with its constant desire to remain faithful to his former choices.
After thirty years, the initial project of the quarterly journal
ended in December 2021, with a last issue, *Trafic* no. 120. A new
version of *Trafic* as an annual journal was launched in December
2022, under the title: *Trafic, l'almanach du cinéma*, with a new
editorial board composed by Raymond Bellour, Bernard Benoliel,
Christa Blümlinger, Jean-Paul Fargier and Judith Revault-d'Allones.
Unfortunately, the editor ceased publication after this sole issue,
following the sudden death of the copyeditor, Jean-Luc Mengus,
who had accompanied the journal since 1993.

Pierre Eugène
<figure><img src="image_22.png" /></figure>
COMMUNITY

CINEPHILIA

THE IMAGE
# Cinephilia Falls to Earth:
Thinking the Image
after Daney

Garin Dowd

This essay explores the posterity of Serge Daney's writings by proposing a series of provisional categorizations in the manner of Daney, who often worked with tripartite distinctions. To think the image after Daney is here to think both in his aftermath and in his lineage (i.e. with him). It is to continue to think with the repertoire of concepts and approaches enshrined in his writing and to think with the conflicted practice of cinephilia that we find in his understanding of his own career as a critic. To think the image after Daney, I propose, is paradoxically to continue to think about the contemporary in a manner attentive to and following his own already retrospective disposition.
"Les films du cinéma atterrissent à la télévision comme s'ils venaient d'en-haut, d'un écran dans les hauteurs ou d'un ciel."

## Cinephilia after the End of Cinema

On my visit to Paris in the year of the 50th anniversary of the events of May 1968, the vitrines of the Champo cinema were adorned with publicity materials to mark seasons devoted to Fassbinder and Wenders respectively. Around the corner in another cabinet on rue Champollion a period poster featured painted representations of John Wayne and Maureen O'Hara in Ford's *The Quiet Man/L'Homme tranquille*. Beside that, behind another pane of glass, Nastassja Kinski in *Paris, Texas* was represented by a low-resolution image on A4 paper, which had clearly been printed by the cinema rather than either drawn from a repository or derived from an archival negative as might have been the case thirty years before. Posters dating from the original French release dates of Wenders's *Les Ailes du désir/ Wings of Desire* and Fassbinder's *Veronika Voss* adorned other surfaces around the curved corner on which Rue des Écoles's much loved cinéma d'art et d'essai stands.<fnref n="2" /> A little further up the rue Champollion the Reflet Médicis cinema had, in its main poster glass side by side, a period poster for *La Fiancée du pirate/A Very Curious Girl* by Nelly Kaplan and one for the 4K restoration of *La Chair de l'orchidée/The Flesh of the Orchid* by Patrice Chéreau.

A few people positioned at different points along the frontage of the Champo looked at posters and read printouts of reviews

<footnote n="1">1 "Cinema films land on television as if they came from on high, from a screen in the heights or from a sky."</footnote>

<footnote n="2">2 On the mannerism of *Veronika Voss*, see Daney 1986, 109.</footnote>
and historical source materials.<fnref n="3" /> They joined each other to wait until it was time to queue for the 11.30 Friday morning screening of Wenders' *The Goalkeeper's Fear of the Penalty*. Others began to arrive. Eventually a queue formed and the staff placed a sign on the pavement of Rue des Écoles to control its direction.

All the films and all the filmmakers represented on the walls of the approximately 150 square meters of façade embracing two cinemas on this one corner of Paris at some point came under the scrutiny and received the critical appraisal of Serge Daney. The manner, however, of the presence of the majority of the films mentioned both on the walls of the exterior and within the *salles* (movie theaters) has radically changed since the period in which Daney and his contemporaries—and certainly the cinephiles of his generation—might themselves have frequented such cinemas. The Champo retains its vitrines; it retains moreover the preference for analog publicity (for example, original posters from the French releases) when it is accessible. Even though some of the publicity materials appearing behind the glass may these days be printed out from a digital source which can make the presentation seem amateurish, the vitrines of the Champo continue to reflect a time that at first glance resembles and thus includes Daney's time. The queue, the line, the *file d'attente* on the rue des Écoles may even have comprised members of a queue that formed there for the first run of *Wings of Desire*, the same and different.

## Daney, our contemporary?

Writing in his journal in 1990, having viewed Straub and Huillet's *Moïse et Aaron* (Daney 1993, 256), Daney recounts that there were ten of them in the *salle* at the Panthéon, adding the question:

<footnote n="3">3 Daney, in recalling the role played by the ritual of attendance at the 9 o'clock screenings in the company of his mother in the cinemas of the 12th arrondissement, remembers how they would often look at the photos outside and end up missing the film due to their hesitation (Daney 2015, 190).</footnote>
122 were we/they errant spectators or a virtual sect? Elsewhere Jean Douchet, in the *Cahiers du cinéma* special commemorative issue on Daney (no. 458), recalling the Cinémathèque française, recounts how within its walls and before its screen, first of all one belonged to a tribe, then a group, then in turn a sub-group, and finally a tendency, as in the phrase “tendance Rossellini, tendance Godard” and of course immortalized in the negative formulation in the title of Truffaut’s famous attack on the *qualité française* (Truffaut 1954). Rarely, in such a community, did one belong to oneself.

Thinking the image after Serge Daney is a notion which must consider heterogeneous temporalities, depending on the Serge Daney one has been able, according to linguistic aptitude, to encounter. For the non-reader of French, it has been considerably more difficult to follow Daney in his manner of thinking the image, to follow him at the time of writing and to continue to be influenced or inspired by him after his death. The translations are scattered and to date the only book to be published in English is given the title *Postcards from the Cinema* (Daney 2007), which contains merely the sketch of a possible book by Daney rather than one signed by him during his lifetime.<fnref n="4" />

But there are other ways in which following Daney in France, following his writing, has become difficult. Some of the books in which his texts were collected are now out of print. While the books were always already collections of articles, they were encountered by a generation as *books*.

In fact, mimicking Deleuze’s three phases of cinema for Daney (which in turn is an enumeration made by Deleuze in tribute to Daney’s own penchant for thinking in threes), as outlined in his preface to *Ciné-Journal* (Daney 1986), one might say that there are, in France and for those who read French, three phases of

<footnote n="4">4 Semiotext(e) published recently the first volume of a translation of *Le Maison cinéma et le monde* (Daney 2022).</footnote>
following Daney as a reader: first, there is a reading that goes
in tandem with publication, in *Cahiers* and then in *Libération*;
second, there is the retrospective reading of the collections as
*collections* (a period that may be complicated in that the reader
of the first category may overlap partially); third, there is the
encounter with the writings as presented in the four volumes of
*La Maison cinéma et le monde*, a period that of course also is that
of the period post-Daney and manifest in a form that in fact does
not reprint many important texts from the individual books pub-
lished during his lifetime.

Hence those who come after in this context may consist of
a following that is contemporaneous—Daney leads, readers
follow—but equally a following that is retrospective, just as it also
embraces one that is posthumous. Is the Daney encountered in
each of these different temporalities of engagement the same? A
focus on the *passeur* and the allied theme of community makes
this question relevant.

To explore temporal complications further, there is a pre-68 and
a post-68 *Cahiers* or a *Cahiers* under Daney's editorship as one
that needs to be set apart; a *Libération* phase; a tennis-journalist
phase overlapping with a *zappeur* phase; and of course, finally, a
*Trafic* phase (encompassing both the period of its planning and
his brief tenure at the helm).

One might then—to broaden the perspective and to add yet
another tripartite distinction—consider the question of the
status of the cinematographic and the audio-visual image during
each of these phases—phases that are marked by three distinct
modes of engaging with his writings (contemporaneously, retro-
spectively, posthumously) in turn symbolized by the article in its
original form, the article collected in *La Rampe* (Daney 1983), for
instance, and the article as collected in the four P.O.L. volumes
(Daney 2001–2015). The first phase would loosely coincide with
the continuation of the development of what Deleuze identified
as Daney’s preoccupation with the great pedagogical lines; the
124 second with Daney's exploration of the new image regime of television and video. The third is our period, the one Daney could not have foreseen, the one of streaming, Netflix, boxsets (without boxes), and films produced by Amazon.

As a way of approaching these themes one can propose that there are (again) three modes of encountering the work of Daney, and therefore three modes of disseminating his thought—three modes of its *passing* which includes being passed on, as we say in English of the act of bequeathing upon death. (I say this because, in taking up the baton of *Trafic*, Raymond Bellour, Sylvie Pierre, and the other editors have enabled Daney's final project to be passed on to us as an inheritance.) At the same time I want to invoke the idea that there are at least three communities in the village named Daney, born in different decades and belonging to different generations. I want to think about the specificities of these readerships both in terms of their relationship to the historical period, considered especially in terms of technological communications developments (but also political developments), and to the mode in which Daney was writing as their contemporary (magazine, newspaper, book), to their relation to the technology and/or to the mode, and whether this relationship was one of contemporaneity or retrospection.

## With and After Daney

Thinking the image after Daney? In terms of an encounter through English, the time lag between a possible and an actual *being-with* Daney can be immense, for reasons well documented. But there are isolated signs of some catching up. In a 2016 article for the art theory journal *October* James Tweedie asserts that Daney is a precursor of media archaeology. Tweedie challenges the widely held view that Daney disdains television. He acknowledges inconsistencies in Daney's view of the medium, but asserts that the rediscovery of film on television forms part of an already anachronistic view of cinema, both in terms of an
acknowledgement that we are already at the end of cinema, with something such as Pasolini's *Teorema* in 1968, and in the era of the victory of mass industrial cinema. Hence the rear-view mirror (*rétroviseur*) idea, which Tweedie adopts from Daney as the organizing metaphor for his reappraisal.

In a much earlier appraisal, on the tenth anniversary of Daney's death, Jean-François Pigouillié, who contributed to *Cahiers* in the 1990s, presents a quite different argument about Daney's posterity, suggesting that in the issue of *Trafic* devoted to Daney in 2002 it is really only the notions of the *ciné-fils* (cine-son) and of cine-biographical relations that endure (Pigouillié 2002, 84). He complicates this perspective by what he regards as Daney wanting to maintain at all costs a strict correspondence between his life and that of modern cinema.

Both articles, however, share an acknowledgement of the indelible presence of the melancholic disposition in the Daney version of cinephilia and both in distinct ways attest to the figure of anamnesis and, hence, to the ultimately psychoanalytic tenor of the late writings and thought of Daney.<fnref n="5" /> Pigouillié even goes so far as to diagnose narcissism in the error that he attributes to Daney, of mistaking the year of Rossellini's film *Rome, Open City* as 1944. This may be historically correct, but Pigouillié is guilty of his

<footnote n="5">5 Very Oedipal, for example, is how he characterizes his early ritualistic film viewing (Daney 2015, 190). Elsewhere, he comments that the salary paid to him for his work in *Libération* was modest but enough to keep a psycho-analyst from abject poverty and to keep at bay transference from the couch (Daney 2015, 105). In another interview he improvises a psychoanalytic “reading” of how Straub and Huillet play out a Lacanian theater through their work (Daney 2015, 111). The specifically Lacanian tenor of many articles such as for example on *Le Diable probablement/The Devil Probably* (Robert Bresson, 1977) is noteworthy, as indeed is Daney’s comment that he is more Lacanian than Deleuzian. In a characterization that recalls aspects of Barthes’s distinction between a normative pleasure of the text and a trans-gressive *jouissance*, Daney identifies an out voice and a through voice (482). In the out voice cinema fetishizes the emergence of the voice from the lips, from which, in his Lacanian formulation, the *objet a* separates.</footnote>
126 own error in claiming that Daney says the camps were *liberated* in 1944. In fact Daney only states that their existence came to the knowledge (of the Allied forces) in this year (to assert an *ethical* lapse, or worse, manipulation by Daney is unwarranted).

The one attributes to Daney a prescience that propels him into the future while the other claims that he deprived himself of his own legacy. But each ponders legacy.

## Daney after Daney

The texts comprising the posthumously published volume of fragments in *L'Exercice a été profitable, Monsieur* are notable for the frequent invocation of the question of environment and location. The *salle obscure* (or movie theater—the fetishization of which Daney claimed to be not at all susceptible to, as in the famous dismissal “les salles, je m'en fous” (“I don’t care about the movie theaters.”) (Daney 2015, 199)<fnref n="6" />—is of course here as elsewhere invoked, but in macrocosm France, symbolically stood in for by the French “films of quality,” which, in Daney’s eyes, make such a pernicious comeback in the 1980s and continue beyond his death. The battle, in Daney’s eyes, is between a voracious postmodern regime of the visual and some form of “resistance,” but the latter he finds holed up or in hiding.<fnref n="7" /> Hence the metaphor of

<footnote n="6">6 Reprised in another text: “je me suis toujours foutu de la salle” (“I never cared about the movie theater”) (Daney 2015, 181). Less colorfully in the interview with Viviant he comments, “chez-moi, l’amour du cinéma c’est jamais confondu avec l’amour de la salle. Dans la salle il y avait encore trop de société, de consensus” (“For me, the love of the cinema is never confused with the love of the movie theater. In the movie theater there was still too much society, too much consensus”) (Daney 2015, 194).</footnote>

<footnote n="7">7 Repeatedly in the pieces collected about films on television, Daney refers to the specificity of the material viewing circumstances. He addresses his readers as fellow TV watchers (invoking a kind of community and occasionally an imagined village—a concept to which he often returned). He refers to his own susceptibility to the flow of television—the phenomenon referred to by Dork Zabunyan as the “visionnage” distrait qui absorbe avec indifférence le défilement des images: un nouveau somnambulisme</footnote>
a new Occupation, marked superficially by films with the "aroma" of Vichy (as he states elsewhere) but more generally by all that he detests in Besson, Beineix, Annaud, and Berri.<fnref n="8" /> Daney's pessimism is not total: within the same volume of fragments he suggests that the filmmakers he prizes have all retreated into territorial enclaves but also that there is hope to be found in younger directors of the period of the late 1980s such as, notably, Leos Carax and Wim Wenders. Cinema had lost its place by the time these fragments were written and Daney had been through the "non-legendary years" of *Cahiers* but also of French society of the 1970s. The *maison* (house) he had once shared within the hermetic cinephilia of the journal, along with the dominance of the *salle obscure*, have gone.

Hence, the pressing question of the public, which is notable in the volume, but also of habitability. The topic is there at the beginning of the journal. The question often translates as how to live in France under the new "Occupation." But it has resonances with the more abstract and macro question as posed by Godard in *Soigne ta droite: Une place sur la terre* (1987), whom indeed Daney directly cites, in stating "une place sur terre comme au ciel" ("a place on earth as in heaven").

## Cinephilia

*Ciné-fils:* Daney made innumerable references to this, his Lacanian formulation, and as Tweedie has reminded us, through this endlessly returned-to word, he deliberately took a critical distance from the founding cinephilia of *Cahiers*. He also referred in this context, in *L'Exercice*, to being kidnapped by cinema. As

<footnote>"distracted 'viewing' that absorbs with indifference the scrolling of images: a new somnambulism" (Zabunyan 2011, 169).</footnote>

<footnote n="8">8 "La France est occupée et le studio représente l'Occupation dans le champ du cinéma" ("France is occupied and the studio represents the Occupation in the field of cinema") (Debray in Daney 1999a, 40).</footnote>
128 reflected in an exhibition at the Palais de Tokyo by Jean-Jacques Lebel, which was in its final weeks in May 2018, objects *collect us*. The objects in this case: the local cinema, the publicity material, the street corner, the films themselves. Daney was a collector but he was also himself appropriated by cinema: cinephilia is not simply a uni-directional projection of love onto an object; the cinephile is also apprehended by the object of their desire.

In the notes he was writing in preparation for the publication of *Devant la recrudescence des vols de sacs à main* (the volume that deploys the title from the public awareness message projected in the heyday of the *salle*), Daney begins by asking what it is that is in crisis in cinema at this time. The question, he elaborates, is not “the crisis in cinema” as such but *what exactly* is in crisis. The answer is divided into two: *la salle obscure* and *l'enregistrement* (recording). At one point in his deliberations he writes that in the great films everything in the *tableau* (the image) moves, but at different speeds—from which he concludes that skies, and in particular skies with clouds, are the best metaphor for such films. We shall return to these skies later.

## Digital After-Images

To return to my allegory of the Champo, some of the experiences of the setting and indeed of the experience of the *salle obscure* are the same, but some have been altered by the digital revolution. The second *salle* of the Champo still has a 35mm projector but in its own description this is in order to be able to screen films not yet converted to DCP format rather than due to a commitment to 35mm in itself.

Many commentators have addressed the question of a purported loss that occurs when the defining context of cinema and cinephilia centered on materiality and projection is removed, namely the movement, migration, or mutation entailed in wresting an experience defined as requiring a viewing experience in a *salle* (such as evoked in my quotation at the start) on to platforms and
portable devices. Raymond Bellour, for example (2012), in his
demand that the cinematographically specific rests on regarding
cinema in terms of the *dispositif*—made with projection in mind
and then in fact projected—has among the more emphatic of
such positions.<fnref n="9" />

The French film scholar Martine Beugnet, writing in English in her essay on watching films on iPhones, singles out Odin and Daney as the only French voices—at her time of writing—who ponder something other than a narrative of loss. In a footnote on Daney she points out in fact Daney’s acknowledgement that the small screen could improve some films (for example *The Ten Commandments*, and even, he quips in *Devant*, the films of Claude Lelouch (Daney 1991, 41). Readers of Daney will know that it is true to say that he insisted on his retention of cinephilic disposition as distinct from the gaze of the telephile—thus asserting on his own behalf and within viewing conceived of as an act of mourning a modality of resistance even within the field of the saturating visual.

Community

Amid the notes and drafts collected posthumously as *L'Exercice a été profitable, Monsieur* lie Daney's transcription of several quotations dated April 22, 1988 and taken from Jean-Luc Nancy's *The Inoperative Community* (1983/1991). Daney transcribes phrases that link the idea of community to mortality and finitude and, in this context, to Nancy's distinction between the individual and the singularity, the latter to be understood as entailing an

<footnote n="9">9 The sort of position with which Daney marked his divergence. For Daney there were those for whom even in a completely empty screening (ideal for *India Song* as he quips, Daney 2015, 194) the film/cinema would still be happening through the mere fact of projection, "c'est-à-dire le dialogue d'un lieu obscure et d'un lieu éclairé" ("that is to say the dialogue of a dark place and a lighted place") (Daney 2015, 177). Indeed, the same text contains Daney's claim that the *politique des auteurs* at *Cahiers* was a regime *against* the *salle* (177).</footnote>
130 exposure to alterity.<fnref n="10" /> The longest passage transcribed concerns the state of *between* "you" and "I" in which such exposure is manifest as *comparution* (co-appearing). The notes, arguably, have a resonance in different planes or facets of Daney's practice and theorization of cinephilia. The community of the *Cahiers*-immersed cinephilia was the refuge in which Daney the critic was formed, while the *ciné-fils* (according to his late self-categorization) who saw himself as at a remove from the generation of the Cinémathèque rats might be thought of as exemplifying the paradox at the heart of Nancy's conception of community. Community found itself addressed by other authors in the decade, Maurice Blanchot (to whom Nancy was in part responding) and later Giorgio Agamben. As many have done before, not least Daney himself, in his "cine-biographical" final phase, one can chart his career as one whose potentiality stirred facing Preminger and Hitchcock at the age of 15, who finds its first community in *Cahiers*,<fnref n="11" /> then breaks with the cinephilia of the latter in favor of the collective political militancy of the journal after 1969, regrouping under his editorship after 1974, only further to remove himself both from politics in the post-'68 sense and from the journal and the standard practice of the film critic in the 1980s, when he became a journalist with a remit far wider than cinema for *Libération*. During this trajectory, ideas of community (affiliation, belonging) and of emergence (becoming) recur, but each of these is characterized by the foundational melancholia so often identified by commentators on Daney.

