The Cinema House and the World – Serge Daney
The Cinema House and the World: The Cahiers du Cinema Years, 1962–1981 / ISBN 9781635901610 / 2022 hardcover edition from Semiotext(e), 600 pages
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One of the greatest film critics of his generation, Serge Daney wrote for Cahiers du Cinéma before becoming a journalist for the daily newspaper Libération. The writings collected in this volume reflect Daney’s evolving interests, from the auteur approach of the French New Wave to a more structural examination of film, psychoanalysis, and popular culture. Openly gay throughout his lifetime, Daney rarely wrote explicitly about homosexuality but his writings reflect a queer sensibility that would influence future generations. In regular intellectual exchanges with Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, and Roland Barthes, Daney wrote about cinema autobiographically, while lyrically analyzing the transition from modern cinema to postmodern media. A noted polymath, Daney also published books about tennis and Haiti’s notorious Duvalier regime. His criticism is open and challenging, polyvocal and compulsively readable.
“Serge Daney was the end of criticism as I understood it.” —Jean-Luc Godard
