I would like to thank you for being there, and specially to thank those who made this symposium possible. It is a very moving moment to have the opportunity to salute Serge Daney’s person and work here - here meaning in Harvard, in Boston, but also in the United States, where his work remains unfairly unknown. I don’t know how much you are aware of the importance the figure of Serge Daney has now in French and European cinephilia. Somehow, it’s even too much, in the sense that his name can be used by too many people, for various purposes, sometime as a somewhat mechanical reference. This is what often happens to personalities who have deeply marked the opinions and feelings of others during their life, and also since their death (since his death in 92).
I am one among the many for who Daney’s work, Daney’s style, Daney’s practice have been a decisive guideline, even before I even thought of becoming myself a film critic. I was not a friend of him, I met him only a few times, in the late period of his life, so this has not much to do with personal relations in the common sense of these words. But... If I intended to say “I” at the beginning of this speech, it’s because the “I”, the personal, subjective, biographical and physical implication plays a major role in Serge Daney’s specific approach of cinema, of writing, of writing about cinema. And this personal relationship he had made also more personal the relation many had with his work.
Serge Daney’s figure could be defined by two contradictory lines : he was an orphan, and he was a heir. As a child, he was raised by his mother and his grandmother, as a young man, he found in the French tradition of film criticism what we might call a fatherly family, somewhere between, he elected cinema itself as the place for another childhood, with a father (the father he did not have in real life). This is the configuration that has been nicknamed as “ciné-fils” (ciné-son and cinéphile).
None of this is my personal and arguable psychological analysis, it was very clear for him, and he spoke about these matters quite often in many ways, then very explicitly and with a total lucidity in the book “Persévérance”, his conversation with Serge Toubiana, a few months before his death.
This personal situation led Serge Daney to build an original identity of “concerned heir”. With others, but more than any other, he took over the flame of the high level film criticism school as it exists in France since the 20’s. But, since the beginning of his published work, even in the theoretical texts of Cahiers du cinema when he becomes a major member of the staff, then editor in chief during the 70’s, he does it according to what will become a motto I’m afraid untranslatable, “ces films qui nous regardent”, “films that look at us” when, in French, “look at us” means dedicated to us, which have to do with our own lives.
In this respect, Serge Daney is, more than anyone else, the one who did continue the thinking of cinema after André Bazin, then the coming generations of critics from the “Young Turks” to the early “political years” in the early 70’s, but with this specific mark of a much more personal relation with films, that could already be felt in his very first text, Un art adulte (“An Adult Art”) dedicated to Howard Hawks’ Rio Bravo and published in 62, when he was 18. This will also lead him, in the late years of his life, to assimilate his fate, suffering from AIDS, and a mortally domed destiny for cinema itself - or, at least, film criticism.
“But the very same movement witch included Daney’s relation to film with his own biography also drove him, in what might seem a contradictory trend, but only defines the richness and complexity of his relation with cinema, towards a new connexion with the whole wide world. Among other things, Daney inherits of the new political interest for “cinemas of the world” in the 60’s, he becomes a traveller, a reporter, a diarist on the move, and finally something quite away from the usual critic work, a journalist. When he leaves Cahiers du cinéma to become in charge of cinema at the newly reborn daily Libération in spring 81, he begins to invent a new articulation between film criticism (and, more generally speaking, the literary genre of art criticism, of witch he is already a leading figure) and newspaper work. The important thing to understand is that he does not add (or at least develop) a new skill, or a new way next to the other ones, the tradition of film criticism and the autobiographical relation with films. He elaborates, as part of the same relation, the way his own body moving through space, meeting people all around the planet, has to do with his own history and the intellectual tradition he is part of. And this, thanks to this dialectic combination that he becomes able to develop, generates what has been among his more original contribution. I mean : his original way not only to think what cinema is, but to think the reality of the world and the various representation processes through the way cinema helps to understand and, so often, criticise them. From sports to transmission of the War on TV, from advertising to politicians speeches, he was in such a position he could elaborate specific tools to analyse images, but also sounds and texts, and the way the have effects in the real everyday’s world.” Very few have been able to do so, though it has been tried often since. The idea I am pleading for here is that it has to do with the power produced by his personal relation with cinema, as I tried to explain before. The only comparison I can think of is Jean-Luc Godard’s gigantic work to use cinema tools themselves, and not only cinema criticism, as ways to understand and criticise theorically the real world. If we didn’t know before, JLG/JLG and the end of Histoire(s) du cinema (the famous “J’étais cet homme”) taught us the deep, and melancholic, connexions between this huge effort and his own life. Jean-Luc Godard, as we all know, is an artist. Serge Daney was he an artist ? I cannot really answer this question, but what I know for sure is that his style, the quality of his writing plays a major role in the intellectual power of his work.
This is why, hoping that what he wrote would be at last extendedly translated in the language of this country where he has unknown biological half-brothers, and so many spiritual “road companions”, as he would have said, I make also the wish that such a translation would be made by someone used to translate literary works, not only essays, since the quality of his language was such a decisive part of his work.
I thank you.
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