A Journey through Serge Daney’s Cinema House

In a response to The Independent’s obituary of Serge Daney dated June 1992, Louis Skorecki wrote: “He [Daney] was the only film critic of real value in France in the last 20 years and one of the only original writers on moving images. He was at the same time something of a Robert Musil, an André Bazin and a Marshall McLuhan.”¹ While Skorecki’s statement is highly debatable, it proves fertile as a starting point to explore Daney’s personality and role in the history of intellectual life in France in the second half of the 20th century. Ulrich’s character in The Man Without Qualities shows a sort of disenchantment and detachment from the prevailing social and political values of its time that echoes Serge Daney’s positioning. Moreover, André Bazin serves as the father figure of any French film critic, and maybe any critic coming after the end of the 1950s. Finally, Marshall McLuhan’s engagement with media theory and critical analysis, while on a different plane and with different perspectives and methodologies, finds a sensitive and almost poetic counterpoint in Daney’s career as a writer, a critic, an intellectual. 

Until now, for the non-French speaking reader, Skorecki’s statement could not be easily verified, something Jonathan Rosenbaum was already regretting in 2001 in an issue of Trafic entirely dedicated to Daney.² Semiotext(e) started to rectify this anomaly with the publication in 2022 of The Cinema House, 1: The Cahiers du cinéma Years, 1962-1981, an almost exact replica of the volume published in 2001 by P.O.L. in France.³ Hopefully, this effort will continue with three more volumes to complete Daney’s almost entire collection of writings over the three decades spanned by his career.⁴

P.O.L.’s 2001 edition

A common theme can be found in reviews published since the release of Cinema House: in many respects the book, originally published in France almost ten years after Daney’s untimely death at the age of 48, arrives twenty years too late for its current readers. This feeling arises from a sense of disconnect between Daney’s prose, areas of focus, attention to morals, belief in the importance of cinema and its critics, and the ethos of the times we currently live in. Even in France, the intellectual figure and stature of a Serge Daney has all but disappeared from the mediatic field. Nonetheless, the sheer number of reviews and the critical attention provided to this release, to which this article contributes, testify to the importance of finally providing access to Daney’s work in the English language.⁵ This very review does not attempt to supersede the perspectives of illustrious critics such as Jonathan Rosenbaum, Richard Brody, or Greg Gerke. It adopts a factual approach with the hope to educate readers on what to expect from and in the Cinema House and it offers a few ideas on how to approach this difficult text. It also comments, from a French reader perspective, on the translation and it complements the print release with a missing table of content for Part One.

A Map of the Cinema House

Cinema House is organized in eight chapters, very uneven in length. In his major preface to the original French 2001 release of the book, also published in the Semiotext(e)’s version, French film critic Patrice Rollet explains this structure: “This edition’s design attempts […] to respect, by organizing into main sections whose dimensions and contents vary according to era […], the map of territories [Daney] charted […] as well as the velocities of writing that he had to adopt across them.” (pp. 10-11).

Part One, titled “In Film’s Wake”, is 255 pages long in a 597-page book. It offers critics of 132 movies in 129 articles written between 1962 and 1981, most of them (119) in Cahiers du cinéma, others (seven) in Libération the year it was created in 1973, and finally three in Faces of Cinema, a short-lived magazine Daney created with Louis Skorecki in 1962. Critics span movies from 22 countries (41 films from the US, 33 from France, 15 from Italy, five from Sweden, four from West Germany, UK, and the USSR, two from Poland and Portugal, two from Canada, Japan, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and Israel, the rest from Belgium, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, China, Denmark, Haiti, and Jamaica). A small number of movies (nine) predate the start of Daney’s career as a critic, being filmed between 1932 and 1961. All the release years are then represented, with peaks of 13 movies from 1966, 11 from 1967, 12 from 1975, 15 from 1979, and 13 from 1980. Some other years are especially low with only one movie critiqued (1973) or two (1963, 1970, 1971), representing dips in Daney’s activity as a film reviewer (but not necessarily as a writer). Nonetheless, this goes to show Daney’s activity relates to current cinema more than to the history of the medium.