<footnote n="10">10 "There is nothing behind singularity—but there is, outside it and in it, the immaterial *and* material space that distributes it and shares it out as singularity, distributes and shares the confines of other singularities, or even more exactly distributes and shares the confines of singularity—which is to say of alterity—between it and itself" (Nancy 1986/1991, 27).</footnote>

<footnote n="11">11 In the 1992 interview with Arnaud Viviant, Daney recounts how he began to read *Cahiers* in 1959 just before the release of *L'Année dernière à Marienbad/ Last Year at Marienbad* and then started to attend the Cinémathèque immediately after.</footnote>
In considering the image after Daney, and thus after his death, one wonders if the lessons of Nancy's *The Inoperative Community* resonate retrospectively. Daney regarded the cinephilia of his youth as belonging to the past, and his writings on the falling to earth of film on to television already take the form of an act of mourning.¹² The community felt by Daney was not only of his virtual sect—and he invoked mysticism over religion many times (not the “mass” of television viewing, which signaled conformity, nor of the *salle*—too much society, too much consensus, he said)—but also the films, directors, and stars whom he bumped into via the broadcasting of a film on television: “how are you?” “what’s new?” “good to see you,” he observes in a short entry. The community was already felt to be impossible, in this case through an awareness of a mutation in the media complex—to use Paul Virilio’s term (Virilio 1994)—of which it was becoming part (symbolized by the parasitic relationship of television to cinema, the increasingly saturated field of the visual and the contamination of cinema by advertising, so scathingly blamed on Besson and Beineix).¹³ *Pace* Beugnet, it is perhaps worth recalling that Daney’s reflections on what constitutes cinema is not confined to the viewing context, so that for Daney, the experience of *Diva* in a film auditorium would not be an experience of cinema but only of advertising. There is no supplement for Daney in *Diva*, just the gliding of images over images. The didactic dimension

12 He makes this comment in the interview with Roger. Films are said by Daney to fall from the sky to television (also Daney 1991, 31), a highly Godardian metaphor designed to indicate a reduction in scale and in power (mannerism), but also to indicate a theological dimension: films “sanctify” television, or at least when those films are by someone such as Visconti (Daney 1991).

13 The interaction with Virilio, which resulted in the dialogue between their pieces in *Libération* on the Gulf War, also results in sporadic references to his writings. Virilio's observations on the "vision machine" (the title of one of his books) are published in *Trafic*. Daney's observations on being able to see what was not seen (in relation to the camps) refers to Virilio's text (Daney 2015, 216).
132 of his disdain for Beineix in particular notwithstanding, *Diva*, he remarked, was—on TV—like a fish in water.<fnref n="14" />

The community of cinephiles in the context of Paris—the Cinématheque, the Champo, the Pantheon, the Pagode, wherever—and the groups formed around *Cahiers*, these were already acknowledged by Daney as governed by finitude, deriving from the impending swamping of the reservoir of the visual and the cliché.

## After the End/Until the End of the World

To return to a mixture of those who were there with Daney and those who came after or who did both: what, one wonders, would Daney make of the fact that the long-lost film made in May 1968 by his "petit frère" Philippe Garrel, *Actua 1*, can now be viewed by anyone on YouTube? Daney declared himself in favor of pirate videos in an interview with Philippe Roux, so one would imagine he would approve (Daney 2015, 178).

Given his interest in the concept of information (i.e. data), what would he think of films with frames in which it is impossible to perceive what is going on because so much digital information is teeming beyond the range of human perception on the screen? What for example of *Dr. Strange* or of the film in which Benedict Cumberbatch reprises his superhero in *Avengers: Infinity War*? A film, the closing credits of which list up to five separate companies of visual effects artists? Would Daney have migrated from television to streaming? No doubt the answer is yes—in

<footnote n="14">14 He would point out in an interview for *Esprit* that he watches television with a cinephile's eye always feeling implicated, "Alors qu'un téléphile est toujours à la même distance du poste, bien placé pour engranger de l'information pure, peu impliqué" ("While a telephile is always at the same distance from the television set, well placed to gather pure information, little involved") (Daney 2002, 27).</footnote>
L'Exercice after all he mentions the installation of cable in his
home.<fnref n="15" />

Analog cinephilia remains possible for, in Daney's phrase, the
"nostalgique de la salle" ("nostalgia for the movie theater")
(Daney 2015, 307) of our times. The Lincoln Center's Philippe
Garrel season for example in 2018 showed almost everything on
35 or 16mm prints, but exposure such as this is becoming rarer
and rarer with institutions such as the British Film Institute and
the Cinémathèque française adopting a policy geared towards
preservation of prints when a digital alternative is available. But
is it possible now only as part of a prolonged act of mourning for
cinema? Daney, we must remember, regarded viewing films on
television as already being involved in mourning.

To return, once more, to the vitrines of the Champo in May 2018,
in *Wings of Desire* Bruno Ganz plays an angel who sacrifices his
guaranteed continuation in the ether in order to be on earth,
where he will succumb not only to the effects of gravity but
also become mortal. Wenders's film also features Peter Falk
playing himself and recognized by Ganz as the actor who played
Columbo. I call this an allegory of cinephilia falling to earth,
or cinephilia in the era of television and latterly of streaming.
It is the trajectory of Daney's own cinephilia, which ended up
becoming manifest in the figure of the *zappeur* flitting about in
the continuity of "life's parade" (in the words of *All that Heaven
Allows*), the cathode ray tube.

Listening to the 1987 interview with Wenders on the France
Culture series *Microfilms* hosted by Daney to mark the release
of the film, I was struck by the remarkable felicity with which
the dialogue corroborated my own projection or fabulation.<fnref n="16" />

<footnote n="15">15 Elsewhere Daney suggests that television is mutating into a "ciné-vidéo-câblo-philie" (Daney 2015, 108). His statement regarding cinema being "finished" is playfully extended into the notion that it is finite because its metamorphoses are not infinite.</footnote>

<footnote n="16">16 *Microfilms*, episode 7, 1987.</footnote>
134 Wenders states that he made a film about angels as a pretext to show humans and to show the quotidian with fresh eyes and new images. It is in this sense that Daney thinks Wenders can in fact *resist* within the context of the regime of the visual. He directly asks Wenders about the *salle*, and Wenders ponders a possible future with an immense television screen replacing the traditional apparatus of projection. Daney goes on to talk about the vast circular screen at the Géode, not long in operation at the time. What would Daney have made of the fact that the first UK screening of Godard's *Livre de l'image/The Image Book* took place at the BFI Imax cinema—a film which one might regard as the very antithesis of the visual spectacular screened in a "cathedral" largely devoted to the merely spectacular (Godard one week, 1917 the next!)?

The conversation with Wenders turns to the question of weight and already the freeing of the apparatus of cinema from gravity. The correlation between cinephilia and the angelic is complete, and it is the gaze of the child that is enabled to see the angel. Novelty of gaze, novelty of image, restoration of the new and the fresh but also of the finite: in coming down to earth to experience the sensations of the embodied and to participate in the terrestrial community the angels are emblems of the double-edged sword of life and death, and the backward, rear-view mirror (*rétroviseur*) look of Wenders is thus co-opted into Daney's melancholic archive.

The fundamental distinction manifested in the late writings of Daney is that between the visual and the image, allied to the concept of mannerism, which he took as the key to understanding what was at stake in certain filmmakers of the period as well as in the interstices of television where David Lynch caught his attention. Daney found something in Lynch's TV work that he did not in the films—to date he had made *Eraserhead*, *Elephant Man*, *Dune*, and *Blue Velvet*. Prophetically as far as *Cahiers* is concerned, he says of *Twin Peaks* that it comes from/of cinema (Daney 1993,
333)—the return by Lynch some 25 years later would see the
series top the end of decade list for the then editorial team.

Jonathan Rosenbaum, who was among the first to acknowledge
Daney's importance in the coming era, notes the aspects of
scale and occasion that mark the specificity of cinema and that
these were crucial to the interest Daney had in films on tele-
vision (Rosenbaum 2005). In his review of Coppola's *One from the
Heart*—the film which famously featured the director's Zoetrope<fnref n="17" />
experiment in directing from the interior of his famous Airstream
trailer, the “Silverfish”—Daney reaches for what will become a
thoroughly malleable and reproducible metaphor concerning the
celestial and the earthly domains: the camera is in the sky, the
characters in the rain.<fnref n="18" />

Daney's review of Wenders's *Wings of Desire* argues that the
“desire” part of the French title gets things wrong. Daney says
the film harks back to silent cinema, which knew how to film the
sky, and places it with Godard's *Passion* in this respect (Daney
2015, 30). In fact, I would add that there is another important
sky sequence in Godard's *Soigne ta droite*, at the beginning.
This scene is itself an echo of the opening sequence of *Playtime*
by Tati. Godard begins his film with a shot from a plane and a
voiceover debating the location or whether there is any location.
A place on earth (Daney 2015, 101) is a genuine question in
Godard. Of course, in *Soigne ta droite* Godard boards a plane with
his film canisters and ends up flat on his face—this is Godard's
most Tatiesque film after all.

<footnote n="17">17 "L'image est (grace à la vidéo) 'bien traitée' tandis que les acteurs sont (à cause de la vidéo) 'sous surveillance'" ("The image is (thanks to video) 'well processed' while the actors are (because of video) 'under surveillance'") (Daney 1986, 125).</footnote>

<footnote n="18">18 Coppola, Daney argues, shows how "le jamais-vu redevient trop vite du déjà-vu" ("the never-seen-before becomes déjà vu all too quickly") (Daney 1986, 123). "Mannerism in cinema is defined as nothing happens to the characters, what happens happens to the image. The decor and the characters do not belong to one another; they do not, unlike in Minnelli, have the same weight as one another. The camera is in the sky, the characters in the rain."</footnote>
136 The trope returns repeatedly in Daney. For example, he likens himself to a silent era hero required to land a plane safely without even holding a pilot's license (Daney 2015, 302). Daney writes that in *Tarnished Angels*, Sirk films the aeronautic display like a domestic scene and intimate scenes as if they were dogfights. He also refers to the coming down to earth of these films, many of which land badly (like in *Tarnished Angels*). They can land badly on television for a number of reasons and with a number of consequences. Technical factors for example may impinge, such as a cinemascope film boxed in by two bands which cannot be as black as they need to be. Or they can be revealed through a particular mode of viewing to have been artistic failures, such as *Some Like It Hot*.

## Image

The late writing of Daney places a lot of faith in Wenders and Carax. Another way to ponder a thinking and a practice of the image after Daney would be to consider their subsequent work in light of the faith Daney placed in them and, as I shall argue in Carax in particular, for reasons linked to the themes of cinephilia and community, the role of the *passeur* and the “end” of cinema.

Recalling that what he hoped for in these two filmmakers was the capacity for a single image—an image charged for him with salvific properties, and he invoked Godard’s formula too, “just an image”—it is perhaps of note that Carax would continue to operate in the singular way Daney identified close to the beginning of his career. In this light it is fascinating to reflect that the other film at the top of the *Cahiers* top ten, in second place, Carax’s *Holy Motors*, is in its way about cinephilia fallen to earth in the era of the visual.<fnref n="19" /> The character of Merde, expanded by

<footnote n="19">19 Daney had a nurturing attitude to Carax who attended (without being registered) the course at Censier he taught with Danièle Dubroux (whose 1991 film *Borderline* made an enormous impression on Daney). But he frequently leavens his praise with statements of perplexity (Carax wastes too much</footnote>
the director from his segment of *Tokyo!* (2008), did not fulfil the promise made at the end of the short film of a "Merde in the USA," but rather was absorbed retrospectively as one part in the playing out of an assignment to an actor in what can be read as a scripted reality show taking place across Paris filmed by invisible cameras. The film was also made during the hiatus in the planned film "Scars," which at the time of writing remains abandoned. It was Carax's hope to shoot on film but finances did not permit this. Daney often repeated his assertion that every film is the story of its own elaboration and to an extent the depiction of its own context of production. Arguably the context of the non-production (that is, on film) and the difficulty perennially experienced by the director (allied to personal grief) forms the backdrop of *Holy Motors*.

The cinephilia espoused by the early Daney was regarded by him as a specific cinephilia of *Cahiers*; Carax himself is steeped in this both due to the frequency of his appearance (as both reviewer and reviewed) in the journal (not least Daney's championing of his debut film *Boy Meets Girl* in *Libération* while he was still on the editorial board of *Cahiers*).

In this regard the film may be regarded as the falling to earth of Carax's own cinephilia in a context marked by technological constraint on the one hand (he is unable to shoot on film due to financial constraints) and opportunity on the other (at least he can make something). Carax would go on to make a film which surpasses the quintessential meta-film—at least for the Daney of 1969—in the extent to which it embeds within itself a critical reflection on the industrial and technological framework embodying at once these constraints and possibilities. Whereas in 1969 Daney argues that Pasolini's *Teorema* is the pinnacle

time trying to find out what he wants, in the interview with Viviant). He answers his own question "Who can new filmmakers copy now?" by saying they, like Godard, follow Lang. They can't copy Carax, he says (Daney 2015, 210). The reason is not entirely clear but perhaps it is because Carax already reprises and recycles aspects of Godard and Garrel.
138 (Daney 2022, 101–4), Carax in 2011 would, in the era named post-cinematic by some, prolong the lineage (which we in part associate with Daney) of the interrogation of the question of spectatorship in the *salles* and in the expanded vision machine of our era. The film opens with the awakened director escaping through a panel in what appears to be a hotel room to the interior of a cinema, with an inert, apparently sleeping audience incapable of registering any response to the screen. Is this Carax’s depiction of the era of the end of the *salle*? The vignettes that unfold subsequently do so out of this opening, the aperture into the space of the empty historically cinematographic (the film is projecting *without an audience*, in that the people are *not spectating*): filming, production, projection. The “heavy machines” of old, referred to in the conversation between the mysterious impresario played by Michel Piccoli and M. Oscar, were also the ones that, paradoxically, produced Daney’s skies; the new ones, being so small and ubiquitous in a world become reality show, leave us firmly on earth (as does the character *played by the character played* by Kylie Minogue, Eva Grace). Daney had written about reality shows in *Le Salaire du Zappeur* very early in the development of the genre or form now so ubiquitous on our television screens. The reality show is the new occupation, according to Daney. It is as if Carax’s film takes up the baton from Daney in its elaboration of a metaphorical display of this.

In this period where some talk of a post-cinema or, as William Brown does in a Laruelle-inflected idiom, a *non-cinema* of the digital era (Brown 2018), one can only speculate as to what Daney would make of departures from industrial practice such as films made on smartphones (Soderberg<fnref n="20" />) or Godard and Wenders’s mannerist use of 3D or of the dissemination and proliferation of multiple viewing contexts of our present moment.

<footnote n="20">20 "Soderberg, c'est malin" ("Soderberg's clever"), remarks Daney in 1992 (of *Sex, Lies and Videotape*), but he doesn't think he can go very far (Daney 2015, 187).</footnote>
Regarding the output of our times, Daney was prescient about a transformation that he observed toward what he termed the vectorial mise-en-scène of some US cinema of the time—Daney cites Tim Burton's *Batman* in particular (Daney 2015, 163)—where we do not come across the space bit by bit (as we would in Lang). Is this now even more the case in Hollywood blockbusters? Carax's *Holy Motors* interrogates this too in its way, in the green-screen and motion-capture episode. CGI in cinema today is even more prone to deploy the potentiality of technology to render the vectorial experience that is produced by contemporary communications technologies in a media-saturated world. In CGI cinema, which is so full and contains densities of layers that although perceptible to the machine eye are imperceptible to the human, we are arguably ever more plunged into a world without the gaps of the Daneyian *visuel*.

If the community for whom Daney functioned as *passeur* is to be considered, to sound like Blanchot, unavowable or, to sound like Nancy (sounding like Blanchot), inoperative, it is so in a way that is open to an ethics. In the essay "Before and After the Image" cinephilia is linked insistently to an ethical project. There Daney defines love of cinema as the knowledge of *what to do with the image that is missing*. When the other comes to be missing, each side takes refuge in their "visual," the one in its real State, the other "in a state" of its imaging (Daney 1999, 190). Thus in the context of the audio-visual representation of the Other there is a pervasive failure to "go to the Other" (31). When this failure arises—as on television it almost always does—then we give ourselves images of ourselves as our way of failing to go to the other. The task of the critic for Daney was to enumerate and write about the ways in which this failure is endemic. Daney had produced powerful examples of the failure to go towards
140 the other, notably the coruscating attack on a televised concert associated with *Live Aid* and television coverage of the Iraq war.<fnref n="21" />

The question posed by the project edited by Dork Zabunyan, *Que peut une image*, is pertinent as a reference point for this essay. It rests on two responses, in the style of Daney as identified by Deleuze: inviting an optimism bordering on naïve—an image can change everything—or on a pessimism, throwing one's hands in the air and exclaiming in defeat: “as if an image could ever do anything” (Zabunyan 2014, 4). Daney, as we know, wavers in the end, still believing in one image, *une image*. Carax's film may in its way be discussed as the answer which the future would provide.

Carax aims to show us a world where everything is image, the instantaneity being such that acting out and viewing are simultaneous; reality TV equated with reality, visual with world, or so intermingled that one cannot exit it; a world in which M. Oscar as hooded vigilante can shoot M. Oscar as banker outside Fouquet's. Does Carax manage to give us an image, just an image?

## Singularity

For Daney it was still possible for a single image to produce and embody a moment of resistance to the regime of the visual, even if by depending on it cinema could still, through mannerism, effectuate some element of anamorphosis—which we might think both metaphorically, as in a distortion or stretching of normative perception and knowledge, and as manifest in images themselves, as for example in the universes of David Lynch.

In a text in which Daney is cited, Bernard Stiegler sums up for me one response to the intervening period, the period when Daney is still our contemporary:

<footnote n="21">21 Of the video clip "We Are the World" he wrote: "a dissolve makes the dying and the famous dance together" (34).</footnote>
Controlling primary and secondary identification leads to psychic dis-identification, which in turn leads to a process of collective disindividuation, that is, to a destruction of the social body itself, and engenders disaffected psychic and social individuals. It does so in a dual sense: it engenders their disaffection [désaffection], ruining their affective capacities; and it engenders their withdrawal [désaffectionation], the loss of their place, that is, of their ethos. For this amounts to the question of ethics: ethics, which is the knowledge of the abode [séjour]. Ethics, as the translation of the Greek word ethos, is that which gives me my place within the circuit of affects through which the process of psychic and collective individuation constitutes itself. Insofar as it establishes such places, ethics is also what weaves that process of transmission linking together the succession of generations. [emphasis mine] (Stiegler 2012, 7)

It seems to me that Daney's late writings are diagnosing such a dislocation—written about in Benoît Goetz's recently re-published book (original publication 2001), prefaced by Nancy, *La Dislocation: Architecture et philosophie*. Daney, in his articulation of a passing (or already past) era and his interaction as *zappeur* of the squeezed space of television, is producing an ethics, as it were, on the run and in the intermittently available loci of a topological mutation.

25 years after the series admired by Daney, David Lynch delivered a further installment of *Twin Peaks*. The first series for Daney was a moment where an affirmative mannerism could inhabit and work against the dominant culture of the televisual, whereas the second, 25 years later, occurs in a period of television characterized for many by telephilia and by the emergence of new modes of series construction and dissemination.

Agent Cooper is beyond individualization (and Daney suggests of the original series that he has something of Cary Grant in *North by Northwest*). Whereas M. Oscar individuates and disindividuates
142 according to scripted, costumed assignments throughout the reality show that has supplanted the world and his own agency, in a different way Cooper, the agent and *agency* that is Cooper, is usurped and suspended in his inadvertent unconscious and unself-aware fractalization, circulating the cosmos, not least in the famous episode 8 of *Twin Peaks: The Return*.

At the beginning of *Soigne ta droite*, Godard, though the voiceover, looks for a place on earth, asking the question that one might attribute to Heidegger, of the *etre-là*, being there. Already in his films identified with the question of the sublime, Godard is posing a question about what we now refer to as the Anthropocene and the ethical question of how cinema is to act when being-there is fractured and recognized comprehensively as finite.<fnref n="22" /> The question of being there as posed by the jolt of the camera in the sky at the beginning of *Soigne ta droite* has intensified in the intervening period. Godard lies on the runway at an airport, film cans strewn around his body. No longer the same; the question of being on the planet has changed, both since Godard asked this question and since Daney pondered the stakes of being a *passeur*.

The words of Patrice Rollet sum up the introduction to the first volume of Daney's writings as collected in *La Maison cinéma et le monde* as follows:

> [H]e wrote that in it, cinema was "a home for images that 'no longer have a home'." The cinema home, like the "Sirk home" that he speaks of in *Trafic*, and not the home of cinema (its official institutions), cinema as a home for the shelterless image, vulnerable to the inclemency of history and the world, but also a home base from which one may set off again once the wind of image rises. (Rollet, in Daney 2022, 12)

<footnote n="22">22 In the interview with Viviant Daney cites Valéry: "Nous savons que nous sommes mortels, nos civilisations" ("We know that we are mortal, our civilisations") (Daney 2015, 195). Valery said: "nous autres, civilisations, nous savons maintenant que nous sommes mortelles".</footnote>
In different ways the examples of Carax and Lynch continue to show us the after-images of the cinema as Daney understood it, now even more emphatically dislocated from both the *salle* and its official institutions.

