Postcards from the Cinema

by Serge Daney, Paul Grant

Postcards from the Cinema is the book Serge Daney, one of the greatest of film critics, never wrote. It is based around an interview that was to be the starting point for a book, a project cut short by Daney's death. Postcards turns a history of cinema into a profound meditation on the art and politics of film.Daney's passionate and lucid engagement with film, combined with his concern for journalistic clarity, effectively created film criticism as a genre. Equally at home with the theories of Deleuze, Lacan and Debord as he was with the movie-making of Bunuel, Godard and Ray, Daney was also a fan of Jerry Lewis and Hitchcock. At the same time - and before his time - he championed the critical analysis of television and other audio-visual media.Long-awaited, this is the first book-length translation of Daney's work, testimony to a life lived with a fierce love of film.

Genres: Film, Nonfiction

160 pages, Paperback

First published March 15, 2007

Reviews

[Jesse · Rating 4 out of 5]

Such an odd collection—odd in the sense that it feels like such a breezy, straightforward read while reading it, but step away for a moment and its complexity and mystery is immediately sensed (frankly, I now feel like I really haven't grasped much of it all). The long essay that opens the collection, the justifiably famous "The Tracking Shot in Kapo," sets the stage for many of the themes that will reoccur constantly throughout the collection: cinephilia, obviously, but mixed liberally with anecdotal autobiography, ethical investigation and a fair amount of genuine, good-natured bemusement in regards to this thing called life. This is all heightened by the realization that most of the content collected here comes from an intensive interview session that took place just five months before Daney's passing, and it certainly bears the kind of grave density accompanying the last words of a man who knows he's dying. There's actually not a whole lot about films or film criticism to be found here; instead it's the testament of a life both utterly imbued and devoted to cinema, and a critical vision utterly insistent on accounting for the messy ambiguities presented by lived life.


"And this world, which no longer revolts me, which provokes only lassitude and uneasiness, is precisely the world 'without cinema.' That is to say, without this feeling of belonging to humanity via a supplementary country called cinema. And then I clearly see why I adopted cinema: so it could adopt me in return and could teach me to ceaselessly touch—with the gaze—that distance between myself and the place where the other begins."

[Lauren Drozd]

invigorating and frequently touching, especially on the formal level of an interview between two old friends, at the close of one’s life. love the way daney talks about travelling, the worlding of cinema, the ethics of the frame and the image. he has a very distinct, unusual awareness of himself as a historical subject, which i find very interesting. there’s also a bit where he briefly gets angry about hijabs, just in case you forgot that this is a french man

[Otie · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this on my iPod, that's how good it is (or would be, if the translation were better).