Rio Bravo: 19-year-old Daney’s first movie review in 1962 in which he writes: “If we have chosen a purely psychological approach to these characters, it’s because Hawks remains a moralist, and because Rio Bravo takes the form of a moral itinerary” (p. 35)

The second longest chapter is Part Six, “Here and Elsewhere”, 150 pages of report on festivals and travels everywhere in the world: Egypt, India, France, Scotland, Syria, West Germany, the Netherlands, the USSR, the US, Poland, Hong Kong, China, Portugal… Daney’s discovery of cinema is parallel to his opening up to the world at a time where little importance was given otherwise in magazines and among critics to cinema of countries from “the South,” or what was then referred to as the “Third World.” While embodying the epitome of the Parisian intellectual, Daney will remain for posterity the critic-traveller, sending thousands of postcards to his mother and his friends, sometimes daily, as postcards were for him the “absolute image,” more so than cinema.⁶

Part Two, “Auteur Theory”, treats of several important cineastes in a dense 40 pages: Mark Donskoy, Allan Dwan, John Ford, Éric Rohmer, Mauritz Stiller, Preston Sturges, Orson Welles, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Manoel de Oliveira, Johan van der Keuken, Hans-Jürgen Syberberg, Nicholas Ray, Louis Daquin, and Satyajit Ray.

Part Three serves as the theoretical heart of the book: titled “The Critical Function”, it assembles a series of four dense articles of the same title published in Les Cahiers in 1973 and 1974. Having reached a greater maturity and taking hold of the magazine as its main editor, Daney synthesises his perspectives with density and poise.

Part Four, “Elaborations”, consists of nine articles published in various journals and magazines (Cahiers, Libération, Monde Diplomatique) between 1973 and 1981, on such diverse topics as cinema audience, the line between bourgeois and revolutionary cinema, live TV, or Mai 68.

Part Five, titled “Image-Proof”, is the shortest with just 10 pages of pictures and brief, incisive comments on them, including on the smile of Richard Dreyfuss, the rope in James Stewart’s hand, or the starlet’s leg.

Part Seven, “Answering Machine Chronicle”, is also very short and collects a few texts about TV published in the Cahiers in 1976. 

Part Eight, “Volleys”, contains four articles on tennis published in Libération between 1979 and 1981. These last two parts prelude Daney’s later commitment to the cultural pages of Libération in the ’80s and give a taste to readers of what’s to come in the next two volumes of the collection, should Semiotext(e) release them.⁷

The choice of movies in Part One draws an interesting map of Daney’s cinéphilie, one that is typical of French critics of these years’ Cahiers du cinéma. A large, if not over-representation of American cinema that translates into a love-hate relationship with Hollywood; a highly critical view of French cinema as it struggles between bourgeois conformism and ultra-ideologized leftism; a specific interest for Italian cinema, born in boundless admiration for neo-realism; an otherwise wide interest in European films; a few forays into other filmographies (Japan, Bolivia, Canada, Israel…); a great diversity in focus (111 different filmmakers for a total of 129 articles, with only Ingmar Bergman recurring three times, each fairly negatively as the Swedish director embodies for Serge Daney at that time the cinema petit-bourgeois; and a little over a dozen other directors recurring twice); all things confirmed by the two lists of ten best films published: that of 1962 and that for the decade of the ’70s (actually 13 films). The first list has seven American and three French films.⁸ The second list highlights four French films, three German, two from the US and Japan, and one each from Spain and Italy,⁹ which demonstrates Daney’s opening to a more geographically diverse cinema. About the list of the ’70s though, Daney himself states: “All of these films come from five or six countries. No new ‘national’ cinemas in sight. The hero of the sixties (the array of impoverished countries dubbed the ‘third world’) is stagnant in the seventies. Unequal exchange: poor countries are also lacking in images of themselves” (p. 284).

Methods to Wander in the Cinema House

With this structure in mind, The Cinema House proves a difficult book to read from cover to cover, especially since, as Richard Brody writes, it takes a while for Daney to become good at what he does.¹⁰ While this disciplined approach has its virtue, it may test one’s patience and result in fatigue that may jeopardize the reader’s ability to come to the book’s end.