## References

Beugnet, Martine. 2013. "Miniature Pleasures: On Watching Films on iPhones." In *Cinematicity in Media History*, edited by Jeffrey Geiger and Karin Littau, 196-210. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Bellour, Raymond. 2012. *La Querelle des dispositifs*. Paris: P.O.L.

Brown, William. 2018. *Non-Cinema: Global Digital Filmmaking and the Multitude*. New York: Bloomsbury.

Daney, Serge. 1983. *La Rampe*. Paris: Gallimard/Cahiers du cinéma.

—. 1986. *Ciné-Journal 1981-1986: Préface de Gilles Deleuze*. Paris: Cahiers du cinéma.

—. 1991. *Devant la recrudescence des vols de sacs à main: cinéma, télévision, information (1988-1991)*. Lyon: Aléas Editeur.

—. 1993. *L'Exercice a été profitable, Monsieur*. Paris: P.O.L.

—. 1999a. *Itinéraire d'un ciné-fils*, propos recueillis par Régis Debray, édition établi sous la direction de Christian Delage. Paris: Jean Michel Place.

—. 1999b. "The organ and the vacuum cleaner." In *Literary Debate: Texts and Contexts, Postwar French Thought, Vol. 2*, edited by Dennis Hollier and Jeffrey Mehlman, 474-86. New York: New Press.

—. 1999c. "Before and After the Image." *Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture* 21(1): 181-90.

—. 2002. *La Maison cinéma et le monde Vol II. Les Années Libé 1981-1985*. Paris: P.O.L.

—. 2003. "The Screen of Fantasy (Bazin and Animals)." Translated by Mark A. Cohen. In *Rites of Realism: Essays on Corporeal Cinema*, edited by Ivone Margulies, 32-41. Durham: Duke University Press.

—. 2007. *Postcards from the Cinema*. Translated by Paul Douglas Grant. Oxford: Berg. Translation of *Persévérance*. Paris: P.O.L, 1994.

—. 2012. *La Maison cinéma et le monde Vol III. Les années Libé 1986-1991*. Paris: P.O.L

—. 2015. *La Maison cinéma et le monde Vol IV. Le moment Trafic 1991-1992*. Paris: P.O.L

—. 2022. *The Cinema House & the World, Vol. 1, The Cahiers du cinéma Years, 1962-1981*. Translated by Christine Pichini. South Pasadena: Semiotext(e).

Eugène, Pierre. 2012. "Apparitions de Serge Daney." *Traffic* 82: 94-102.

Goetz, Benoît. 2018. *La Dislocation: Architecture et philosophie*. Paris: Verdier.

Nancy, Jean-Luc. 1983/1991. *The Inoperative Community*. Edited by Peter Connor. Translated by Peter Connor, Lisa Garbus, Michael Holland, and Simona Sawhney. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota.
144 Pigoulié, Jean-François. 2002. "Serge Daney sans postérité." *Esprit* 286 (7): 61-87.
Rosenbaum, Jonathan. 2005. "The Missing Image [On Serge Daney]," *Jonathan Rosenbaum*, May 29. Accessed October 29, 2022. https://jonathanrosenbaum.net/2022/05/the-missing-image-on-serge-daney/.

Stiegler, Bernard. 2012. *Uncontrollable Societies of Disaffected Individuals: Disbelief and Discredit, Vol. 2*. Translated by Daniel Ross. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Truffaut, François. 1954. "Une certaine tendance du cinéma français." *Cahiers du cinéma* 31: 15-29.

Tweedie, James. 2016. "Serge Daney, Zapper: Cinema, Television and the Persistence of Media." *October* 157: 107-27.

Virilio, Paul. 1994. *The Vision Machine*. Translated by Julie Rose. London and Bloomington: BFI and Indiana University Press.

Zabunyan, Dork. 2011. *Les Cinémas de Gilles Deleuze*. Montrouge: Bayard.

Zabunyan, Dork. 2014. "Que peut une image ?—Les conditions d'une question." In *Que peut une image ?*, edited by Dork Zabunyan, 4-11. Paris: Le BAL / Textuel.
<figure><img src="image_23.png" /></figure>
"DEATH OF CINEMA"

MODERN CINEMA

HONG KONG CINEMA

IRANIAN CINEMA

THE ESSAY FILM
# Thinking the Future of Cinema

Bamchade Pourvali

Beyond the melancholy, beyond the repetition of the 'death of cinema' feeling of the 1980s, we find in Serge Daney's writings an attention to a new cartography of cinema that was at that moment taking shape in Hong Kong and in Iran. These were two filmographies in which Daney recognized the continuation of "modern cinema." This reflection on the future of cinema in the late period of Daney's writings is coupled with his sensitivity to a cinematographic form to which he was always attentive and which he called the "essay film." The development in the 1990s of these two filmographies as well as of the form of the essay film retrospectively produces some echoes in these writings.
148 Serge Daney's works from the 1980s onward are infused with a certain melancholia about the crisis faced by modern cinema and its possible disappearance. But beyond that, his writings reflect on the future of this modern cinema in which he recognized himself,<fnref n="1" /> by paying attention to the revival of Hong Kong and Iranian cinema, and the rise of a form he had always appreciated: the essay film. His writings from that time shed some light onto the 1990s debates, when Hong Kong and Iranian filmmaking would flourish, and the essay format would come to occupy a new space in thinking about modern cinema. Re-reading Daney's works from that time allows us to link these two types of cinematography, as well as the essay film, to the history of modern cinema. It also offers a more nuanced image of Daney's concerns regarding the future of cinema in general, and of modern cinema more specifically. Indeed, in the 1980s, when Serge Daney quit his role as editor in chief of *Les Cahiers du Cinéma* to oversee the cinema section at *Libération*, he did not hide his doubts about the future of modern cinema. A certain melancholia permeates his texts accompanying the *La Rampe* collection (1983). In November 1983, six months after *La Rampe* was published, Daney declared in *Esprit*:

> the question that people are starting to ask themselves is not about the future of cinema but about the potential death of this (small) part of cinema which does have a history, which conveys the seismographic tremor of what is happening elsewhere, at the same time, in "real life." (Daney 2002, 13)<fnref n="2" />

According to Daney, what defined modern cinema was its ability to record real life and the audience's desire to encounter real life differently when going to the cinema. Because it is definitely real

<footnote n="1">1 Because Daney was born in 1944, the year Roberto Rossellini filmed *Rome, Open City* was released, and he discovered Alain Resnais's *Hiroshima mon amour* upon its release in 1959, he identified with modern cinema.</footnote>

<footnote n="2">2 Originally published as "Passion de l'image: des Cahiers du Cinéma à Libération. Entretien avec Serge Daney par Michel Crépu, Serge Delavaud, Michel Mesnil et Olivier Mongin" in *Esprit* 83: 11 November 1983.</footnote>
life that Daney was talking about when he evoked Hong Kong cinema and Iranian filmmakers, and Daney viewed the essay film, which appeared as one of the outcomes of modernity in cinema, as an extension of a modern heritage.

## The New Horizon of Hong Kong Cinema

Serge Daney was an aficionado of Hong Kong cinema. He enjoyed watching Hong Kong films at festivals—in Cannes, Pesaro, Hong Kong—or in Parisian cinemas such as La Cigale, located on boulevard Rochechouart, but also during the Kung Fu film festival he organized in 1983 and 1984 with two other *Libération* editors, the brothers François and Max Armanet. From 1982 to 1984, Daney often pointed out how strongly Asian cinema was represented in festivals.

In 1985, one year after the signature of the Sino-British Joint Declaration, and during the ninth edition of the Hong Kong International Film Festival, Daney published in *Libération* the essay "Hong Kong a le blues" (2002, 819–26).³ in which he drew attention to the shift happening in the work of Hong Kong directors. The essay starts with the following observation:

> Hong Kong—Her Majesty's colony—has produced strange colonized beings. They are Chinese, but Chinese people who have not been taught their history as Chinese from Hong Kong. No textbook evokes China after 1949 in its terse summaries of contemporary history. No mention of Hong Kong. The colony does not, should not, possess a history. It is a parenthesis opened in the nineteenth century awaiting to be closed imminently. British people are not the type of people who impose their history ("Our ancestors, the Angles" is not really their style), and Chinese people have all the time in the world to impose an umpteenth rewriting of theirs (it will be the post-Deng Xiaoping history; we do not know it yet). For
Hongkongers born after the Second World War, the only history they have is the often bitter life lived by their parents.

Daney retraced the period of the Chinese Cultural Revolution as it was experienced in the colony:

In the late 1960s, there was a wave of student protests in Hong Kong (1967). Faced with British bureaucracy, these students had no other recourse to maintain their Chinese identity than to declare themselves “pro-Chinese.” But in China, the Cultural Revolution was happening. This joke was the price a generation had to pay to start watching (and filming) the city in which it had been born: ungrateful and unique Hong Kong, a global but showcase city. This realization is of interest to cinema critics in that it precisely needed *images*.

Daney evoked the situation of the Hong Kong new wave's film-makers whose films seem to find a new historical horizon that was absent until then, benefitting genre cinema alone: "'New wave' filmmakers ... are faced with a new challenge. They need not prove their talent by playing the game of the 'genre' movie but they need to welcome some concern for (or at least a sense of) history twelve years before the return of Hong Kong to the Chinese motherland." Then, reinstating the "retro trend" in a different context than that of 1970s French cinema for which this concept was coined, he added:

> As for Hong Kong, we need to turn to the 1940s, between the day the city was taken by the Japanese (Christmas 1941, after eighteen days of siege) and its return to the status of British colony (after 1949). This time period is at the heart of many recent films. Amnesia is no longer possible: there has been something of a retro fashion in Hong Kong cinema. ... As with any retro trend, it is largely phantasmatic. It consists in pretending to process past events for the second time when they have never been processed in the first place. How can we tell Chinese stories from the 1940s in the global language
of 1980s quality cinema? How can we invent a nostalgia? ... Judging them would be silly: how many human communities need cinema today to play the part of their identity. Very few indeed.

Reading these lines, it is impossible not to think of a filmmaker that Daney would never know; one that would become one of the most prominent Hong Kong directors of the 1990s, and the first Chinese president of the Cannes festival: Wong Kar-wai. Wong Kar-wai was discovered internationally in 1994 with his fourth film, *Chungking Express*, and right away, was labeled as the filmmaker of the handover of Hong Kong to China in 1997. This historical moment would indeed appear in his sixth feature film, *Happy Together*, shot in Argentina. The film follows two Hong Kongese lovers, Ho and Lai, played by Leslie Cheung and Tony Leung, who have left the colony to go and work in Buenos Aires. In the restaurant where they work, Lai meets Chang, a young Taiwanese man played by Chang Chen, whom, at the end of the film, he will go to find in Taiwan when Chang goes back to look for Lai in Argentina. Through these characters, the film brings together the three Chinas: Hong Kong, Taiwan, and mainland China, since the film mentions the death of Deng Xiaoping, which Lai hears about in his hotel room in Taipei on 20 February 1997, the year the handover happened. It is hard to know if Daney would have enjoyed the works of Wong Kar-wai, a director born in Shanghai, a city which is at the heart of the Hong Kong retro trend from the 1980s. This trend in Wong Kar-wai's works is more about Hong Kong in the 1960s, the moment when he arrived in the colony with his parents in 1963. The only thing we can be certain of is that Daney would have perceived the historical dimension of Wong Kar-wai's films as he did with Tsui Hark's work.
## Encounters with Abbas Kiarostami and Mohsen Makhmalbaf in Iran

Daney's relationship to Iranian cinema was not as strong, in the long term, as his relationship with Hong Kong cinema, but it is still present, sometimes in an indirect manner. Daney took an interest in Shorab Sahid Saless<fnref n="4" /> after discovering his film *Utopia* and, on 22 February 1983, published an article entitled "*L'Iranien aux dix films allemands*" (2002, 657-58).<fnref n="5" /> What Daney wrote about the film and its director is also valid for Saless's Iranian works that Daney did not know. The position and influence of Shorab Sahid Saless was decisive for Abbas Kiarostami's career. Two years later, in his account of the 1985 Locarno festival, Daney likened Amir Naderi, winner of the Montgolfière d'or for *The Runner*—the first Iranian film to be awarded a prize in an international festival after 1979—to directors from the three Chinas.<fnref n="6" /> In 1990, Daney went to Iran for the eighth Fajr International Film Festival in Tehran. He wrote an article published in the 3-4 March issue of *Libération* entitled "Images fondues au noir dans Téhéran sans visage" (2012, 513-20).<fnref n="7" /> Right away, Daney wrote: "The image that Iranian directors reflect of their society is one that is harsh ... but stronger than expected." Daney met the two prominent directors of the 1980s-1990s, Abbas Kiarostami and Mohsen Makhmalbaf, who were not well known outside Iran, and in Makhmalbaf's case, completely unknown by non-Iranian audiences. This was the year before *Close-Up* (1990) by Kiarostami in which Makhmalbaf played himself, was shown for the first time. Daney defined the distinctive features of these two filmmakers in an assured style, with striking and irrevocable phrases. Kiarostami is described as being "methodical and cruel, a true filmmaker," whilst Makhmalbaf is

<footnote n="4">4 Serge Daney nicknamed him SSS as Pier Paolo Pasolini was called PPP.</footnote>

<footnote n="5">5 Originally published in *Libération*, 22 February 1983.</footnote>

<footnote n="6">6 "Les Trois Chines," *Libération*, 4 December 1985, reprinted in *La Maison cinéma et le monde*, Vol. 2, 838-839.</footnote>

<footnote n="7">7 Originally published in *Libération*, 3-4 March 1990.</footnote>
qualified as a "Baroque mystic (à la Scorsese)." Daney added: "Kiarostami and Makhmalbaf are very different but both very interesting. Very serious, too. Convinced of the importance of Art and of cinema as an art."

Daney also identified a gap in Iranian movies that center around childhood: the absence of little girls. This would become the originality of a different filmmaker, one who, at that time, had only directed short films, a director whose name now automatically follows Kiarostami and Makhmalbaf: Jafar Panahi. His first two films, *The White Balloon*, which won the Caméra d'or in 1995 at Cannes, and *The Mirror*, which won the Léopard d'or in Locarno in 1997, both portray little girls. With *The Circle*, which won the Golden Lion in Venice in 2000, Panahi would ultimately create a new genre of Iranian cinema about women's condition, which would come to replace his focus on childhood. If Daney stopped writing about Iranian cinema, Kiarostami's works would continue to haunt him as evidenced by the following remark made during the conference at the Jeu de Paume:

> The magnificent Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami affects me very much and, at the same time, it's very strange because his work reminds me of Rossellini's. I wonder by what type of strange alchemy an Iranian can, all by himself, continually discover, rediscover, and push further the hypothesis which produced Rossellini and some other Italian filmmakers. Does Kiarostami belong in the history of cinema? I'm not quite sure, but he does belong to a certain history of cinema, which Rossellini is a part of, and which is the same as mine.

The importance of Kiarostami may seem obvious today but, at this point in time, no one had predicted with such fervor the place Kiarostami would occupy in years to come. Moreover, Jonathan Rosenbaum recently recalled the importance of Kiarostami in 1990s international cinema by comparing him to 1960s Godard (2016).
# A Modern Form: The Essay Film

Talking about Daney’s reflection on modern cinema amounts to talking about a cinematographic form he was always interested in: the cinematographic essay, or the “essay film” as he liked to call it, anchoring it into the history of cinema. It is well known that Daney’s cinephilia was sparked at the Lycée Voltaire during Henri Agel’s Latin lessons, which the latter sometimes replaced by film screenings. He would always show the same films, two essays made into movies: Georges Franju’s *Blood of the Beasts* (1949) and Alain Resnais’s *Night and Fog* (1956). In 1966, in the entry about Éric Rohmer that Daney wrote for the *Dictionnaire du Cinéma* edited by Raymond Bellour and Jean-Jacques Brochier, he mentioned Rohmer’s works for educational television and even went on to regard the first one, *Les Cabinets de physique au XVIIe siècle*, as Rohmer’s masterpiece.<fnref n="8" /> Of all of Godard’s films, the one that Daney quoted the most is *Here and Elsewhere*, the first video film by the Godard-Miéville couple, a film that Daney went on tour with and presented around the world. In the same manner, Daney wrote a short but enthusiastic text about *We Can’t Go Home Again* by Nicholas Ray (2022, 324–26).<fnref n="9" /> He also repeatedly and enthusiastically evoked Fellini’s *The Clowns* in two texts (1998, 247; 1992), but always in parentheses. Discovering Artavazd Pelechian in 1983¹⁰ marked an important moment in Daney’s work as a critic. He also liked Van der Keuken, Robert Kramer, and Hans-Jürgen Syberberg who are all essay film directors. As someone who linked experimental cinema to art history and was not too keen on Rossellini’s educational films, Daney could nonetheless sense the importance of the essay film, which Bazin, Astruc, or Rivette had already written about, but which would only

<footnote n="8">8 Daney would once more evoke Éric Rohmer’s film in "Sur Salador," *Cahiers du cinema* 222, July 1970.</footnote>

<footnote n="9">9 "Nick Ray et la maison des images.", originally published in *Cahiers du cinéma* 310, April 1980.</footnote>

<footnote n="10">10 "À la recherche d'Arthur Péléchian," *Libération*, 11 August 1983, reprinted in *La Maison cinéma et le monde*, Vol. 2, 410-413.</footnote>
significantly develop in the 1980s and 1990s thanks to video and
digital technology.

In Daney's text about cinema¹¹ for Anne Bony's book *Les années 60* (1983), the penultimate paragraph is entitled "Towards the essay film?" He wrote:

> Towards the middle of the decade (let's say *All These Women* by Bergman in 1964, *Masculin Féminin* by Godard in 1965, *Hawks and Sparrows* by Pasolini in 1966) we could have anticipated a very free cinema in which, once the conventions of the “spectacular” had been rejected, an author would no longer be afraid of regularly showing pages from his work notes or his diary, which are made out of public (belonging to everyone) and private thoughts (belonging to himself only).

In the preface to *Ciné-Journal* (1986), Gilles Deleuze wrote to Daney: "You did not give up on finding a deep link between cinema and thought ... You have thus maintained the great conception of the early days: cinema as a new Art and a new form of Thought." Viewing cinema as "a new Art and a new form of Thought" and in line with the 1920s avant-gardes (a period Daney wrote about in Anne Bony's *Le cinéma des années 20*) embeds the essay in cinema. Since the 1990s, there has been a great deal of research on the essay film (Blümlinger and Wulff 1992; Liandrat-Guigues and Gagnebin 2004; Rascaroli 2009; Corrigan 2011; Bacqué et al. 2015; Papazian and Eades 2016; Alter and Corrigan 2017; Alter 2018; Hollweg and Krstic 2019). It is hard to avoid observing that Chris Marker represents a large gap in Daney's works. This can be explained by the *Cahiers du Cinéma's* position towards Marker's *Le Joli Mai* in 1963 (Delahaye 1963) up to *Level Five* in 1997 (Jousse 1997). Daney met the "unmeetable Chris Marker" only one time. It was in Hong Kong as Daney recounted in *Persévérance* (1994) and in "Journal de l'an passé" (1991). In the
156 1990s, the dialogue between Godard and Marker would become clearer around the form of the essay film. *Germany Year 90 Nine Zero*, on which Daney wrote in "Journal de l'an passé," is a response to Marker's *Berlin Ballade*, just as *The Kids Play Russian* (1993) is a response to *The Last Bolshevik*. Indeed, Serge Daney, in *L'Exercice a été profitable, Monsieur*, writes about *Germany Year 90 Nine Zero: "His best film, for a long time, with the good aspects of Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988-1998)* and *Nouvelle Vague* (1990)*" With this remark, Daney highlights what defines Godard's originality in terms of the film essay, the invention of a new form: the novel essay (or fiction essay) that goes back to *Deux ou trois choses que je sais d'elle* (1967). The interrogations on cinema's character developed in "Journal de l'an passé" gravitate around that question. "The loneliness of history" and "the history of loneliness" of which the Godard film speaks correspond to those of Germany, through the journey of Eddie Constantine and his character Lemmy Caution. *Les enfants jouent à la Russie* will confirm this inscription of Godard in the fictional essay and his dialogue with Marker from which he takes footage. I like to think that Daney may have written about Marker then.

As can be seen from the above examples, a large part of the critical and theoretical stakes from the 1990s which extend Daney's reflection on modern cinema was already substantially present in his work from the 1980s and the early 1990s. This is what makes reading his works so stimulating. In laying the foundation of modern cinema to come, he was, after all, and despite himself, the historian of the passage of cinema from one century to another.

