Serge Daney: Postcards from Cinema

The work of French film critic Serge Daney has for too long remained a gap in the world of English language film criticism. In fact, his proper introduction is so overdue that the very mention of this deficiency is itself becoming something of a cliché. Apart from a few texts that have shown up on the internet or in various collections, there has been no English translation of a book by Serge Daney. Obviously lacunae, fissures and slight treatment will always haunt the substance of our knowledge and our corpus of world art and literature. From France alone we are still on unfamiliar terrain with Jean-Louis Schefer’s writing on cinema, while Jean-Claude Biette remains an obscure figure both as a filmmaker and a critic; Philippe Arnaud, Nicole Brenez, Alain Philippon, Alain Bergala…a seemingly endless “missing” or “most wanted” list. But it is an easy and even futile task to simply point out what is lacking. To fill the various gaps it’s not enough to merely cite the absence and give it a proper name; the work of reparation must be undertaken as well. With this end in mind, a number of events have been produced to try and bring Serge Daney to the English-speaking world.