A recommended method would be to use the table of content to start with articles that elicit connections with common interests between Daney and the reader. Navigating one’s way into the book according to taste or curiosity is the surest way to get acquainted to Daney’s style and idiosyncrasies. This is where some editorial choices made by Semiotext(e) are surprising, especially compared with the French publication: the lack of table of content is hard to defend, depriving the reader of a chronological visibility and readability of the opus. If anything, this review will be useful as it proposes an analytical table of content of Part One with titles (as stated in the translation), pages, movie date, article’s date, article’s publication, movie nationality (see at the bottom of this review). My French volume purchased and read in the early ‘00s still bears the pencil marks of my own prioritization: at that time, I felt an urge to read Daney’s views on Miloš Forman, Roberto Rossellini, Woody Allen, Ingmar Bergman, Werner Herzog, Jean Eustache, Steven Spielberg, or Yasujirō Ozu. I probably had never heard of Johan van der Keuken, Werner Schroeter, or Marco Bellocchio, and it would take me years to return to Daney’s book and discover these authors through his pen and through their films.

The author’s pencilled table of contents in the French version of the book

A third way to wander the Cinema House is through the extensive index Semiotext(e) luckily retains. It also proves incredibly helpful to find one’s way in the richness of the book. While not flawless (I could not find The Deer Hunter [Michael Cimino, 1978], even though a full page is dedicated to its review at the time of the Berlin Film Festival (p. 458) and the film is referenced three times in the 2001 French version of the index), this tool allows another entry by film, actor, or director. As I wrote this review, I used the Godard entry, which is by far the most prolific of the book (50 different pages holding references to Godard) to reread everything Daney wrote in relation to the critic turned filmmaker between 1963 (My Life to Live [Jean-Luc Godard, 1963] appears as number 6 in Daney’s list of the ten best films of that year) and 1980 (Here and Elsewhere [Jean-Luc Godard, 1976] is also on the list that closes the chapter of film reviews). Godard’s name is uttered 11 times just in the introductory 1977 interview with Bill Krohn… This approach provides a fascinating chronological perspective on Daney’s ongoing admiration for Godard through all his evolutions, from trailblazer of the French New Wave to his experimentations with avant-garde documentary filmmaking.

Daney plays an important role in Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988-1998), and when the two authors dialogue in the early 1990s, we witness two dinosaurs¹¹ of film theory and practice exchange under our eyes.¹² From the parallel lives of these two giants stems an intuition: while Daney is 15 years younger than Godard, both shared the same cinéphilie in the ’60s. Both are guilty of the same ideological excesses and sclerosis in the early ’70s, exemplified in Daney’s critical texts for the Cahiers at that time and Godard’s militant films. Both redeemed themselves in the otherwise mediocre ’80s, to finally make amends in the ’90s: Godard with his masterful Histoire(s) du cinéma, Daney by gifting us shortly before his untimely death with the creation of Trafic,¹³ the theoretical and poetic antidote to his ’70s excesses.

Godard and Daney in dialogue

In the end, I counted 36 actual quotes referring to Godard in the entire volume, in addition to a full account of Vent d’Est (Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin, 1970). A careful review of these notes reveals a number of recurring themes that matter to understand Daney’s perspective on Godard as well as his more general critical outlook. Among many others: montage (“As Godard said again recently, ‘montage was what had to be destroyed, for it allows us to see’” (p. 480)); the legacy of cinéphilie (“Cinephilia is not only a particular relationship to cinema, it is a relationship to the world through cinema. I remember what people like Moullet and Godard said in the fifties: they learned about life at the movies. Cinema taught them how to live” (p. 19)); the central importance of Here and Elsewhere (Jean-Luc Godard, 1976) for Daney; the strong connection between Godard and Vertov, as well as with Rossellini; the key role Godard is already playing in relation to television and the media; and the importance of travel. I assembled the excerpts of these 36 quotes in a 3,000-word document: this document also illustrates Daney’s style, with its own sense for montage in the sentence and between sentences, its dazzling connections between cineastes and works, and its sometimes acerbic and deadening commentaries on otherwise well-regarded filmmakers (“Like Godard before ’68, Fassbinder has become a little factory, with his raw material, his specialized workers and his immigrants; the filmmaker is no longer the author of an oeuvre as much as he is the little boss of his little world” (p. 458)). A similar exercise on other directors, actors, or films awaits the reader according to her own interests and taste.

Finally, I would propose a fourth experimental approach, which is to focus first on Part Three, “Critical Function”, and to then return to Part One and read articles written around 1973 to test the degree to which Daney’s critical apparatus around utterance and enunciation helps explain his assessment of films at that period. One can then radiate forward and backward in time with the 1973-1974 theoretical articles serving as prolegomena for Daney’s entire work at the Cahiers. For Daney, when Louis Malle directs a movie about collaborationism with the Nazis during World War II, the film tells us more about Malle himself and France under President Pompidou in the ’70s than on a history 30 years passed. One should note, though, that the absence of any attempt at a critical apparatus, including translator footnotes, leaves a reader unfamiliar with France’s political and cultural history of the ’60s and ’70s naked in front of some difficult cultural gaps, such as figuring out who or what is hiding behind the names of French politicians or TV shows of these decades. 