*Translated into English by Melina Delmas and revised by Kate Ince*

## References
Alter, Nora M. 2018. *The Essay Film After Fact and Fiction*. New York: Columbia University Press.

Alter, Nora M., and Timothy Corrigan, eds. 2017. *Essays on the Essay Film*. New York: Columbia University Press.

Bacqué, Bertrand, Cyril Neyrat, Clara Schulmann, and Véronique Terrier-Hermann, eds. 2015. *Jeux sérieux: cinéma et art contemporains transforment l'essai*. Geneva: Mamco, Head.

Blümlinger, Christa, and Constantin Wulff. 1992. *Schreiben Bilder Sprechen: Texte zum essayistischen Film*. Vienna: Sonderzahl.

Bony, Anne. 1983. *Les Années 60*. Paris: Du Regard.

Corrigan, Timothy. 2011. *The Essay Film: From Montaigne, After Marker*. New York: Oxford University Press.

Daney, Serge. 1986. *Ciné Journal*, Vol. 1, 1981–1982. Paris: Cahiers du Cinéma.

———. 1991. "Journal de l'an passé." *Trafic* 1: 5–30.

———. 1992. "Journal de l'an présent." *Trafic* 3: 5–24.

———. 1998. *Ciné Journal*, Vol. 2, 1983–1986. Paris: Cahiers du Cinéma.

———. 2002. *La Maison cinéma et le monde*, Vol. 2, *Les Années Libé (1981–1985)*. Paris: P.O.L.

———. 2012. *La Maison cinéma et le monde*, Vol. 3, *Les Années Libé (1986–1991)*. Paris: P.O.L.

———. 2022. *The Cinema House & the World*, Vol. 1, *The Cahiers du cinéma Years, 1962–1981*. Trans. Christine Pichini. South Pasadena: Semiotext(e).

Daney, Serge, and Serge Toubiana. 1994. *Serge Daney: Persévérance—Entretien avec Serge Toubiana*. Paris: P.O.L.

Delahaye, Michel. 1963. "La chasse à l'I." *Cahiers du cinéma* 146: 5–17.

Hollweg, Brenda, and Igor Krstic, eds. 2019. *World Cinema and the Essay Film: Trans-national Perspectives on a Global Practice*. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Jousse, Thierry. 1997. "Mr and Mrs Memory." *Cahiers du cinéma* 510: 60–62.

Liandrat-Guigues, Suzanne, and Murielle Gagnebin, eds. 2004. *L'essai et le cinéma*. Seyssel: Champ Vallon.

Papazian, Elizabeth, and Caroline Eades, eds. 2016. *The Essay Film: Dialogue, Politics, Utopia*. London and New York: Wallflower Press.

Rascaroli, Laura. 2009. *The Personal Camera: Subjective Cinema and the Essay Film*. London and New York: Wallflower Press.

Rosenbaum, Jonathan. 2016. "Philosophical Treatises of a Master Illusionist: A Conversation about Abbas Kiarostami." *Underline*, July 8.
THE GIFT

WRITING AND TRAVELLING

FILM FESTIVAL

THIRD WORLD

WORLD CINEMA

PASSEUR

GRIOT
# Showing Cinema Where It Happens: Serge Daney, a Global Cinema Critic

Claire Allouche

By focusing on Serge Daney's festival writings, remarkable for what they catalyze in terms of reflexivity, we propose to trace here a decentered critical cartography, particularly concerning the place and analysis accorded to non-western cinematographies, which were essential for Daney's "making of the world" of cinema. This movement implies a rethinking of the term "passeur" in relation to the non-western film festivals from which Daney wrote, as a kind of image "gifter" understood according to Jacques Derrida's thinking of the gift in *Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money*. Daney's various forms of gifts in turn question the historical status and form of statehood of cinema
Serge Daney sometimes introduced himself as an all-surface tennis aficionado. At the beginning of this workshop, Hervé Joubert-Laurencin presented him as a table tennis player who did not know he was one. To Serge Daney's sporting qualities, involving both his sense of observation and the outpouring of words on keyboards or notebooks, I would add: Serge Daney as long-distance relay runner, Serge Daney as lead climber, linking non-hegemonic images from various places in the world, on the margins of an already recognized cinema history.

During the student seminar devoted to Serge Daney's works, organized at the ENS Rue d'Ulm by Pierre Eugène in 2016 and 2017,<fnref n="1" /> I started to get interested in the “change” of critical angle<fnref n="2" /> brought about by Daney's texts on non-western cinematographic production. This paper proposes to put into perspective the considerations sketched out during the following sessions: “Serge Daney, ciné-fils de la maison-monde: *Réflexions sur un cinéma tricontinental*” in April 2016 and “Serge Daney, écrits festivaliers” in March 2017, organized with Marc Nauleau.

What critical cartography of Serge Daney's work emerges when we consider all of his texts about non-western films—themselves written far from the rue Traversière, far from his office at the *Cahiers du Cinéma* or *Libération*? What historical

<footnote n="1">1 The seminar's program can be accessed through the following links: - 2016: http://dhta.ens.fr/Serge-Daney-voyage-entre-mots-et-images.html - 2017: http://dhta.ens.fr/Serge-Daney-de-l-ecran-a-l-ecrit-et-inversement.html</footnote>

<footnote n="2">2 The image of the angle is at the center of Daney's account of the 1980 Rotterdam festival: "And so, in 1980, at the 9th International Festival of Rotterdam, one could feel targeted by the films in two ways. Sometimes on a right angle, frontally interrogated, perpendicular to the image, facing characters looking into the camera, positioned as judge, witness, arbitrator. Sometimes on an obtuse or acute angle, aslant in an entrelac of bodies and fictions, of 'scenes' providing ever-changing 'slots' for the spectator's eye." (2022, 473). Originally published in "Rotterdam 1980," *Cahiers du Cinéma* 310.</footnote>
thread can be woven between these geographically distant texts, whilst taking into account the singular temporality in which they were produced? Indeed, their creation strongly depended on the organizational frame of film festivals and the geopolitical context of the countries in which these festivals took place. To what extent should we consider this body of texts as another form of critical invention, sometimes more reflexive, more essentialist, but always constitutive of the continued creation of a "global" cinema, which goes beyond Eurocentric prominence?

## "Faire monde" on Several Levels: An Incomplete Third Path

In his *Journal de l'an passé*, which opened the first volume of *Trafic*, Serge Daney drew a direct analogy between the fragile permanence of cinema in time and the acknowledgment of a third world which was persisting in a global cartographical approach: "Because, of this, at least, I am sure: cinema cannot better endure forthcoming societies than Africa can find its place on the map of a world that works. A place is needed to write this, so that oral tradition can continue. Before griots retire. A journal, for example. A cinema journal" (1991, 5). It is interesting to note that as "the place to write this," *Trafic* embodied from its first pages the privileged and shared space of this fundamental union, of this shared voice, and of this simultaneity of fact: the future of images and the world's destiny. A world not conceived from a dominant center but as a constant emergence, which was lacking rightful visibility. Moreover, the future of cinema was envisaged to be in solidarity with immaterial writing, culturally anchored outside western issues of preservation. In Daney's mind, was the main mission of the authors of the *Trafic* era—these active "griots" as he called them—to be depositaries of a centrifugal memory of cinema rather than to work towards an applied history that was already referentialized?
162 "The world," said Serge Daney to Philippe Roger in an interview entitled "Le passeur," ought to be "the 'vast' world, the world in which limits are pushed back by the camera and the world of which I am allowed to call myself a 'citizen'" (1999, 123). He added: "when we talk about 'the whole world,' we should actually say 'rich countries,' because the other ones are very far from that, they view them as quite Baroque" (1999, 123). Here he was highlighting the unequal topography of the cinematic map, organized according to an asymmetrical axis of separation, thus complexifying cinematic reception in the name of a presumed "global" entity. Thus, to take up Deleuze's formula in his letter to Serge Daney (1998), it is not really about making sure that "the world turns to film" in each and every possible location, but about keeping the overall scale of cinema as "global" in order to "faire monde," without losing sight of the historical discontinuities, the geographical gaps, the halted projects, and the living hopes for a completely different order of cinema. "Faire monde" does not involve a satisfying encounter with a presumed "cinema of the Other," with a stranger dutifully and successfully fulfilling his role by maintaining the impossibility of understanding the codes of another culture. What matters for Daney in this "faire monde" is first to construct and to help an "Other cinema" so that it can emancipate itself from Eurocentric expectations. In that, his festival writings appear to be "looking out onto" this promise of a global cinema.

"Faire monde," beyond the illusion of a lasting unity, first involves thinking about the expressions used to refer to this "periphery," this "other," which is usually stigmatized before it is aptly named. It is interesting to note the occurrences of the term "third world" in some of Daney's texts. He often uses it with defiance, either by using quotation marks, or by stressing the outdated value of this term once it is taken out of its historical context. It is with this momentum that he defended and participated in the Festival des 3 Continents, founded in 1979 by Alain and Philippe Jalladeau, who "always combatted the lazy and narrow-minded comfort of
that small term: 'third-world.' At the same time, we ought not to lose the promise carried by this term" (Daney 2002, 837).<fnref n="3" /> Nevertheless, in two texts written in 1981 about Filipino cinema, Daney asserted somewhat of a contradiction based on this tension between "comfort" and "promise," between the historical weight of this term and its possible contemporary echoes.

In fact, in his text from December 9th, 1985, "Nantes à l'heure de Manille,"<fnref n="4" /> Daney wrote:

> In a part of the world that for a long time was called "third," a dying regime decided to create a brand image for itself. To sell the country off or to save its hide. In order to folklorize itself to the non "third" world, it had three types of smoke-screens: the tourist camp, the sport celebration, or the cultural event. (2002, 599)

When Daney presented the most emblematic Filipino filmmaker in his text "Qui est Lino Brocka?" published on December 10th, he declared:

> A third-world filmmaker is necessarily someone reinventing cinema for personal reasons, caught between the law of quick profit (which is even tougher than elsewhere) and the risk of a brutal confrontation with the powers in place (who are always wary of images they cannot control). That is when these filmmakers manage to move us. Satyajit Ray in the 1950s, Ousmane Sembene in the 1960s, Lino Brocka in the late 1970s and today.

In the first text, reminiscing about this "third cinema" is associated with an abusive consideration of the "cinema of the Other" from the affected country. As soon as the country no longer needs emancipatory cinema, the assumption is that all audio-visual creation is selling national imagery. At the same

<footnote n="3">3 Originally published in "Nantes, l'âge de raison" in *Libération*, 29 November 1985.</footnote>

<footnote n="4">4 Originally published in *Libération*.</footnote>
164 time, Daney exposed the authoritarianism of image production in a ternary manner, as if the three blows of theater would sound anyway, a dramatic backlash against the shift from hope of a world opening up to a strongly controlled insularity. In the second text, Daney surprisingly places Brocka in a presumed aesthetic and political continuity with two filmmakers who are emblematic of the development of their country's cinema and of an unmatched western international acclaim. Because there is no obvious meeting point—either formal or social—in the films of those three filmmakers, this is surprising. The occurrence of the word "third world" nevertheless entails the unchanging effectivity of an "Other cinema," as if it were still acceptable to re-appropriate it, to transform it, to reiterate its impact from a different temporality. By unfolding a cinematic course of action running from the 1950s to the beginning of the 1980s, he renews his claim that an "Other cinema" is necessary.

Nevertheless, as far as I know, Serge Daney did not offer a different term to replace "third world" so that this evolution could begin from a critical standpoint. Implicitly, we could view Daney's critical "faire monde" as situated on the level of a post "third cinema," one which would go beyond the momentum of the 1969 eponymous manifesto by Octavio Getino and Fernando Solanas. A cinema that would respond neither to North American consumers' expectations, nor to the small elite of auteur cinema.<fnref n="5" /> It is easy to read this between the lines of his report on the 1985 Cartagena Festival when he wrote: "Since Glauber Rocha or Fernando Solanas (late 1960s), there has no longer been a need to shake up the language of cinema to talk about shocking things.

<footnote n="5">5 "In the meantime, there exist *our* culture and *their* culture, *our* cinema and *their* cinema. Because our culture is an impulse towards emancipation, it will remain in existence until emancipation is a reality: *a culture of subversion* which will carry with it an art, a science, and *a cinema of subversion*. The lack of awareness in regard to these dualities generally leads the intellectual to deal with artistic and scientific expressions as they were 'universally conceived' by the classes that rule the world, at best introducing some correction into these expressions" (Getino and Solanas 1997, 35-36).</footnote>
The Esperanto of TV films is enough. Period” (2002, 828).<fnref n="6" /> Here, Daney indicates the desertion of the third path to the benefit of shapelessly unifying the life of images. A decade earlier, he was insisting on his responsibility as a critic to increase the visibility given to this other cinematic path when he wrote about the reception of Miguel Littin’s *La tierra prometida* (1973): “We’ll go see *The Promised Land* because it is Chilean or because it is beautiful, but not both” (2022, I:163).<fnref n="7" />

From festivals to press projections, Daney viewed the lack of consideration for this “third cinema” in the western world as constitutive of a cinematic “faire monde.” Hence the necessity to support “third cinema” with more forward-thinking interrogations rather than stories that are completely decipherable by a western audience. During the 1985 Cannes Film Festival, Daney noted about the so-called “international competition” that “ninety years after its birth, cinema—‘Cannes-able’ cinema, of course—is coming back to the place of its origins, that is to say, our country. As for the rest, it has become impossible to show, or it never even existed. We are orphaned from the rest of the world” (2002, 783).<fnref n="8" /> His use of the word “orphaned” here clearly shows a blocked cinefiliation in the most internationally visible cinema festival. Daney summons a map of the world that has been threatening to turn into a blinding outward appearance rather than a reservoir of cinematic images ever since it was a childhood memory.

On the contrary, a few months later that same year, Serge Daney would write about the Festival des 3 Continents: “In 1978, there was good reason to create a ‘Festival des trois continents’. Indeed, there were no more festivals dedicated to the confrontation and

<footnote n="6">6 Originally published as “Cartagène 1985 – Cartagène ressuscitée” in *Libération*, 26 August 1985.</footnote>

<footnote n="7">7 Originally published in “La Terre promise: un film invisible” in *Libération*, 18 November 1974.</footnote>

<footnote n="8">8 Originally published in “Géopolitique de la compétition” in *Libération*, 9 May 1985.</footnote>
166 competition between films from these three continents (Africa, Latin America, and Asia)." He concluded:

What was enduring in the eyes of the organizers, the Jalladeau brothers, was the desire to prove that cinema history was neither over, nor reserved for a handful of experimental countries, nor even well known. [...] In this new context, festivals will play an essential role: that of showing. Happy Nantais who have already seen so many things! Do they know that they are unconscious co-producers of the films they discover? (2002, 837–38)

By ending his text on a question addressed directly to the audience rather than to the reader, Serge Daney was stressing the fact that the global history of cinema first starts from the space where a film is screened, in a hotspot of Nantais and international “griots,” before being written in the pages of *Libération*. Thus, the audience’s responsibility in the reception and the circulation of films is essential, as the best remedy against the “lack of people” which is problematic at Cannes, a festival that does not have a lay audience. In this way “the place to write this” is still first and foremost the cinema.

Beyond being acknowledged in the western world, this “Other” cinema still ought to live, be shown, be cared for, and preserved in the original areas where it was created. In his repeated praise of the Festival des 3 Continents, Serge Daney suggested that each of the three continents should have its own “Other hotspot.” “Asia lacks a great festival” (2002, 600), he also noted in 1985, in Nantes. In 1984, at the Festival de Rio, he had already pointed out:

> The map of cinema festivals is both busy and gappy. Geopolitically speaking, it favors the “dialogue” between West and East but penalizes encounters between North and South. Until now, there were only four great festivals (Cannes, Venice, Moscow, Montreal)—said to be *de rang A* –, and since the disappearance of the Tehran festival (after the 1979 Revolution) and the Manila festival (after Imelda
and Ferdinand Marcos came to power), no country from the South (a better term, because of its romantic brutality, than the gloomy “third-world”) has been able to organize and to “lend credibility to” a great international festival, a festival that is full of color, culture, and “glamour,” and which is supported by the film market. (2002, 751)<fnref n="9" />

"Speaking like a geographer," echoing Gilles Deleuze's motto (Deleuze and Parnet 2008, 159), Serge Daney places his historical conscience in these unequal cartographical dynamics, where revealing a center also means taking into account the limits of its influence. This cinematic "faire monde" could be read as an attempt to inhabit cinephilia, that is to say—to use Jean-Marc Besse's words—to combine a "collective destiny and an individual experience which, in the end, take us back to the sometimes contentious organization of life, that is to say to the definition of a time, commensurate with a space and with their general orientation." (2013, 9). Thus, the most inclusive composition possible of a global cinema history stems from the critical possibility of welcoming in this cartographical pulsation.

## Being a Go-between: A Gift

The relative space left to world cinemas that were not those of rich countries occupied a special place in the works of Serge Daney right up to his death. For example, in the "Journal de l'an nouveau" he wondered about the disappearance of "concrete America behind the success of abstract Americanization" (1992, 8) and he compared the American spectacle of the previous decades to a "potlatch of images which intrigued Bataille and which now concerns Hollywood's Japanese buyers" (1992, 8). The use of the word "potlatch" in this context is as disconcerting as it is revealing. Potlatch, which is a central term in Marcel Mauss's

<footnote n="9">9 Originally published in "Lever de rideau sur Rio" in *Libération*, 12 December 1984.</footnote>
168 *The Gift* (2007), expresses, in different communities from different continents, particularly in America and Oceania, a system of gifts and counter-gifts which, in itself, is not synonymous with the kind of bartering familiar from western societies. Other than the idea that there would be a sort of “mercantile theft” of the Hollywood recipe in one of the Asian countries with the largest cinema production, there remains a preoccupation regarding “images which show themselves,” those that “make us think about” contemporary cinema, by working to bring closer what is thought to be “distant.”

How can global cinema's tacit counter-gifts establish themselves where hegemonic potlatch is dying? How does Daney contemplate a possible extension of this for "the Other cinema"? In which terms does he describe his role? I could surmise that his work, which is continuous in time but spatially intermittent, involves a double work of cinematic programming in his works about the Other cinema: the task of receiving the preliminary work of international festival programmers, and the task of carving, within these pre-established programs, a particular cinematic substance, interrogating apparent contingencies in what they carry of signification, by multiplying questions and speculations. This preoccupation is at the heart of his text "Découverte du cinéma chinois," following the program of films put together by Marco Müller in Turin in 1982. Daney ends his text by wondering about how to make a fragment of cinema history visible in the country where the films themselves are produced:

> Things will stay like this as long as the Chinese audience continues to view nothing or nearly nothing of foreign production and while the latter is viewed behind closed doors, only by professionals. As if cinema could have two different histories: that of the filmmakers who see everything in secret
and that of their audience who sees nothing. A semi-colonial
situation, again. (2002, 618)<fnref n="10" />

Far from moving towards a sociological study of the audience,<fnref n="11" />
Serge Daney watches the films of the Other cinema behind those
who are looking at the screen. He pays an almost ethnographical
attention to emergent cinema: emergent in the sense understood
by Clifford James in his work *The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-
Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art*, not as

a practice of interpreting distinct, whole ways of life but
instead as a series of specific dialogues, impositions, and
inventions. “Cultural” difference is no longer a stable,
exotic otherness; self-other relations are matters of power
and rhetoric rather than of essence. A whole structure of
expectations about authenticity in culture and in art is
thrown into doubt. (1988, 14)

Serge Daney was actually interested in festivals as structures,
as matrices that are porous to the current history of the world,
as screens that parallel contemporary geopolitics. Daney's fes-
tival writings outside of the western world look like new takes
on the world, far from the postcard fetish, or from the snapshot
imagery. They recount the complexity of this ever-changing
cartography in which the legend does not always match the map.
Others ventured out to claim a "history of cinema" written in
black and white, as is the case in *Cinémas d'Amérique latine* edited
by Guy Hennebelle and Alfonso Gumucio Dagron (1981). Daney, on
the other hand, first talked about mourning the cinema that no
longer happened, the cruelty of the films that will never be made,
a geography never exhaustively explored, before talking about
inventoried filmographies, proofs of a tradition:

<footnote n="10">10 Originally published in "Découverte du cinéma chinois" in *Libération*, 31 March 1982.</footnote>

<footnote n="11">11 Even more so if we take Daney's words from *Itinéraires d'un ciné-fils*, in which he explains that society is the enemy of the world. This idea can be found in other of his texts too.</footnote>
What does a "Latin-American cinema" specialist look like? It looks like a man looking sadly at a map of Latin America. With its small and large countries. Surinam and Brazil. Cuba. One by one, this man crosses out the countries he no longer expects "good" cinema from, and sometimes even no cinema at all. He reviews his index cards joylessly. A monotonous diagnosis: if "good" cinema has a hard time existing in the jungle of money, it cannot exist at all in places where the military is cracking down. (2002, 480-81)<fnref n="12" />

Here, we witness a similar concern to the one voiced in his text "Petites guerres au Liban," which was published a year later, in which he listed the risks faced by Lebanese filmmakers at this point in time: "Is he aware that an ever-growing part of the world is less and less able to produce an image of itself? To stage itself? As if counting on cinema to hand others an image of yourself had become a luxury" (2002, 166).<fnref n="13" />

Considering the texts of Serge Daney, a festivalgoer on three continents, as a developing bath of emerging, threatened, or missing images, I would surmise that his critical role as a "passeur" is intensified here. Not only because he writes about "what is happening" in the thickness that separates him from screens, but because festivals represent "passages," actual moving microcosms. However, it is best not to consider Serge Daney as a "passenger" and thus, I refuse to idealize his travels into those of a "globetrotter." He is more of an image "gifter," strengthening his stance and the readability of his location for readers who might not have access to other traces of the films than through his words. Daney's critical exercise appears to be most profitable, as it allows readers to imagine films of which they are divested.

