinéraires d'un ciné-fils (1992), 3 parts of 63min, 60min and 64 min, directed by
Pierre-Andre Boutang and Dominique Rabourding
- Daney-Sanbar, Conversation Nord-Sud (1993), 46min, directed by Simone Bitton and Catherine Poitevin
- Serge Daney, Le Cinephile et le village (1993), 55min, directed by Pascal Kané
- Du cinéma à la télévision, propos d'un passeur, Serge Daney (1993), 55min, directed by Philippe Roger
- Télé(s)-Flux: le gué Daney (1994), 44min, Directed by Bernard Mantelli
Radio
Serge Daney hosted a weekly broadcast on French radio station France-Culture called Microfilms from the last quarter of
1985 to July 1990. Daney invited a guest speaker (a film maker, a film shoot photographer, an actor) to talk about a film, a
particular subject, or to sum up the events of a film season or a festival.
External links
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