Ultimately, when the reader leaves the Cinema House, she may experience a sense of longing or, even stronger, of melancholy for a bygone time of film criticism. The reward for the journey is high though, as Daney’s thought process proves incredibly fertile to help shape the reader’s taste and ability to confront today’s cinema, however different it might have become. Try it: I left a screening of Barbie (Greta Gerwig, 2023) recently wondering how it would fare under Daney’s razor-sharp pen in terms of utterance and enunciation. To paraphrase the title of a posthumous book by Serge Daney that quotes one of his favorite films, Moonfleet (Fritz Lang, 1955), “L’exercice a été profitable, monsieur” (“The exercise has been beneficial, sir”).¹⁴

A Note on Translation

The work of Christine Pichini translating Daney is rightfully being hailed in many reviews. Anyone taking on the translation of 600 pages of hard, theoretical criticism from the ’60s and ’70s deserves much praise, especially when the result reads with ease and flow. Nonetheless, a bilingual reader familiar with Daney’s original text will notice choices that, at times, get in the way of a thorough understanding of the critic’s original thinking. The first example comes, unfortunately, on the first line of the first article which reads: “Culmination of an oeuvre that is no longer impossible to ignore, Rio Bravo may very well be, along with Hatari!, Howard Hawks’s testament” (p. 31). The French reader will refer to the original and correct this awkward, contradictory statement to “Culmination of an oeuvre that is no longer possible to ignore”, while others are left to ponder whether the double negative is a first instance of Daney’s textual paratactic of the ’70s… In the major article on Kazan’s The Visitors (1972), the choice of “eternal” to translate “immarcescible” (p. 130), a word a reasonably well-read and well-educated person would have to look up in the dictionary, raises the question of choice of register. In the article on One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (Miloš Forman, 1975), the translation of Kafka’s aphorism that opens The Trial (Orson Welles, 1962), while restoring Welles’s original text from the film, betrays the meaning from the French version written by Daney.¹⁵ In the appraisal of Annie Hall (Woody Allen, 1977), we read: “There are at least two schools among the great American comedies (the talkies, anyway)” (p. 210). The French original refers to comedians (comédiens), therefore the actors, not the films. With a more marked impact on understanding, in the devastating text on Höstsonaten (Autumn Sonata, Ingmar Bergman, 1978), Pichini translates: “Even as the last of his films is greeted as an event of immeasurable importance, he [Bergman] is no longer producing interesting cinema” (p. 223). The original text reads “he is no longer producing something that interests cinema”, which resonates very differently, cinema becoming the subject one should interest rather the object produced. Later, in the incredibly hard to translate texts of the “critical function” series, choice is made to translate the pair “énoncé / énonciation” with “the utterance (what is said) and the enunciation (when it is said and by whom)” (p. 332). Why not? The reader loses the oral parallel between the two words, but not their meaning. Why, then, wait for the third article of the series, more than ten pages later, to give the French words in brackets next to utterance and enunciation? (p. 345). And did Mao write “Dogmatism is lazy” (p. 354) or “Dogmatists are lazy” (Daney’s original text)?

Other mistakes abound that relate to sloppy copy-editing: in the introductory interview of Daney by Bill Krohn, the number of typos becomes irritating: éspacement instead of espacement (p. 16); “between Eisenstein from Pudovkin” (instead of “between Eisenstein and Pudovkin,” p. 16); “whose mission is to to begin” (p. 26). Further in the book, a review published in Libération is dated 1979 instead of 1974, creating a false idea that Daney was contributing at that time when all the film reviews published in the daily newspaper are concentrated in 1973-1974. Editing issues abound in the rest of the volume, a testimony of the state of publication in the US that should not reflect too badly on Semiotext(e). One can only hope that publication of the remaining volumes receives a more attentive scrutiny to accuracy.

Part One: Table of Contents

Serge Daney, The Cinema House and the World, 1: The Cahiers du cinéma Years, 1962-1981 (South Pasadena: Semiotext(e), 2021).

Endnotes