<footnote n="12">12 Originally published in "Le tout cinéma latino-américain" in *Libération*, "16-17 January 1982.</footnote>

<footnote n="13">13 Originally published in "Petites guerres au Liban" in *Libération*, "11 February 1983. The "he" in this quote refers to Lebanese filmmaker, Maroun Baghdadhi.</footnote>
If there is gift, the *given* of the gift (*that which* one gives, *that which* is given, the gift as given thing or as act of donation) must not come back to the giving (let us not already say to the subject, to the donor). It must not circulate, it must not be exchanged, it must not in any case be exhausted, as a gift, by the process of exchange, by the movement of circulation of the circle in the form of return to the point of departure. If the figure of the circle is essential to economics, the gift must remain *aneconomic*. Not that it remains foreign to the circle, but it must *keep* a relation of foreignness to the circle, a relation without relation of familiar foreignness. (1992, 7)

Coming back to my initial premise of an incomplete “faire monde” for a critical analysis of cinema in all its complexity, I come back to the idea that global cinema “closes the loop on itself”; it does not mold itself to the globe but, on the contrary, expresses itself more through uncertain arcs.

I can see at least three possible instances in which Serge Daney gives to the Other cinema. First, Serge Daney as a psychic festivalgoer, who sees burning cinema questions behind the artifices and illusions of obviousness. His text “Carthage, An 10” (2022, 399–414)¹⁴ could be considered seminal in this regard, as he took care to analyze all the strata of the festival and because the films reviewed do not appear to be unilateral subjects but various prisms through which to think about a continental cinema. He lists, quite exhaustively, subdivisions that will appear again in later texts with some variations. He considers, in chronological order: the historical context of the festival; his mood when he arrives; the jury’s selection; the history of the festival and the way it has evolved; how censorship is influencing this festival at
172 this time; and the place of the audience and its role. The text also contains: an inventory of the screens' geography; an analysis of the films selected; thoughts about official cinema, about the limitations of national cinema and about the absence of politics; a reflection on the continental potential of cinema; a brief review of two striking films; and a prospective sentence in conclusion.

Secondly, Serge Daney can look like a "giver of presence" of the actors of this Other cinema with his presence, alternating his point of view with a listening stance. The episode of his show *Microfilms* dedicated to Fespaco (Festival pan africain du cinéma et de la télévision de Ouagadougou) in 1987 is remarkable in that, after having listened to the dreams of commercial North American cinema related by young audience members, or "little soldiers" as he called them, by the hotel swimming pool, he talked for a long time about the future of African cinema with Thomas Sankara, Burkina Faso's head of state and well-known figure in the country's first revolution, who would be assassinated that same year. Serge Daney thus shows the coexistence of an alienated look with that of an emancipating project, which is a constitutive tension in the "Long March of African Cinema." Questioning the future of cinema given to us in the present tense means to put it back in play in the midst of uncertainty, to simulate a muddled cartographic forecast.

These works by Daney can also be seen as the gift of a time for a history of cinema in continued emergence, if we view it in Jacques Derrida's sense:

> The gift is not a gift, the gift only gives to the extent it *gives time*. The difference between a gift and any other operation of pure and simple exchange is that the gift gives time. *There where there is gift, there is time*. What it gives, the gift, is time, but this gift of time is also a demand of time. The thing must not be restituted *immediately and right away*. (1992, 41)

Serge Daney thus worked on the three continents like a watchful compass, far from his status as a "slayer of preconceived
notions, always seeking the right images to wage his war against clichés.”<fnref n="15" /> His festival writings show how much his geographical movements and his capacity to be analytically anchored in each cinematic place catalyze the writing of his thoughts on the discontinuities of the history of cinema and, at the same time, the political upheavals of the contemporary world. In some ways, the singular space-time of festivals gives him the opportunity to revive his acuity by displacing possible cinephile habits. They are experiences of refining his awareness of his place of enunciation, whereas Daney prefers to be disoriented by the circumstances of festivals in distant cinematic countries than to conquer any neocolonial ideal. Writing about cinema from festivals is definitely not an expression of power but the bilateral experience of a cinematic encounter, a genuine way to definitely stay a “giver of presence.”

That is why it appears to us that Serge Daney also “gave” himself a text, all the while opening his perspective and ability to listen, adjusting his critical compass to that of a specific filmmaker. We could reread “Johan van der Keuken’s *Vers le Sud*” and view the Dutch filmmaker as Daney’s festival alter ego, who, in the early ‘70s was looking to “find a cinema form that would respond to the third-world sensitivity of that era” (Daney 1998, 132)<fnref n="16" />. In 1982, in the face of the evolution of “docu-liar’s” work, Daney acknowledged that “the word ‘third world’ has gone stale” (1998,

<footnote n="15">15 Here, I am quoting one of Daney’s three ways to “come back from a far-away place”: “Until now, there were [or was (sic)] three ways of coming back from a far-away place. Three ways to show the few things one had seen—*there*. Three ways of showing one’s own docu-lié, of bearing witness. There was the globe-trotting journalist, seeking easy-to-sell, never-seen, and surprising scoops and images (let’s say Reichenbach’s *L’Amérique insolite*). There was the famous artist, only armed with his or her gaze, one of those unique gazes that can make anything interesting (let’s say Antonioni’s *Chung Kuo*). And then, there was the slayer of preconceived notions, always seeking the right images to wage his war against clichés (let’s say Godard for *Ici et ailleurs*).” Originally published in “L’As du cliché,” *Libération*, 10 January 1983, and reprinted in *La Maison cinéma et le monde*. Vol. 2 (2002, 147).</footnote>

<footnote n="16">16 “Vers le Sud.”, originally published in *Libération*, March 2, 1982.</footnote>
174 132) and that the South is a "geopolitical and physical state" (1998, 132) that they share. Johan van der Keuken himself confided: "I don't care about the documentary, in the sense of documenting something, but what you document is actually a physical presence, not only that of the other, but my own. It might be even more important to document the fact that we were there and in which way" (1993, 78). Serge Daney, giver of cinematographies from three continents, worked (while) fully present. Jacques Derrida claimed: "'to give time' is not to give a given present but the condition of presence of any present in general" (1992, 54). "Faire monde," is not so much letting moving images emerge as it is chasing them, definitively, along a centrifugal trajectory.

Translated into English by Melina Delmas and revised by Kate Ince

## References

Besse, Jean-Marc. 2013. *Habiter: Un monde à mon image*. Paris: Flammarion.

Clifford, James. 1988. *The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art*. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Dagron, Alfonso Gumocio, and Guy Hennebelle, eds. 1981. *Les Cinémas de l'Amérique Latine*. Paris: Lherminier.

Daney, Serge. 1991. "Journal de l'an passé." *Trafic* 1: 5-30.

—. 1992. "Journal de l'an nouveau." *Trafic* 3: 5-24.

—. 1998. *Ciné Journal*, Vol. 1, 1981-1982, 131-35. Paris: Cahiers du Cinéma. (first edition 1986. Paris: Cahiers du cinéma)

—. 1999. *Devant la recrudescence des vols de sacs à main, cinéma, télévision, information: 1988-1991*. Lyon: Aléas.

—. 2002. *La Maison cinéma et le monde*, Vol. 2, *Les Années Libé (1981-1985)*. Paris: P.O.L.

—. 2022. *The Cinema House & the World*, Vol. 1, *The Cahiers du cinéma Years, 1962-1981*. Trans. Christine Pichini. South Pasadena: Semiotext(e).

Deleuze, Gilles. 1995. "Letter to Serge Daney: Optimism, Pessimism, and Travel." In *Negotiations*, 1972-1990. New York: Columbia University Press.

Deleuze, Gilles, and Claire Parnet. 2008. *Dialogues*. Paris: Flammarion.

Derrida, Jacques. 1992. *Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money*. Trans. Peggy Kamuf. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Getino, Octavio, and Fernando Solanas. 1997. "Towards a Third Cinema." In M. T. Martin, ed. *New Latin American Cinema*. Detroit: Wayne State University Press.

Keuken, Johan van der. 1993. "Le Comment du monde." *Cahiers du cinéma* 465.

Mauss, Marcel. 2002. *The Gift: The form and reason for exchange in archaic societies*. London: Routledge.
<figure><img src="image_24.png" /></figure>
TABLE TENNIS

TENNIS

TELEVISION

LE SALAIRE DU ZAPPEUR

DECONSTRUCTION
# Ping-ponging with Daney

Hervé Joubert-Laurencin

By commenting on the only text that Serge Daney devoted to table tennis, this essay retraces both his multiple writings about tennis, a sport that he followed very closely, and a whole series of theorizations the critic carried out in his texts: about gestures and bodies, about the way in which television films sport (imposing democratization and visibility on it), and about the fiction and suspension of meaning that is in every sport as well as cinema. Without being a specialist of the game, it is through a look trained and informed by the cinema that Daney reconstitutes certain cinematographic characteristics on the ping-pong table, bringing in all the intelligence of the sport at the same time.
178 A researcher friend was kind enough to send me a snapshot of the young Serge Daney playing ping-pong. I could not find any photos from my childhood to return the favor, which is too bad as it would have clarified the title of this piece right away, thanks to a rhetorical figure of cinema called shot/reverse shot, which parallels racket games and very much resembles my title: "Ping-ponging with Daney." So the only thing I can do is to display a relic: my old Nagoya "YV S" racket. At the end of my ping-pong years, I had only kept the original Hanna blade, type Ehrlich, for the feeling of its diagonally cut varnished handle with its eleven holes on each side. "At the end," that is to say when my game had reached the last stage of its evolution, which occurred between the ages of eight and fifteen, we had to change the rubber on my blade. This was a tricky task for which I relied entirely on my coach, who knew about the different types of glue and which one was best for me. So my blade is no longer covered by the sponges of a "YV" but has the same sponge on each side: a 1.5mm-thick Butterfly Sriver D13-L. This is a great sponge for attacking and lifting efficiently when you master lifts and topspins, but also thin enough to counter-attack—for example, to perform fast and sharp backhand blocks, which were my best moves, and had saved me during many matches. After being in a cupboard for more than forty years, however, my old racket looks a sorry sight. It has become impossible to play with: the wood is decaying, the lovely deep red sponges have turned black and become cracked and slippery, and without that adhesion would not be effective. I think the racket would break into pieces if I were to play with it. But holding it in my hand still feels great and brings back the feeling of playing ping-pong, which is forever ingrained in my central nervous system and which I only ever get in my everyday life when my arm goes to catch something falling off the table without me having consciously decided to do so.

So in the match I want to play against Daney, I only have old and tattered tools, and I have not played professionally since I was fifteen. As for Daney, my opponent today, he is not much better
off, since he is only an amateur (or at least that is what was
suggested by his P.O.L publishers who, in 1994, posthumously
entitled his book *L'Amateur de tennis*). The picture confirms this
status: his right arm and his legs are too stretched out to be able
to stop the ball except by sheer luck; the fact that his hand is
blurry—other than making me think that his wrist is moving when
hitting the ball, which is a mistake (one's hand should stay firm
at the end of the arm and the wrist should be solid as the ball is
hit except when performing a very sophisticated move)—cannot
hide how badly he is mishandling the racket, which he holds like
a shovel. Moreover, his free arm does not seem to know what to
do and does nothing to help balance Daney's posture. In short, he
is hopeless, except for the fact that his eyes seem to be following
the ball, which is good.

As his picture shows, entering the game of ping-pong also means
adjusting hand-eye coordination, just as you do when making or
watching movies.

I brushed up a little (both for you and for myself) on my
knowledge of ping-pong. I can thus summarize the Sino-Japanese
situation on that front, which will help us understand the context
of the only text Serge Daney ever wrote about ping-pong which,
strangely enough, comments on images of Japanese ping-pong
players.

Since the end of classical cinema, let us say 1959, and since
ping-pong entered sport's modern age of professionalism and
Olympism (around 1988), it is China, rather than Japan, which
has literally been crushing all the world's other countries with its
social basis of millions of players. Ma Long has been the world
champion since 2015 and is the winner of the most titles in history
after several of his fellow countrymen, including the good-looking
Wang Liqin who was crowned world champion several times.
After 1959, the Chinese were the kings of the world twenty times
out of thirty, the French once, and from time to time the Swe-
dish. Take for instance Stellan Bengtsson when I was fifteen
180 years old, and in the late 1980s, the great blocking player Jan-Owe Waldner. The latter is my ping-pong ego ideal, as he is the all-time king of a move called the block—the matrix move of third style or so-called counter tactics. (There are three different types of play in table tennis: offensive, defensive, and counter, also called counter-attacking.)

It is well known that Serge Daney was a sports journalist for *Libération* between 1980 and 1990, but apart from a few exceptions, only wrote about one sport: tennis. However, in the middle of the decade, on the occasion of a video installation at the Centre Pompidou in December 1986, he wrote a text about ping-pong.

My hypothesis, my back-and-forth—my ping-ponging if you will—will thus be one of deconstruction. If we accept that sports journalism is generally a less legitimate activity than cinema criticism—and that it could, for that reason, allow us to better grasp Daney’s writing—then ping-pong is even less legitimate than tennis and will enable us to go even further. I will start with an example of Daney’s remarks about sport in general, then address the question of tennis and, finally, that of ping-pong.

## Sport

In *Le Salaire du zappeur*, Daney compares football to tennis in the following terms: "It is by becoming televised that some sports (tennis especially, but the list is much longer, see golf) gained a larger audience than they had previously had" (1988, 184–87).<fnref n="1" /> He added: "football (which *already* had this audience) has managed to become the ultimate democratic form of entertainment." This democratization is possible through the addition of "time-outs" and "the sum of *inserts* that TV-channel hoppers always relish in." In other words, "time-outs and image inserts" are the key words here. There is a topic that Daney often talked about and that is often discussed where Daney is concerned, which I cannot

<footnote n="1">1 Originally published in *Libération*, 24 November 1987.</footnote>
come back to here: the freeze-frame. In this new grammar, these
“time-outs and inserts” would be the televisual equivalent of
freeze-frames. These surroundings and excesses should not be
categorized as what our little “Trumpo-Macronian” era—an era
eager for the politics of control, for a semiology of superficiality,
and which is unconscious of the unconscious—would call story-
telling. Rather, they should be categorized as a Freudian slip, or
one of those random non-manageable signs that are specific
to TV and were described by communication sciences starting
from their prehistory in the 1950s. For Daney, this is the “vanity”
specific to football, a “playground” for big children, “the space
of a soft ‘Discipline and punish,’” where “pupils’ parents” are in
cahoots. Through this last expression—a very negative one for
Daney—we understand that the childish scenes football players
perform when they pretend to be injured, and the democratic
complicity that this creates with the audience, is not in itself very
good staging. What needs to be understood is that it is never-
theless staged, and that it can count as staged when faced with
the filmic emptiness that TV also creates in huge quantities. This
is why going beyond the strictly sporting subject of sports in this
medium turns out also to be a return to cinema. In this instance,
Daney adds in this short text, “tennis players, be they the winner
or the loser, have few moves at their disposal to behave badly.”
Nevertheless, these few moves make up most of Daney’s sports
commentary and the originality of it too. Actually, his only text
about ping-pong is significantly entitled: “Quelques gestes.”

*A first conclusion:* Daney thinks sport through television; it is TV that brings him to tennis. He is a sports poet at the time when sport is going through its televisual metamorphosis.<fnref n="2" /> Even though Daney becomes a regular at Roland Garros and attends the 1983

<footnote n="2">2 I will not come back to what is called “acceleration,” which is decided by sports federations and famously due to the constraints of the TV calendar. It appeared both in tennis and table tennis as they became more popular with the public. I am truly shocked that a table tennis set is nowadays played in 11 points rather than in 21.</footnote>
182 Davis Cup in Grenoble, his first tennis articles talk about his gaze being mediated by the small screen. For example, in the issue of *Libération* published on 7 July 1980, he writes: "McEnroe saves two match points, winning eight consecutive shots. Screams erupt in Wimbledon's stands while I start screaming too in front of my TV set (a small Sony color set, a very good one)" (1994, 38-39). Consequently, this experience goes hand in hand with the claim— which for Daney is not specific to sport, but to TV commentary in general—of a look formed and informed by cinema. "The benefit of clay, why I love this surface so much, much more than others (but of course my perspective is that of a cinema aficionado, who prefers a still shot to a zoom), is that it creates fiction" (1994, 15), he writes on 29 May 1980. Here, Daney equates a resounding clear rebound in Roland Garros to a still frame, opposing it to the zoom of a swift and fast ball gliding onto Wimbledon's grass (2002, 905-6).<fnref n="3" /> Additionally, a rebound or plot twist [*rebondissement* in French—a pun already present on the first page of *L'Amateur de tennis*] would generate fiction.

These are two examples of a general approach brilliantly summarized by his masterpiece about televisual stylistics, "Nouvelle grammaire," a short article written on the occasion of his trip as a special correspondent for the Los Angeles Summer Olympics (1986, 243-45).<fnref n="4" /> We could mull it over for several hours, and I can only refer you back to it if you do not believe how rigorous and inventive Daney's completely original theory of television is.

On that point, ping-pong as an operator of deconstruction should not let us get lost in the search for surface equivalence (the equivalent to the tennis court's variation between grass or clay can only be that of sponges, which are themselves more or less fast, glued to the flat and neutral surface of the racket's blade, the questions of the play area and the table's and balls' material and manufacturing having been standardized and resolved a long

<footnote n="3">3 Originally published in *Libération*, 29 June 1981.</footnote>

<footnote n="4">4 Originally published in *Libération*, 4 August 1984.</footnote>
time ago). It will only help us to understand that when tennis is
experienced through television, the court is no longer, for man, a
space in which to run, glide, and fall. Once resized onto the small
screen, it becomes a visual table to scrutinize. That is to say there
is no longer a ping-pong experience, an experience of "table"
tennis, but rather of "retable" tennis, the playing surface having
been tilted up like an altar table in sacred art (in Italian, "retable"
translates as "pala d'altare").

Thus reduced to the classical form of western thought of the
*example*, tennis can become an object of discourse. I do not have
time here to go over the frequent developments of that issue that
can be found in Giorgio Agamben's various works. Thus, I will
only mention, as the Italian philosopher recalls multiple times,
that the first meaning of the German word usually translated
by "example," *Beispiel*, means: "what is played on the side," and
that this corresponds quite well to the word "paradigm," derived
from the Greek *para-deigma*: "what is shown on the side." On TV,
tennis "is shown on the side" (paradigm) and "plays on the side"
(*Beispiel*).

Thus, now that tennis has become ping-pong again through the
intervention of TV itself, this historical excrescence of the imme-
morial racket game is reconnected with its roots. But let us not
get ahead of ourselves.

A second conclusion: what is at play—both with television itself (this object of social leveling and voyeurism as considered by Daney, as it allows us, according to his admirable expression, “ce qui ne nous regarde pas”: to “watch what is none of our business/what is not watching us”) and also, more simply, through its mediation—is a whole issue of social legitimization and delegitimization. To better understand Daney’s ideas, it has to be specified that he is a theorist deeply linked to the form of
184 the proletariat.<fnref n="5" /> The "tennis players" who have "few moves at their disposal to behave badly," are, whether they want to be or not, likened, through televisualization, to the popular "cinema" displays of common-or-garden football players. It is obvious that Daney is perfectly aware that, in the late 1970s, he is playing a discursive game with tennis, because this sport, which had until then been used by the petty bourgeoisie to try and marry their daughters into a higher social class, is now offered to those for whom tennis was once "none of their business." Here, ping-pong as an operator of deconstruction asserts that the original racket game is both a royal game and a people's game—a phenomenon, not of leveling or destruction, but of class deconstruction. I will not go as far as to say that Maoism can explain the world domination of Chinese ping-pong players, but I will maintain the idea that the concepts of people and elite have, for a long time, made particular sense in that huge, nationalized empire. Thus, the motto in my coach's room "Ping-pong is the game of the masses, table tennis the sport of the elite" is explained, because it refers to a sport which has kept within it a double postulation revealed by the two different names it bears. I do not know any other sport that has two names which are as equally recognized and commonly used. Here I would also note that the sociology of sport has long taught us that nations who dominate through their elite champions are also those who possess the biggest mass of players in their population." Game of the masses, sport of the elite" is thus the formula of a general rule valid for every sport, even if it is not known or explicitly said.

<footnote n="5">5 This, I must point out, is not linked to the leftist stance he had adopted at one point of his life, which, as far as he is concerned, was one of the stages of his progressive social legitimation as someone coming from an impoverished background.</footnote>
Tennis

Serge Daney's tennis chronicles are the object of a separate work, *L'Amateur de tennis*, prefaced by writer Mathieu Lindon, who was one of his former *Libération* colleagues. It was published in 1994 by P.O.L., in other words before Daney's writings started being published in several volumes by the same publisher.<fnref n="6" />

Let us go back to the spring-summer season of 1981. Two articles from that time can be found in the short chapter entitled "Wimbledon, 1981" in *L'Amateur de tennis*. This chapter could have been called "McEnroe's consecration," since the first article relates the difficult victory of the capricious American against Rod Frawley: "Both players were playing the same kind of tennis and the mimetic violence was extreme" (1994, 49). After this evocation of René Girard's theory, the mimeticism motif continues in the second article which implicitly refers to the political alternation that had just happened in France, where after decades under a right-wing government, the left came to power when François Mitterand was elected President on 10 May 1981. "L'alternance du pouvoir" tells how McEnroe beat Björn Borg on 5 July 1981 after having lost against him the previous year, thus ending the Swedish player's complete domination of tennis (five consecutive victories at Wimbledon and six at Roland Garros during the previous years). *La Maison cinéma et le monde*, volume II, which was published in 2002, however, tells a truly suspenseful saga if we put the articles back in order. What happened before this shocking twist? Borg was getting bored on the roof of the Galeries Lafayette during a promotional tennis event for children.

<footnote n="6">6 The benefit of having a book is that it gives an overview of Daney articles and shows how a system constituted itself (Lindon even claims, quoting Marguerite Duras, that it is this book that makes Daney a writer). The downside is that each of the first three volumes of Daney's general works dedicates a whole chapter to the tennis articles that were not published in *L'Amateur de tennis* but does not include all the articles on the subject either. This scattered configuration does not allow a quick grasp of the timeline of the sporting stories.</footnote>
186 He was bored because he could not now play each serve as if his life depended on it, but only "as if his *image*, and only his image, depended on it" (2002, 904).<fnref n="7" /> He did not know yet that a change in power would happen and that he would be replaced. It was as if the part of reality resisting in his victorious body, whichever media is representing it, was replaced by imagery.

Björn Borg's visual and televisual becoming preceded his disappearance from sport. The following article (Daney 2002, 906)<fnref n="8" /> condemns the dreary and dispassionate comments from 1981's TV journalists, which are as regular and safe as Borg's perfect game. Daney prefers their precursors' prose, the TV sports journalists, who saw the "the possibility of astounding twists," that is to say, creating fiction by getting closer to reality, as reality will, in this specific case (but this case is paradigmatic) make a spectacular comeback with McEnroe's victory.

If we push further the logic of Daney's little scribbles about sport that I have quoted so far, McEnroe's victory becomes the triumph of cinema over television, of reality and storytelling over boredom and repetition. There is also a stand-alone article in the same chapter of volume II of *La Maison cinéma et le monde*, a little later in 1982, about William Klein, who had filmed Roland Garros the previous year, and whom Serge Daney critiques quite negatively (2002, 915-17).<fnref n="9" /> With great coherence, Daney reproaches the photographer for not being able to capture "the cinema,"

<footnote n="7">7 Originally published in *Libération*, 21 May 1981. In 1969, Pasolini produced an analysis of the cyclist champion Eddy Merckx that is similar to Daney's about Borg. Pasolini says that Merckx's "explosion of vitality" is "overflowing but not at all shapeless." Here is his argument: on TV, "victories seem to be conditioned by a will to repress which humiliates the cyclists ... their real relationship with us has irremediably gone through a process of alienation and falsification. Merckx is a truly great champion because he wins in spite of all of this. Merckx's body is stronger than the way we consume it. Merckx's victories are scandalous" (Pasolini 2012, 158), originally published in *Tempo*, 7 June 1969, "Il Caos" column.</footnote>

<footnote n="8">8 Originally published in *Libération*, 29 June 1981.</footnote>

<footnote n="9">9 Originally published in *Libération*, 6 July 1982.</footnote>
which would have enabled him to break "television-tennis,"
because "cinema and tennis are arts of (lasting) performance and
of (passing) time" (2002, 917), whereas "photography is a practice
of immediacy."

A third collection, *Ciné journal*, from 1986, includes an article that comes back to the spring 1981 French Open, entitled "Des balles si lourdement chargées." It is a summer text fairly heavily charged with erotic and sexual imagery, written a month after the end of the tournament. The balls are described as testicles, sometimes "deflated, hairy, dead," sometimes as a "concrete object, hairy and conforming to the regulations" turning into something "phantasmatic." The balls are "struck with great violence before falling to the ball boys and girls who retrieve them," "they carry hatred, phobias, desires to lose or to punish"; some men can "get into the ball and they are screaming." By offering such a fantasized description of the tennis ball, this article goes beyond the sport itself to turn it, as explained by its retrospective introductory paragraph, into a "stock of metaphors." The idea (also taken up elsewhere) of the ball "representing the gaze" is interesting, but here it is seemingly developed from a primary Lacanian presupposition, which brings together the gaze and the phallus under the designation of "objet petit-a," amongst others. "The tennis ball—Daney says in a very elliptical nod to André Bazin<fnref n="10" />—has no seam." Apart from the fact that a tennis ball is indeed made out of pieces of felt—yellow felt since television imposed this color so that the ball would be more visible on screen—it is glued rather than stitched together, and the use of this possibly poorly controlled allegory of Christ's unshareable,

<footnote n="10">10 Quoting the Bible (John, 19:23–24, Psalms, 22:19), André Bazin writes: "For Renoir, knowledge is achieved through love and love through the world's epidermis. The suppleness, the mobility, and the living formation of the way he stages things, are his way of draping, for his pleasure and for our joy, the seamless tunic of reality" (2018, art. n° 927), originally published in *Cahiers du cinema* 8, January 1952. This image is taken up in "Découpage," in the volume entitled *Vingt ans de cinéma à Venise* (Écrits complets, op. cit., art. n° 1089).</footnote>
188 seamless robe that soldiers cast lots for prior to his crucifixion, may link the ball, or the gaze, to a perpetual back and forth without any solution as to its continuity? The article's conclusion seems to go along with that. McEnroe's cathode-ray tube fluorescence, unlike Borg's metronomic body, which is seamless and does not know any break, produces visible humanness, the unconscious, life, what is loose—in short, it produces cinema in its way of buttressing reality. I quote: "Between two racket blows, for a time that can be infinitesimal, the American player becomes undone, dislocated, absent. I ... am talking of his body and about this piece of the unconscious that passes through his body. For him, the ball is the Other, it is adversity rather than the adversary" (Daney 1986, 243-45).

Having given this idea of what Daney is doing with his descriptions of tennis, we shall now get back to the ping-pong ball, which is not made out of soft felt, nor out of marble, but out of celluloid.

## Ping-pong/Table tennis/Gossima

The glued and perfectly spherical ping-pong ball is a product of the reunion of two hemispheres, like the miniature globes that you find on kids' desks. Until the International Table Tennis Federation decided recently to approve the use of PVC and plastic, the ball shared with cinema and its film, and with cartoon and its cel, the fetishism of the little celluloid skin.

Because it is colloidal (that is to say agitated by Brownian motions that can be seen under a microscope) celluloid was also favored in Auguste Lumière's medical neo-humoral theory. He was one of the inventors of cinema, the first maker of photographic plates and photographic film in the world, and thus the first photographic chemistry engineer in history. He claimed to save humankind—make it immortal even—by maintaining in the human body itself, through various ingestions and radiations, the colloidal state of its interstitial liquids, by preventing their
flocculation, that is to say by impeding the immobility that leads
to their biological death.

His theory fizzled out, but it clearly carries resonance relating to
cinema and animation. Where this is concerned, I have studied
the only Lumière film attributed to Auguste, *Les Brûleuses*
*d'herbes*, from 1897, in which the vibratory agitation of the smoke
is a wonder of cinema. Following this logic, we could claim that
the very, let us say "filmic", way sports are staged, is colloidal-
like. Historically, this staging only occurred with the invention of
television, which is the only thing that Serge Daney is interested
in. We could claim that tennis looks more like ping-pong when the
balls' long trajectories and the players' coming and goings, once
broadcast on a small screen, turn into Brownian motion. And
finally, that in the years Daney knew it, television itself, as a fast
material, was already overtaken by video art.

Thus, it seems quite logical that, in the mid-1980s, the video artist Christophe Bargues invited Serge Daney to write commentaries for his video installation entitled "Quelques gestes... de Tokyo à Yamagushi," dedicated to Japanese people playing ping-pong. It was exhibited in the foyer of the Centre Pompidou near the exhibition "Le Japon des avant-gardes" from December 1986 to January 1987.<fnref n="11" />

Daney's only text about ping-pong starts with an anonymous
main character, which reverses the traditional story of the
tennisman. An eighty-three-year-old amateur discovers the tennis
table's moves. He is playing, Daney says, "without thinking about
victory." In fact, the descriptions of Borg and McEnroe, to go
back to two examples which do not constitute exceptions, do still
convey the rage to win, although they are realized in opposite
ways. This Japanese man from the Seibu shop club, is, on the
other hand, experiencing an opening, the opening of "the door

<footnote n="11">11 Prod. Corsaire sanglot, 1986. In *La Maison cinéma et le monde* (Daney 2012, 354–63), the reproduction of this article is composed of ten "sequences," which are each accompanied by a video screenshot.</footnote>
190 of a world constituted of different moves." Thus, armed with my
celluloid tool of deconstruction—ping-pong as an operator of
deconstruction—I conclude that Daney saw reality in sport being
breathed through the little interstices of timeouts and of the
celebrities' fuss making (their "cinema"), and this is why he chose
McEnroe over Borg. In front of the ping-pong table, he discovered
that it is within sport itself that cinema can disturb television or,
in other words, that the real can tear reality, gently, in the action
of sport itself.

This idea is expressed from the first sequence and from time
to time in the following ones, through what could be deemed a
Barthesian description of Japan as an exotic civilization. Daney
was writing about the art of video for the Centre Pompidou rather
than televised sports for a daily newspaper. This might have
induced him, maybe involuntarily, or maybe not, to act like the
new Roland Barthes. Fifteen years after the publication of *The
Empire of Signs* and six years after Barthes's accidental death at
the exact moment his name became associated with the *Cahiers
du Cinéma* through the publication of his book *Camera Lucida*,
Daney sees, in these images of Japan, the signs of an "empty
availability" in "spaces of inefficiency," of "suspended" moves,
one "that is self-sufficient," and another one a "repeatedly tested"
basic move, producing a "pleasure without trace and almost
without image." In other words, variations on the central motif
of *L'Empire des signes*, that is to say not *L'Empire des sens*,<sup>12</sup> as one
could mistakenly think but the *exemption* of meaning. In this
book, Barthes does indeed offer a sort of sequel to suspension
as commitment, which is the idea he had noticed in the work of
Bertolt Brecht. After a suspended ending, rather than a classic
happy or tragic ending, the theatergoer returns home with a
political issue on his mind. More than the suspended meaning,
he imagines in his study the exempted meaning. Taking haiku as

<footnote n="12">12 The French title of Nagisa Oshima's *In the Realm of the Senses* (Ai no Korida, "Bullfight of Love", 1976).</footnote>
an example, he claims that artists engage in political acts when they offer the free spectacle of a fair cry, whatever it may be: “the haiku is as pure, as spherical, and as empty as a musical note; this might be why you’re supposed to read it twice, like an echo ... the echo only underlines the lack of meaning”<fnref n="13" /> (Barthes 1970, 99).

But it is not the Barthesian version of Daney that prevails. This rhetorical exercise in the manner of Gide's or Barthes's way of observing little things would remain too predictable if Daney the sports journalist did not once again emerge, and if the tennis observer in him was not displaced by the proximity of the hands and table game that is ping-pong. The generosity of the theorizing machine thus gives forth nearly a dozen invaluable remarks inspired by this sport that Daney only discussed once.

Firstly—and this had already emerged in some tennis commentaries—there is “a dialogue between humans and the humble celluloid ball.”

Secondly, the gaze of the ping-pong player which follows the ball all the way to his or her opponent becomes an extension of that player. This leads to dispossession: if it goes beyond mimetic rivalry and the microscopic avatars of surveillance and voyeurism that the text is talking about, it could let go of alienation and go all the way to becoming other.

In the third sequence, by describing what a ping-pong championship looks like, with its rows of tables aligned in a gymnasium, Daney, being the good formal analyst that he is, perceives what every ping-pong player inherently knows: the paradoxically collective, nearly collectivist, let us say “Chinese” nature of this racket game that is in theory an individual sport. Practicing a sport professionally can tear down the apparently clear distinction between individual and team sports. I quote:

<footnote n="13">13 Haiku is therefore a good parallel with table tennis. When the pure and free note of the spherical and empty ball resonates, exempt from all meaning, its double sound echoing: ping? pong!</footnote>
Because there's never only one table in a room, but several, and the tables are so geometrically arranged that they offer to the audience's gaze, on top of the balls' crafted trajectories, the relentless rippling of the lines of the bodies "at work." Every player is of course "focused on his or her game," but all of them know that they are borne by the wave crashing around them.

This remarkable observation brings to my mind two memories that are very far apart from each other. The older one goes back to the first team championship I took part in during my childhood. It is the moment I first saw, suddenly and in a single panoramic look, a whole gymnasium filled with rows and rows of ping-pong tables, and that, at the exact same moment, I heard the balls, all in action at the same time. This was probably my first vision of community. The second is the very detailed memory of the first book Serge Daney and I discussed the first time we met: Giorgio Agamben's *The Coming Community* (1993). Chapter 12 of this work is a good continuation of Daney's remark about the gymnasium full of anonymous Japanese ping-pong players. Its title is "Dim Stockings" and it is about a TV ad<fnref n="14" /> in which a group of individuals (young women wearing tights, as is to be expected) magically creates a common movement which does not belong to any one of them specifically but to all of them, including us, the audience. For the Italian philosopher, this effect unintentionally produces a new "ordinary body," "torn from the merchandise in its decline."

Because of this remark, Daney then notes the choreographic and musical aspect of ping-pong: "the spirit of table tennis ... means that there's never any rest, only restful rhythms".

The sixth sequence retrospectively appears as a superb funeral oration for a strange and phobic rule of table tennis, which was

<footnote n="14">14 It also appears both in William Klein's film, *Qui êtes-vous Polly Maggoo?* (1966) and in Guy Debord's short film, *Réfutation de tous les jugements tant élogieux qu'hostiles qui ont été jusqu'ici portés sur le film "La Société du spectacle"* (1975).</footnote>
banned in the mid-1990s, the "obstruction" rule: "this thing that is so ambiguous in table tennis" Daney says, right away using the right word, the Lacanian concept of "the Thing." "One must return all the balls, except for the 'faulty' balls," Daney sums up perfectly, like the good neurotic he is. He adds: "The good object becomes the bad object, which you should not touch under any circumstances: plague-ridden." So if a bad serve from your opponent, which had clearly gone over the endline, unfortunately touched your racket, you used to lose the point. Thus, players used to withdraw their hand or even their whole body when a ball was coming at them.

Daney uses this little ethnology of table tennis to address the Japanese's presumed phobia of responsibility and their relationship to guilt. This orientalism is of little interest, but it nevertheless enables him to tell a legend I would call: "the legend of the guilty racket." "There is this story of a decisive ball, very high, judged by everyone to be a fault and which the player who was on the receiving end of it greeted by joyfully throwing his racket in the air, anticipating his own victory. But the pseudopodal racket, which had an unconscious, went on to touch the ball in the air."

If we use one of Daney's observations about tennis and add it to the commentary on this pongistic *noli me tangere*, we can suggest that this table tennis rule paralleled the unwritten rule beginning around the 1910s in cinema, which is the basis for both the existence and the invisibility of the off-screen. Indeed, players suddenly withdrawing their body to avoid *"obstructing the ball"* meant that the table's surroundings were taboo (and it should be added that the interdiction on touching the table in any manner during the game is still a rule at international level). A visible portion of the game space suddenly became invisible by being untouchable; it was as if an inhabited and dangerous emptiness was suddenly created. Similarly, the prohibition of the look-to-camera in cinema creates the fourth wall of an imaginary cube as efficiently as if a giant and metamorphic plastic one-way mirror had been set up in a real space. With the abolition of the
194 "obstruction" rule, so well spotted by Serge Daney who sees it as the Lacanian "Thing," "Das Ding," table tennis lost its "off-table" and, with it, a little phobic piece of its relationship to cinema.

I will skip an observation about the sound rackets make, which goes back to the issue of rhythm already mentioned, in order to get to one last observation from the ninth sequence, which again shows Daney's very keen perception of the game. Namely, his perception of a very specific competition, the "doubles" ("men's doubles," "women's doubles," or "mixed doubles": two players against two others, playing on a table of the same size as usual), with its terribly quick disappearances and reappearances of the person who must, when it is his or her turn, answer the invitations from the whole table. Daney sees mostly joy here: a "joyous rush around the table" allows one to "dance his or her appearances." He sees "young women who are eager to rush to the ball with youth's impetuosity," because, he adds, "there's also the joy of being where the ball expects us to be."

This joy is not the silly "importance of taking part," which was the political conception of early Olympism, in my view very far from the profound reality of the game in sport, nor the enthusiasm of tiring oneself out. On the contrary, joy is the gist of sport, and more particularly of racket sports, which should really be called hand games or palm games (Jeu de paume).

During a trip to Macao (as attested by one of his Carnets personnels), on 28 July 1980 at the Jai Alai Stadium, Daney attended Basque pelota games with an "audience that joins in, screaming and betting as if this was the races." One of the oddities of the history and geopolitics of hand and racket sports means that Florida in the United States of America, and Macao, which is a special administrative region of China and was under Portuguese administration at the time of Daney's visit, are the two main places in the world to which Basque pelota was exported. These two territories use the Basque words, names, and forms but they have their own off-track betting.
Daney accidentally happened upon one of the multiple games descended from the matrix of “real tennis,” and which carries in its very name what Daney described, regarding doubles in ping-pong, as “the joy of being expected by the ball.” Indeed, *Jai alai*, the name of Basque pelota is neither Florida English nor Macanese Chinese, but Basque and it simply means “happy game” (*jai*: game; *alai*: cheerful, happy). I would add that except for one letter and one phoneme (which does not constitute a pun but rather a strong proximity under the old frameworks before the invention of literature in the modern sense of the word), the *jeu* (game) itself is very similar to the poetic *joy*, the *joi* of Provençal poetry, of *trobar*, a word that the readers of Jacques Roubaud and Pasolini know well. The latter says he sings “*ab joy*,” “from joy—out of joy,” and describes this very specific feeling of elation, which is very similar to the Portuguese or Brazilian *saudade*, in the following way: this “joy” is an instantaneous “nostalgia” for life, which creates a feeling, or an understanding, of the “exclusion” that “heightens the love of life.” The “happy game” is, in sum, a poetic and vital “happy *joi*.”

It is now time to conclude by explaining that it is not important to differentiate or hierarchize tennis, table tennis, or badminton (the three Olympic racket sports). Or Basque pelota, called *jai alai* or *chistera*, which allows us to understand that every racket is the extension of the hand and the arm, the Italian *palla tamburello* or *balle au tambourin* in France which, because they make direct use of a musical instrument to hit the ball, emphasizes the percussively musical character of the games in which the ball gets hit and the pleasure of the synchronism that they share with cinema's audiovisuality. Or Valencian pilota, which is still played with bare hands today, or squash, speedball, or some others.

Because the most important thing is to understand their common origins. All of them come from real tennis, which was born in France in the thirteenth century, and until the time of Louis XIV was both a popular sport, easily enough set up on town and village marketplaces, a court wall and the roofs of closed market
196 stalls to create an improvised court (the outdoor game is called *longue paume*), and an aristocratic one that was played by all the kings of France and their court in numerous refined rooms (the indoor game is called *courte paume*). Louis XIV abandoned real tennis, the court followed him and so did the nobles. The game thus disappeared entirely in just a few years after completely dominating every other game for five centuries in France and having been exported elsewhere, most significantly to England. To start a game of real tennis, someone would say *tenetz*, (the imperative of the verb *tenir*, to hold, in French): this is where the English term “tennis” comes from. It is because of this background, which mixes common and community, the masses and the elite, the hand and the eye, rapidity and joy, that ping-pong and tennis speak to Daney. According to Charles Tesson, “he was fascinated by any sport in which the hand becomes a second eye, which does not automatically obey the other” (2001, 244). Ping-pong pushes this relationship very far.

One of its early names might point to it if we interpret it a little. It is more or less established that ping-pong was invented between 1870 and 1891—a time at which the pre-cinema devices started to appear—by English tennis players (possibly in the colonies) who wanted to keep playing tennis on rainy days, which is why it was initially called “table tennis.” The rivalry with two other names “Gossima” and “ping-pong” (an onomatopoeia which comes from the double sound of the ball hitting first the racket, then the table), stopped when the English sporting federation settled on “table tennis” in 1921. “Gossima” disappeared while “ping-pong” was used to designate the leisure activity, without becoming completely taboo in competitive circles.

Gossima is thus the third and archaic name of ping-pong/table tennis, its lost or hidden name. It was a nineteenth-century commercial invention, which lasted around thirty years at the junction of the two centuries, more precisely a trademark registered in 1891 by the British company “John Jaques and son” on the advice of James Gibb, the engineer who imported the little
celluloid ball. This name was probably trying to evoke the English
word "gossamer," which suggests cobwebs, tulle, or other very
fine and light fabrics all at once. This seems very likely consid-
ering the mythological image stuck to the top of the Jaques box:
Peter Pan-type elves throwing round balls around above a huge
cobweb, which is at the center of the composition. The first nets,
made out of a very light fabric, can evoke gossamer. We can also
consider the first rackets made out of stretched skin and the idea
that one of the goals of the game is to make a ball flying like a fly
be captured by the spider-net.

The invisible threads linking the eye, the hand and the moving
object, this organic ensemble of semi-instinctive movements of
the whole body and the central nervous system (I will not talk
about the relationship of all this with post-cinema, the "ping" of
computers and the video game-future of post-cinematographic
animation, because that is another story), find a good allegory
in the image of the spider's web. The gossima player is like a
mobile brother of the cinema viewer whose eye is associated
with a strong kinesesthesia, but whose body is physically immobile.
Cinema is an arachnoid game of real tennis. Thank you, Serge
Daney, for letting me play this match with you.

*Translated into English by Melina Delmas and revised by Kate Ince*

References

Agamben, Giorgio. 1993. *The Coming Community*. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Barthes, Roland. 1982. *The Empire of Signs*. New York: Hills & Wang.

Bazin, André. 2018. *Écrits Complets*. Ed. Hervé Joubert-Laurencin. Paris: Macula.

Daney, Serge. 1986. *Ciné Journal*. Vol. 1, 1981-1982. Paris: Cahiers du Cinéma.

—. 1988. *Le salaire du zappeur*. Paris: Ramsay.

—. 1994. *L'Amateur de tennis: Critiques, 1980-1990*. Paris: P.O.L.

—. 2002. *La Maison cinéma et le monde, Vol. 2, Les Années Libé (1981-1985)*. Paris: P.O.L.

—. 2012. *La Maison cinéma et le monde, Vol. 3, Les Années Libé (1986-1991)*. Paris: P.O.L.
198 Pasolini, Pier Paolo. 2012. *Écrits sur le sport*. Trans. Flaviano Pisanelli. Paris: Le Temps des Cerises.

Tesson, Charles. 2001. "L'enfant de la balle." *Trafic* 37 (special issue "Serge Daney, après, avec"): 241-49.
<figure><img src="image_25.png" /></figure>
JEAN-CLAUDE BIETTE

BERNARD EISENSCHITZ

DIARY

DAILY WRITING

TRAFIC

MAURICE BLANCHOT

TELEVISION
# A Few Diaries in the Early Volumes of *Trafic*

Simon Pageau

Several diaries were published in the early issues of *Trafic*; Serge Daney wrote some, as did Bernard Eisenschitz, while Jean-Claude Biette published a series of articles influenced by daily writing. We believe that the journal form is not an insignificant one. As a journal, *Trafic* allowed critics to catch up on memories, or, conversely, to write about the films of the present, but always with a desire to show another present, an “untimely” actuality it sought. This article focuses on three of these diaries, analyzing the inventions of forms in the writing as much as the modalities of a life experienced amid the images.
202 For someone of my generation, who was born in the middle of the 1990s and only encountered cinema and its literature around twenty years later, approaching the journal *Trafic* meant being faced with a visually impenetrable number of volumes. The collection's spine is the first thing one sees. It forms a block that is very homogenous and quite austere. Taken as a unit, the different volumes can only be told apart by their number. The scansion of the tens and the thickness of some milestone volumes (no. 37, no. 50, no. 100) are the only relief, whereas the repetition of the title—*Trafic*—the compactness of its stenciled typography, and the consistency of the sandy kraft paper binding are separate from the rigor of the dates of production. What is actually communicated first is what is hidden—*Trafic* might be keeping a secret. Mallarmé wrote that “carrying a secret is the prerogative of any folded sheet,” and *Trafic*'s secret seems to be deepened by this mute façade, which is still expanding, since n° 107 came out not long ago.

The word “secret” might be a little too heavy, a little too romantic. But it could identify this invisible and fleeting thing: this deliberately hidden object, whose work is nonetheless communicated through the weight of all these volumes. The word secret is also a way of inserting myself in a history that is not mine. Because a secret is never shared without an audience, it is never impersonal, or “loose,” with a bit of play. On the contrary, a secret indicates a space of shared interests. It simultaneously names the parts of an exchange and establishes its rules. So if there is indeed a secret, uncovering it is my way of playing along. Understanding *Trafic*'s secret means finding myself in a position that enables me to understand this history and guarantees that I can understand this secret, almost 30 years after the creation of the journal. At least, a little bit. In short, it enables me to test *its sympathy*.

The early volumes of *Trafic* start with diaries: Serge Daney's diaries. Others accompany them, more will come later: Bernard
Eisenschitz's, Jonas Mekas's, Jean-Claude Biette's.<fnref n="1" /> These diaries bear the trace of the time of the journal's creation, the early 1990s. A very "weak" (Daney 1991, 29) time according to Daney, but which despite all its spinelessness, presides over these cine-diaries. In *Trafic*, this time still watches over the passing of days— and thus exposes itself to the inevitable rhythm of the daily private diary. These diaries also depict individuals, characters, enthusiasms, or resistances, which are the traces of a certain method, often the critical method of being in the world with cinema, of a cinephilia.

A published diary is probably no longer private. Nevertheless, the type of free writing that mimics addressing yourself inevitably possesses personal echoes. For example, in his three diaries, Daney puts his body on display: he eats chocolate pralines to ward off fear in "Journal de l'an passé" (1991), he "eructates" (1992a, 14) when things are not moving forward in "Journal de l'an nouveau," he falls asleep and wakes up in front of his TV set in "Journal de l'an présent" (1992b). As for Eisenschitz, he talks about memories that come back to him when he visits places from his past, while Mekas even confesses that he no longer dreams. Thus, these texts are different from journalistic chronicles; different from a simple analysis of the state of cinema. In these diaries, we understand that the time of the journal will be that of everyday life, and that this everyday life is something thick in which the present is admittedly liminal, but always in dialogue with its deficiencies and its memory.

I became aware of this when reading the first of Serge Daney's diaries, the "Journal de l'an passé," which runs from April to November 1991. It follows Daney's life and current events through

<footnote n="1">1 Bernard Eisenschitz (1944–) wrote in the *Cahiers* in the 1960s but his collaboration ended in the “red years” of the journal for political reasons. Close to George Sadoul, he would become one of the great French cinema historians and translators. Jean-Claude Biette, critic and filmmaker, one of Daney’s closest friends, wrote in the *Cahiers* in the 1960s, came back in the 1970s, and continued to write in the journal episodically until the 1990s.</footnote>
204 very scrupulously recorded dates. However, although the watch-
word casts a wide net over the phantom of current cinema, in
return, it is always about bringing it closer to an issue that marks
a moral and memorial commitment with that cinema: that of its
possible loss.

Thus, the vapid questions which seemed that they *would*
*never be asked again* come back. For instance: is cinema
an art? Will it be kept: all of it or just a part? And what will
happen to what we loved about it? And what about those of
us who loved ourselves unduly through it? And what about
the world it had promised us, of which we were supposed to
be the citizens? Day by day, I take notes and note my takes.
But I am now talking about Cinema in general and I talk to
myself until I get sick of having talked about it so much. My
leitmotiv could be "Were we dreaming?" And when I meet
someone, I ask myself if this person was part of this "us," of
this oral tradition that was the love of cinema. Because, of
this, at least, I am sure: cinema cannot better endure forth-
coming societies than Africa can find its place on the map of
a world that works. (1991, 5)

Then, after this incipit, the diary starts and the days tally up.
And thus the critical writing, which stays linked to contemporary
events, always refers back to a broader memory. Daney uses
notions from his own history as a critic, rehabilitating them to
evaluate current events. This modus operandi is admittedly not
new. But what changes in the *Trafic* diaries is the density of this
memory in those constant back-and-forths between present
events and past systems of thought. Of this memory, I ought to
say here that it becomes denser and larger. It is no longer there
only to maintain the coherence of a way of thinking that has been
upset by its contemporary objects, but because this memory is in
danger and it is already dying. It is about signaling its revitalized
presence through a sort of active mourning—it is about trans-
mitting cinema “with its loss” (Interview with Serge Daney and
Jean-Claude Biette, no date, probably January 1992) according to
Daney. "With its loss"—in other words as if molded in the work of memory, a starting point towards which all the presents are coming back to from now on. To transmit cinema "with its loss," or else not being able to transmit it at all. But this gesture is not insignificant. It engages writing in a vertical dynamic, which was already present in Daney's critical analyses, but which became even more prominent from then on. Let us be clear, transmitting cinema, *passing it on*, will not mean making it History here. It will not mean arranging dates according to a linear axis, onto an effective materiality that is smoothed out by the arrangement of events. It will not be like going the length of the event of History. To take up Charles Péguy's expression it will truly mean, "being inside the event, [making sure] above all not to get out of it, but to stay inside, and to climb back into it from within," contrary to a historical history which "passes alongside" it, that is to say "passes it by" (1931, 229).

Generally speaking, this memorial style of writing is that of a diary one writes to ward off the present time. Blanchot said that a diary is "a convenient way of escaping... silence." Because to write every day, he says, is "to place oneself temporarily under the protection of everyday time"; it means submitting one's writing to "this fortunate regularity that one undertakes not to threaten" (2003, 183). So, from one regularity to another, the regularity of the diary protects one from mundane issues of the present time, and the most distant thoughts can be maintained in the everyday life of its pages. Sometimes, the person writing the diary relies on the present in order to better escape from it. Under the tutelage of the passing days, the writing becomes freer to feel a path into memory's staircase for itself. Reading the diaries from the early volumes of *Trafic* is thus a means of understanding this memory and the vision of cinema it carries. It is a way of grasping the present of the journal's volumes, while keeping in mind the fragments of a preexisting time—scattered pieces of one of its secrets that have been found and made readable.
Jean-Claude Biette in Lyon, the Theater

It is significant that, amongst the early volumes of *Trafic*, the article by Jean-Claude Biette that bears the most resemblance to a diary is *Trafic* no. 5's "À pied d'œuvre." Actually, the series "À pied d'œuvre" as a whole could be linked to the genre of the diary, if we understand that writing is as linked to films as it could have been to days. It is through them that Biette's thinking forms and then aggregates. Biette considers films in the present tense of their filmmaker's vision, and he follows the critical approach he had already used in his chronicle "Les fantômes du permanent," published a few years earlier in the *Cahiers du Cinéma*. In a way, the articles in "À pied d'œuvre" are themselves cine-diaries, as the films are viewed one by one, as autonomous entities. For each film, its very own and identifiable governing principles prevail, which guarantee the truth of its experience. The overall progression of Biette's meticulous diary appears scattered, indifferent to any absorbing and premeditated coherence. However, he still finds coherence through implicit connections, larger and subterraneous movements, and through the interest he takes in characters. In the early volumes of *Trafic*, his style becomes more coherent and fluid as he finds a new flexibility in the text. He stops using his usual elongated sentences with many clauses separated by dashes and parentheses, sentences which suspend their objects then drop them within the body of a paragraph.<fnref n="2" /> Through the pressure of the sentences coming one after the other, he carries away the center of a thought that always seems to follow the reader's eye.

However, the fifth article of these chronicles marks a departure. First, *Trafic* no. 5 is the first volume without a text from its founder. Biette who, until then, closed each volume, now has the difficult task of opening it and introducing contemporaneous

<footnote n="2">2 Mathieu Macheret perfectly described Jean-Claude Biette's writing in "Voyages en cinéma" (2016, 135).</footnote>
objects to the journal. This is because the first text of a volume, be it explicit or not, and according to Patrice Rollet, “engages” (Interview with Patrice Rollet 2018) the journal. It engages it by positioning it in a topicality that it cares about, sometimes dis- tantly, but always with the attention we pay to the object that concerns us. And secondly, it marks a rupture because it is not current events that are being written about. Time’s tremors are a dead weight over which the writing stumbles, jeopardizing its balance and lost peacefulness. And as the text proceeds, only the agitation of films will make Biette gradually forget about time. Thus, it would be fairer to say that this text is a diary despite itself. “Despite itself,” despite current events. This is shown by the date that opens it: “December 12th, 1992, a Saturday in Lyon,” a date that is precise but already nearly distorted, as if dispersed by the use of the indefinite article, which renders its unique character colorless, and invites us to listen to a tale, to a fabulous story, rather than to a chronicle.

At the beginning of this entry, we are in a theater, in Lyon. Biette is replaying an encounter, a conversation between other guests—he is a guest himself—and the few audience members present at the screening of Jean-André Fieschi’s film, *Pasolini l’enragé*. Although traditionally the afternoon’s discussion should open with an exchange of perspectives and a critical confrontation of ideas, this is not how it goes this time. Due to the direction taken by the first questions, the discussion lingers more on the film- maker’s death, and the number of works he has written, as the audience wants to know what they should read by this poet:

> we suddenly become guests of a TV program [Biette writes], in which interviewers and interviewees, putting on hold the modest but real uniqueness of their experience, must find a common denominator of depersonalized informative elements, which are communicable precisely because they can be quantified and therefore immediately digested by a computer. (1993, 6)
208 Now we understand that televisual aesthetics dominate the rules of this dialogue. Next, a heavy and immediate present settles onto the theater, demanded by those asking questions, who expect not memory, but *information*. There are no questions *with* the work but only *about* it, in other words concretely, about Pasolini's death. So what is missing according to Biette—and what makes up the consternation in the opening of this diary—is the density of a time liable to create an experience. The interviewees lack adequate time to answer, and the people asking the questions are likewise not given enough time. Without a doubt, they are lacking this private, irregular, non-normalized time, which carries within itself an imagination able to preserve the character of an *addressed* story weighed by the person telling it, and which, for the critic, thus guarantees a certain responsibility. So Biette's point of view from this stage is strange and eagle-eyed, completely external to events despite his precise descriptions of his own position, of the other guests' position, and that of the audience as a few divided blocks. To quote Pierre Léon's introduction to his book on Biette, if it is necessary for the latter to rely in his works on friendship, "in the meaning of it understood by ancient philosophers, in which the elements are holding together and the reason why they hold together is friendship" (2013, 8), it is clear that there is not much friendship here. Thus, it is from outside the event that Biette brings back cinematic names and considerations (Godard's for example) so that these elements can stick together.

Then the rest of the article progressively goes deeper into a type of writing closer to its object, in the sense of a cinema object, which, step by step, frees itself and supplants television. It only half does this at first, with André Antoine's *La Terre*, where restoring the film and screening it with live music maintains cinema in a sling since, for Biette, this "double sacralization" can only give rise to a fervent respect that is "anesthetized" (1993, 8) to the film. Accurate history is much more present than the film itself, and that demonstrates how distant we are from the images—it
*distances us from them*—whilst the music, which is inadequate, separates the film from its own continuity. The way the screening is staged impedes the positive reception of the movie all the more because there is another obstacle: the theatrical set-up. This is internal to the film’s dramaturgy, which restricts the actors, and can only offer tropes. Here I am roughly summarizing Biette’s more complex analysis.

Then comes Boris Lehman’s *L’Homme de terre*. This is also a silent movie, but the marriage of the live music and the images is more harmonious this time, more effective. So that critical writing no longer stops on the threshold of the images. This time, if we review the internal construction of the film’s shots, it is clear that music—which is the starting point of Biette’s critique—is actually the glue. It unites the filmmaker, who appears in the film, with the subject of his topic, the making of a statue. From the start, the music harmonizes Lehman’s face with the statue he is filming, giving to one what it has taken from the other, namely the mod-elling of clay at work, and then the fear of this work.

> Here [Biette concludes], music does not overwhelm the film, nor does it smother or culturalize it. It does not detract from its message, but it *keeps us* [my emphasis] on the path of its internal violence ... It is the least appealing and the least anecdotal part of the written language of Lehman’s cinema. (1993, 10)

This music thus offers a return to cinema in that it brings the film’s elements together and ensures the harmony of its geology. It “holds” the audience’s attention in the film’s work—in all its violence—yet this work is somehow the only thing able to deliver signs of its expressive truth. It is also via the music that the writing of this diary exposes itself differently. The description of the film becomes more attentive, more fluid too, switching from one proposal to the other—from the man to the statue and from the soundtrack to the image—with the new-found flexibility of its long sentences juggling with the shots, as they are certain to be
210 supported by the film's matter which they are patiently moving, out of respect for the one effacing himself behind the object he is accompanying.

I will quickly gloss over the last part of the text. Cinema, once it is found again, is described from the eternally focal point of its images. The film Biette discusses is Ritwik Ghatak's *Reason, Debate and a Story*, which was programmed in Valence by Françoise Calvez and Raymond Bellour. From this patiently told story, Biette deduces the presence of a filmmaker, Ritwik Ghatak, as well as the reality of a world that breathes as if on its own, as it is filmed by a man who knows how to make us forget the artifices of his language. This is not far from the theories that will appear in "Qu'est-ce qu'un cinéaste?" (*Traffic* no. 18), even if, here, it is the film that is talking as it is the first witness of its own image event—a definitive actuality behind which the writing finally manages to carry itself.

## Bernard Eisenschitz in Moscow, the Rain

One of the questions asked by the early volumes of *Traffic* could be: how to create a community now? How to assemble a group around a journal that is open to the desire of writing about cinema, but which does not have a full editorial board? In fact, in the first year (the first four volumes), more than forty different authors were published in *Traffic*. Although these collaborators for the most part had a shared past, all being Parisian cinephiles from the 1960s and 1970s, and possessed some common interests—Godard, Hitchcock, Lang, Renoir, or even Ford are the filmmakers that they most often quote—*Traffic*, a journal that chooses to embrace a certain disruption of the norm, does not hide that continuity is very important to it as well. A homogenous body for the journal is also created through writing, the kind of counter-society with bootlegger airs that was so beloved by Daney. This is apparent in their subtle way of quoting other members or referring to them by initials, which plays on the
mystery of the identity of the group's actual members and is also found in the way they address one another or bring others of the group into their own thought. From the very beginning, *Trafic* is the journal of the "I"—written in the first person singular—in which however no one writes alone: one's words are always directed to someone else and, often, they are mulled over as a group. But even more than that, *Trafic* becomes the space in which news is shared and, through this, news from the world and other people is cross-pollinated too. And if letters—there are many of them in the early volumes—are a privileged place for these exchanges, the cine-diaries also participate in this sharing of inclinations, vision, and knowledge.

Amongst the early volumes of *Trafic*, "Boris Barnet: journal de Moscou" (Eisenschitz 1993) is a traveler's diary. Written between September and October 1992, it appears in *Trafic* no. 5, during the winter of 1993, and gives to the Russian autumn the gray shades of a risk of refreeze. Because, according to Bernard Eisenschitz, it is urgent to take hold of Soviet cinema while, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, it is opening up but already at risk of forgetting itself, as noted by the historian at the beginning of his diary:

> The bookkeepers of this memory did nothing to preserve it nor to examine it in detail (except as a gallery of masterpieces), and it would have gotten lost before any of this was even attempted. At the same time, it looked like archives were opening up and that people felt the urgency to talk more. It was the right time to try and preserve that—for us, not for the Soviets: if they had done it, it would not have mattered much, but it seemed that it was not the memory of this wealth and of this continuity that they wanted to keep. We are the ones who need to make our position on this Soviet cinema clear: why it mattered, what we liked about it, and beyond that, what we have to do with the Communist dream that it embodied again. (1993, 117)
212 "We are the ones who need to make our position on this Soviet cinema clear": this weighty sentence gives momentum to the diary. With it, we understand who is talking to us. This "we" which is both impersonal and transparent—this "we" which is very much in line with the tone of the *Cahiers*—this "we" carries within it a heaviness of time from which the ashes of past dogmas and their barely extinguished beliefs are still gleaming. With this sentence, we also understand where this diary is going; towards a forthcoming community, towards its reinvested history. Towards the starting point of a dream that is now stateless except in the memory of films which, if they too may have imagined it, may have done so less than those who saw them, than those who made them, and those who keep them. Here, we are reminded of Daney in *Persévérance* who, after having mentioned his shared Maoist past with the *Cahiers*, wrote about China: "When I first went there in 1980, I truly felt—which is ridiculous but real—as if I was the only one from the *Cahiers* to come apologize, as if by coming, I was saying: I apologize" (1994, 146). Here, Daney was talking about an acquittal, a duty to go to China as a way of giving back to the place an old stolen desire that was not its truth. This is definitely not Eisenschitz's approach. But it is still about going somewhere, as one could do, to "check" (as Deleuze put it), to check if we have been blinded by images (for Daney), and to check that this is also why they deserve to be watched (for Eisenschitz). And also going there to protect them.

At first, it was about seeing and listening as much as possible
[the historian continues]. Films, people, documents. Films
first, because it is the primary reason to get attached to this
one rather than another one: Boris Barnet, whose film *Au
bord de la mer bleue* had been screened again and again by
Langlois at rue d'Ulm and had totally shaken up our idea
of freedom in cinema. And because [he adds] misunderstandings
always seem to happen about films.

Eisenschitz went to Russia to see a retrospective of Barnet's films.
On the day he arrived, Friday 25 September, he went straight
to the cinema, quietly entering during the screening of *Nuit de septembre*. The next day, he started searching the archives and compiled a list of people to meet—either friends of Barnet or people who worked with him on his films. The encounters come one after another in his diary: naturally, some are very fruitful whereas others are less so. Just like his films, since Barnet, an erratic filmmaker, also shot some bad films. First because of political contexts; secondly because of his inconsistent personality, showing enthusiasm for joining the Party while seeming ignorant of politics himself. This is why some of his films seem to dodge the issue and are at odds with contemporary viewers' expectations, either too close to the Party's instructions or struggling to adapt to them. His heroic films are clumsy, and his realistic films lack plausibility. However, it is in this discrepancy that Eisenschitz would find the greatness of Barnet's films; in their inability to create stereotypes and through their too pure characters which are almost too transparent; in the blind voluntarism which fitted the needs of his time and thanks to which "unamendable" life seems to flood his films. "If there was an image of the century [Daney taken up by Eisenschitz], it would be Gene Kelly singing in the rain. *Le Bonheur n'a rien à vendre*, or (he added) *Au bord de la mer bleue*" (1994, 130). This is understandable, as it is by rewatching films that Daney proceeds. He mocked those who found this useless and opened his visions to very free analogies inherited from his cinephilic history—Henri King for example, but also Griffith and Hitchcock. "Watching and rewatching films, the only proof that cannot lie" (1994, 125).

While the Barnet retrospective is at the heart of the diary, the latter also reveals the historian's modus operandi:

> How to proceed? This is often the most exciting part, this first moment, listening to people's stories ... It seems to me that documents have to go hand in hand with people's accounts. Both are inaccurate at best, probably dishonest, and first off, my only solution is to gather as many as I can, without too
much critical filtering, to attempt to understand them, to get them to talk. (Daney and Toubiana 1994, 125)

Filled with people, this “journal de Moscou” shows a network of knowledge building itself peacefully as days go by. It is constantly a question of letting people talk, of trusting them, because this vivid speech guarantees that the speaker will take a position towards history, towards the Party, and towards cinema. It guarantees national specifics, which are also the plane against which Barnet must stand out if we want to understand the dynamics of his swerves; these swerves are all the more important for presenting a memory that is still active and surfaces back to talk with the contemporary world of this diary. For the large network stimulated by Eisenschitz, from Moscow to Saint Petersburg, appears to be stratified. It is made up of different intertwined time layers that show the harshness of the country and follow Russia’s turmoil. Indeed, during autumn 1992, Russia was caught between huge contradictory forces—carried away by the opening of its economy to the free market, but still marked by the vivid colors of its history and near past. The never-ending avenues inherited from Communism’s functionalism open both onto overflowing train stations, freed from police and its checks, and onto museums that are indifferent to the time’s moods and unchanged for many years. Caged in this arrhythmia, Russian cinema from the early 1990s did not seem to find its own identity. Disinterested in politics and lost in the affected mimicry of Tarkovsky’s films, filmmakers were no longer grasping at reality, forgetting even the urgency of current affairs; for example, the war that was starting in Georgia.

Thus, the writing style of this diary responds to the temporal division related to Russia's states and that finds echoes in some of Barnet's films. Eisenschitz had been writing dryly for a long time already, using simple and concrete things to start his ideas off and then develop them. In this “journal de Moscou,” however, this style seems assured. One is struck by the short sentences that set the scene with places and objects that are really present:
an interview at home, a visit to the museum, or walking along a long avenue in drizzle. We rediscover a great clarity and this Muscovite diary becomes more assured, where it was already holding up under the days' patience, never getting ahead of the research's results but waiting for the course of time to ultimately and peacefully grant it character. And thus, in turn, time expresses its density, which is made of divisions that Eisenschitz does not fabricate, never makes up, but that he reveals by writing: he only describes them, expressing them by describing places. Amongst these places, there is one that channels the contradictory flows of Russian life particularly exactly: the underground station. Here you come across beggars as well as antique dealers, a couple busy behind a car window, as well as many books being bought keenly, those dusty books getting wet with rain in the meantime.

Underground stations are a privileged space in this diary. Thanks to them, the author moves throughout the city and goes to film screenings, meeting their audiences. It is also through them that time layers get superimposed. And if present time speeds up to the point of forgetting itself, the dust sleeping on book covers protects from memories which, under the passengers' eyes, are still keeping watch and not getting lost.

## Serge Daney in Paris, the Snow

Keeping a diary also means holding onto spaces of transit that indicate a dynamic and, more particularly, demarcate a desire. So that the passage sometimes opens the diary onto the ever- escaping world it is trying to contain (its "outside," let us say). And, in "Journal de l'an présent," there is a space of transit that is not really chosen but seems to appear on its own. This space, despite Daney's promise to stop talking about it, is television.

In "Journal de l'an présent," Daney's third diary, the omnipresence of television, and the domestic imaginary it brings with it, immediately implies a certain fixity of the critic's body. Since "Journal de l'an nouveau," it seems that Daney no longer travels.
216 The Rolle dinner with Godard and Toubiana, which opened his second diary, happened in 1990, and the rest of his thematic reflection on the cinematic character only tightens the geography offered by films, going back in time to the contemporary present of the *Trafic* releases. Daney watches Sirk's films on TV, and Pialat's *Van Gogh*, on which his reflection ends, is a current release that he probably saw in a Parisian cinema. Following the same structure, the "Journal de l'an présent" opens on the memory of a trip to Valence. Daney replays a conversation with someone called Missika, before quickly abandoning this for an observation about the becoming-spectacle of the image which leads to the possibility of the absence of the image, this "Blanchot effect" as Daney calls it, a very cinephilic effect, which draws on a literary tradition, but which, in the early 1990s, is running on empty. He thinks that, in the future, humanitarian aesthetics will replace it, as this aesthetics of presence has become too full, and now, illegible.

Will he go back to the publicity of taking up again ... the medieval tradition of the dance of death [Daney writes] or the Baroque tradition of the *vanitas*? ... Meanwhile, it's not surprising that Luciano Benetton is a candidate in the Italian elections. This kind of icon manipulator can only be a genuine political animal. A strange feeling actually, that all of this is coming back from far away and that Italy is where it is coming from. [And he concludes a little while later:] What if, for the second time in our history ... Italy was the laboratory in which, faced with the imminent rule of the visual and its simulations, we worked on new postures? (1992b, 6-7)

Here, we can be struck by the centrifugal nature of this commentary, the particular way of pointing out a memory before reactivating it in a form that better fits the era's demands. Writing seems to possess a plural time with layers of memory that all converge towards the present, which appears on its last legs and as deaf as an imperative. Generally speaking, the "Journal de l'an présent" is also constituted of these vertical
blocks of time, which pile up, asymmetrical and disparate blocks
that give the writing a scattered cohesion. To illustrate these
pages, I like to think of the shape of a bunch: a bunch of flowers
in which the flowers take root in the water of memory and, one
by one, open in the passion of a newborn day—although, in this
diary, days no longer actually matter. This was already the case in
the “Journal de l’an nouveau,” which was more directly thematic
and in which paragraphs were separated by titles rather than by
dates. It is again the case in the “Journal de l’an present.” Here,
however, the common thread seems much more erratic.

Usually, the calendar gives the writing of a diary its tempo.
However, when writing emancipates itself from time, it
paradoxically becomes calmer, a calm in which all the words from
the past come back and are mixed together with the fortuitous
event of the day, which appears as if twinned with its ghost of
ideas. The diary detaches itself from the assurance of every-
day life, but gains in prudence what it loses in safety; and this
prudence is the burden of the past. This is the reason why the
“Journal de l’an présent” seems more frantic, the way its parts
are organized seems more instantaneous, decided by Daney him-
self in his interactions with the world or subjected to his TV set
through which the world comes to him, as shown by the following
passage about Bertrand Tavernier entitled “THE SNOW,” which I
am quoting here in full:

I had once again dozed off opposite my friends Bang and
Olufsen, when some sort of vociferation woke me up. I
realized it was a talk show and that Bertrand Tavernier was
talking about his latest film, *La Guerre sans nom*. He was
explaining that the Algerian War, because of its length and
of the mountainous nature of the country, had also been a
war in the snow. And that putting these words together—
“Algerian War” and “snow”—was enough to create a new
vision, a brand-new idea, a simple and daft desire to *see that*.
I am not sure that, despite his shouting, Tavernier convinced
the audience but, for once, he did move me. In fact, only a
filmmaker can still marvel at the possibility of an image that contradicts clichés. An image that is a little more precise or a little more exact, which gives a kind of desire to see, to check, for example, if the Algerian snow from the Aurès mountains was similar to the snow in an Anthony Mann western. All in all, cinema might just be clarifications of this kind: "less vagueness," in exchange for "more pleasure." Marveling at the pleasure of logical reasoning or at the pure and simple exercise of imagination, this exercise that little John Mohune was right to find "rewarding." (Daney 1992b, 9-10)

This excerpt follows Daney's critique of the televised broadcast of the closing ceremony of the Alberville Olympic Games, the 16th Winter Olympics. This gives the impression that Daney fell asleep in front of his TV between two paragraphs. By staging this awakening through writing, it gives the illusion of a real temporal continuity between the two paragraphs. The continuity is even stronger as it blends into a wintery atmosphere, which helps to envision the author's numb body. The snow on the TV, which is no longer broadcasting except for the little imagination it acquired through cinema, and the snow of the static kind on the screen, which gives a name to the interrupted image flow or (quite the reverse) signals that this flow is continuing for the solitude of the channel surfer during his sleepless night (1988); this snow now *awakens*. It allows us to see; it stops the flow of television with the presence of cinema.

In the first paragraph, he writes in the past tense, which is the tense of the somatic. Daney is looking at himself and he is staging a memory, the memory of a motionless stance, which is that of the "*passeur*" who points out what cinema is in televisual drowsiness. In the second part, he writes in the present tense. This is the moment when Daney seems to pick up the memory where he left off, and also when, beyond the TV program, cinema comes back. Here, the reflection goes back to a more general present that wishes to describe a piece of truth unalterable to its images—cinema as a precise gesture: on the basis of a current
event, Tavernier becomes a filmmaker for a short time. From this generic present, Daney pulls out a collective memory, through the image of little John Mohune from *Moonfleet*. This childhood image is omnipresent in Daney's last works and embodies this cinephilic "we"; this "we" that returns to a hallucinated past and has become nearly timeless. Motionless, Daney binds himself to a collective history that he makes emerge within himself, through himself, following the very permeable distinction between individuals and group that would result in "Le Travelling de Kapo" (*Trafic* n° 4), and in one of his best remarks during a carte blanche session in Marseille, in December 1991: "cinema taught the inhabitants of the twentieth century to search and find themselves, one by one, on a screen held out to everyone" (Daney 2015, 123).

In his book *Clio*, written in 1931, Charles Péguy helped to find another image, a precise concept, to describe exactly the movement of this "Journal de l'an présent" in which Daney, between two sleeps, and through an accomplished experience of cinema, closes the loop on his cinephile history and recaptures an image from his childhood. This word is: "senescence."

To age is to pass. To pass from a generation to another, from one time to another. ... *To become* another generation, from another time ... To age is not *having changed age*; it means to change age or, rather, it means having stayed too long in *the same* age. ... Ageing is essentially an operation of return, one filled mostly with regret. Return within oneself, on oneself, on one's age, or rather, on the age preceding what becomes one age, one's actual age. ... Ageing is mainly a memory operation. (Péguy 1931, 226-28)

In the "Journal de l'an présent," Daney could simply be ageing, bringing to his future self some images from his previous age that protect him from the present time and make him continue meeting the world. His actual age, the time he wrote his diaries, becomes this mix between old age and new presences that awaken the undying images of his cinephilia. Through Tavernier's
220 words, John Mohune appears, creating a community whose members, scattered in space and time, finally get together in this off-camera space of thought called upon by *the snow*, to start an exercise of “wonderment,” of “precision,” that is above all “rewarding”—“the pure and simple exercise of imagination” gifted in cinema. Daney *ages*; and all the more so because, since the creation of his new journal, he ages with other people. Through him, and his constant link to a larger group, a community that is admittedly very lively though hidden, *Trafic* is a journal in which names age together; in which the “return within oneself, on one-self” exposed by Péguy is a secret way of more aptly giving others news about one’s era. And the *Trafic* diaries are a way of saying of this era—that it is still the same, still the one of little John Mohune.

*Translated into English by Melina Delmas and revised by Kate Ince*

References

Biette, Jean-Claude. 1993. "À pied d'œuvre." *Trafic* 7: 110-18.

Blanchot, Maurice. 2003. *The Book to Come*. Standford: Stanford University Press.

Daney, Serge. 1988. "En attendant la neige." In *Le salaire du zappeur*, 241-44. Paris: Ramsay.

—. 1991. "Journal de l'an passé." *Trafic* 1: 5-30.

—. 1992a. "Journal de l'an nouveau." *Trafic* 2: 5-18.

—. 1992b. "Journal de l'an présent." *Trafic* 3: 5-24.

—. 2015. "Carte blanche à Serge Daney." In *La Maison cinéma et le monde*, Vol. 4, *Le moment Trafic* (1991-1992). Paris: P.O.L.

Daney, Serge, and Serge Toubiana. 1994. *Persévérance Entretien avec Serge Toubiana*. Paris: P.O.L.

Eisenschitz, Bernard. 1993. "Boris Barnet: journal de Moscou." *Trafic* 5: 117-35.

Interview with Patrice Rollet. 2018.

Interview with Serge Daney and Jean-Claude Biette. no date. Interview by Laura Laufer. Accessed September 17, 2020. http://www.lauralaufer.com/spip/IMG/mp3/_Daney_Biette-mp3-2.mp3.

Léon, Pierre. 2013. *Jean-Claude Biette, le sens du paradoxe*. Paris: Capricci.

Macheret, Mathieu. 2016. "Voyages en cinéma." *Trafic* 100: 135-39.

Péguy, Charles. 1931. *Clio*. Paris: Gallimard.
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# Serge Daney and *Trafic*: Round Table with the Members of the Editorial Board

The round table took place at the Institut National d'Histoire de l'Art (Paris), on September 28, 2018. Arranged by Pierre Eugène.

## Serge Daney and *Trafic*

**Patrice Rollet [PR]:** I got to know Serge relatively late, when I was literary director at *Cahiers du cinéma* and he was at *Libération* and would stop by on his way home. He would talk for hours every time and we would let him cheer himself up in this way. I'd heard about a journal project at the time, the "Ur-*Trafic*" or "paléo-*Trafic*," a project he'd had in 1987 or 1988 for a journal that would be produced by a cinema producer (Paolo Branco) rather than published by a publisher. I don't know where the discussions got to; Branco would know. Raising this possibility again with Serge, our first thought was to make *Trafic* a quarterly supplement to *Cahiers du cinéma*. Paul-Raymond Cohen's initial draft was indeed developed at the desk of the editorial team of the time. The project was already very clear in Serge's head. As you know, he then fell ill. And he decided to stop everything, including the *Trafic*
project, in order to concentrate on a book that would have been
a written form of *Persévérance* (not just the interview he did with
Serge Toubiana). That then lasted a few months. I remember that
the first design for which Serge wrote a kind of summary of the
first issue of *Trafic* dates from the end of June or early July of 1991.
Then, after two or three months, his desire to go ahead with *Trafic*
returned, but this time with the decision to cut the umbilical cord
between him and *Cahiers*. At this point he looked for a publisher,
and through Leslie Kaplan who wanted to get him to write a book
for P.O.L., he met Paul Otchakovsky-Laurens. He gathered a few
people around him who he felt would be compatible: Raymond
for everything he could offer theoretically and for his connections
with the world of contemporary art and installations; Jean-Claude
Biette, a longstanding comrade from *Cahiers*; me more for my
editing work at *Cahiers du cinema* that he liked; also Yann Lardeau,
who did not become involved at all, and Sylvie, whom Serge called
upon very early on.

So we met up. Discussions were held about what *Trafic* was to be. It was clear to him that that he would write the introductory text but that it wouldn't be an editorial—which is where the fake-real diary form of the first three issues came from. At the end of the issue, Jean-Claude was to write a text “responding” to the introductory text. The texts are actually much more out of sync with one another than that when you read them, but that was the initial idea.

The journal was conceived as very open to the art world, from
prehistoric painting right up to contemporary art. What seems
very important to me is that at the moment that he launched
*Trafic*, Serge was effecting a return to cinema and to cinema as a
point of view on the world. And that this was to be the “DNA” of
*Trafic*, as he put it.

**Raymond Bellour** [RB]: When Serge found out he was ill, we
really had to persuade him to carry on. We saw him one by one,
talked to him, and promised to support him, to work with him
and to be fully involved. Doing this helped us to feel comforted
ourselves, and gave this "year of *Trafic*" the particular color of an
existential commitment that forged a very strong bond between
us, one that continued even after Serge died.

Serge used to insist on the fact that the verb "revoir" [to see
again, review, revise] is related to the word "revue" [journal,
review]. That the journal would be concerned with current events,
but that current events implied two things: both the films coming
out and being made and the festivals taking place, but also the
concern of each of the editors with what was current for them
personally. In other words, if Patrice, Sylvie, or I were to wake up
one morning saying "I'd like to talk about Stroheim," our current
interest was just as valuable as the most recent film released by
a known director. I'll read you the last part of the statement of
intentions written by Serge, which describes what will be in the
journal:

1. Very personal articles that follow current events in the cinema
from day to day

2. "Letters from" written in a deliberately epistolary style from
distant friends in isolated locations

3. French and non-French texts from cinema's past that have
remained unpublished for explicable or dubious reasons, or
that have become unavailable

4. Texts by filmmakers representing different stages of their
work, such as notes, appraisals of progress, or work-in-progress drafts

5. Texts dedicated more precisely to the adventures of art in
general

6. Freely written essays by philosophers, writers, and novelists

7. One-off cinephilic essays that are untimely or unwelcome

We more or less stuck to this program. In spite of the years that
have passed and of predictable evolutions, I have the feeling that
it's still the same journal. I always wrap an issue up by asking
myself what Serge would have thought of it.