Serge Daney and Queer Cinephilia

This project looked at the French film and television critic Serge Daney (1944-92), and at his relationship with the twenty-first century’s new, queer and feminist modes of cinephilia. It was funded through the AHRC’s Research Network scheme and ran from 1 July 2018 to 30 June 2021.

Serge Daney is a central figure in film and television criticism of the post-war era. From 1964 he wrote for the leading French film journal Cahiers du cinéma, and was its Chief Editor from 1973 to 1981. He then went on to write for the French daily Libération and to found the film magazine Trafic. He died of AIDS in 1992, just before the start of the digital era that has transformed film criticism and cinephilia.

Daney's criticism incorporated psychoanalytic, Marxist and media theory, and offers many points of connection with current film and media studies. In France, Daney is acknowledged as a key influence by a broad range of philosophers, theorists, critics and filmmakers. However, his work has never been systematically translated into English, and has not received the international scholarly attention it deserves. Daney was the embodiment of a particularly French kind of cinephilia, dubbing himself a ciné-fils (son of the cinema, punning on cine-phile). However, his work’s links to studies of queer cinema (the New Queer Cinema of the 1990s and more recent productions) have received very little attention in Europe. This network will focus on these and on less patriarchal, queer and feminist forms of cinephilia: who are the ciné-filles of today?

The network, which is being led by Professor Kate Ince of LCAHM (PI) and Professor Marc Siegel of the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz (Co-I), addressed these areas in a set of three workshops  held in Paris (organized by Pierre Eugène), Mainz and Birmingham in 2018 and 2019. They established an international network of scholars, critics and curators who will develop future research on Daney and queer cinephilia.

Professor Kate Ince

Kate Ince is Professor of French Film and Visual Studies at the University of Birmingham. She has published widely on French cinema and on authorship in cinema, including the books Georges Franju (MUP 2005, also published in French by L’Harmattan/Presses Universitaires de Laval in 2008), and the edited volume Five Directors: Auteurism from Assayas to Ozon (MUP 2008). Following in-depth research into feminist and film phenomenologies, her study of female subjectivities in contemporary women’s cinema The Body and the Screen appeared with Bloomsbury early in 2017, and won the BAFTSS association’s prize for the best monograph of that year in April 2018. She has also edited special issues of New Cinemas (2008) and Studies in European Cinema (2013) entitled ‘Disunited Nations’ and ‘Women’s cinema in France in the 2000s’ respectively, and her study of the French director Mia Hansen-Løve for Edinburgh University Press’s ‘Visionaries’ series on women filmmakers appeared in February 2021. The collaboration with Marc Siegel on ‘Serge Daney and queer cinephilia’ initially arose out of a workshop she organized in June 2016 that was funded by the strategic partnership between the University of Birmingham and the Goethe-Universität, Frankfurt.

Kate's profile

Professor Marc Siegel

Marc Siegel is Professor of Film Studies at the Johannes Gutenburg University in Mainz. His research and publications focus on issues in queer studies and experimental film. His book A Gossip of Images is forthcoming from Duke University Press. He is co-editor of Film Culture 80: The Legend of Barbara Rubin (2018) and a 2014 special issue of journal Criticism dedicated to the American underground artist Jack Smith. He has also co-edited two German-language anthologies Synchronisierung der Künste/Synchronizing the Arts (2013) and Outside. Die Politik queerer Räume/The Politics of Queer Spaces (2005). Siegel has also been active as a freelance curator. He curated numerous film series and programs for film and performance festivals, as well as museums und galleries, including the Berlinale; Tate Modern (London); CCCB (Barcelona), Bunkier Sztuki (Cracow) and the Goethe Institute (Kolkata). He also co-curated the festivals "EDIT FILM CULTURE !" (2018); "Camp/Anti-Camp: A Queer Guide to Everyday Life" (2012); and "LIVE FILM! JACK SMITH! Five Flaming Days in a Rented World " (2009). He is on the advisory board of the Forum Expanded section of the Berlinale and one of the co-founders of the Berlin-based artists' collective CHEAP.

Pierre Eugène

Pierre Eugène is Associate Professor in Film Studies at the Université of Picardie Jules Verne (Amiens, France). His research focuses mainly on the French critic and theoretician Serge Daney and on some other French critics and directors who gravitated towards the Cahiers du cinéma (André Bazin, Jean-Claude Biette, Luc Moullet, Louis Skorecki) : he collaborated on the French edition of the complete writings of André Bazin, under the direction of Hervé Joubert-Laurencin (ed. Macula, 2018), and directed with Hervé Joubert-Laurencin and Philippe Fauvel Jean-Claude Biette, appunti e contrappunti (De l’Incidence éditeur, Grenoble, 2018). Member of the editorial board of the Cahiers du cinéma since June 2020, he also published articles in Trafic and book chapters about classical Hollywood and modern European cinema (Marguerite Duras, Georges Cukor, Jean-Luc Godard, Nanni Moretti, Jacques Tourneur). He is currently preparing a study of the movie Femmes femmes (Paul Vecchiali, 1974) and the publication of his PhD thesis on Serge Daney defended in 2017 : Les années non-légendaires de Serge Daney : 1962-1982. Exercices de relecture (ed. du Linteau, 2021). He convenes the website (in construction): www.daney.net.

Changing and Exchanging: Serge Daney mid-stream

Workshop 1 of ‘Serge Daney and queer cinephilia’ project
27-28 September 2018, Institut national de l’histoire de l’art, Paris.

“As a passeur I stayed midstream, waiting for someone from one of the banks to call me or reach out to me, and since that never happened I began to send little messages, both written and oral, sending news from one bank to the other without myself belonging to either of them” (Persévérance, Paris, P.O.L 1994, p.64).

Serge Daney, at the end of his life, revealed himself to be a passeur : a messenger, a go-between, a mediator among creators and spectators. At the same time, he persisted obstinately in trying to distinguish between two notions: “image” and “visual”. If the visual is a “loop”, wrote Daney, “[t]he image always takes place at the border of two force fields, it is meant to bear witness to a certain otherness ; and although it always has a hard core, it always lacks something. The image is always more and less than itself.” More than itself, meaning it is a recording surface, bearing more meanings than those who make and see it imagine; less than itself : needing to be edited with other images, in order to grow and acquire a raison d’être.

Between the “more and less than itself”: shortfall of the self, necessity of otherness. “Serge Daney amid others” will be the theme of this workshop, which will address how the notions of group, community, link, exchange, mediation, intervention, all these modes of relating to the other or others are revealed to be fundamental to and ongoing in Daney’s critical, theoretical and analytic work – and may even constitute the essence of the critical act itself.

• Changing and Exchanging programme [PDF, 2.5 MB]

International Daney: Queer and Feminist Implications

Workshop 2 of ‘Serge Daney and queer cinephilia’ project
25 January 2019, Johannes Gutenberg University, Mainz.

Film critic Serge Daney is a legendary figure in the world of French film. He began writing for Cahiers du cinéma in 1964 and was editor-in-chief of the magazine from 1973 until 1981, at which point he became a journalist for Libération. In 1991, Daney left the daily newspaper to found the journal Trafic. He died of complications due to AIDS in 1992. His criticism, collected into numerous French-language books, exerted great influence on filmmakers and theorists, including Jean-Luc Godard and Gilles Deleuze, both of whom have acknowledged his importance to their own work and thought. Outside of France, Daney is primarily known only to francophilic and some queer film enthusiasts. A number of his essays have been translated into English and published online (http://sergedaney.blogspot.com/), but there is only one English-language book, Postcards from the Cinema (2007), a translation of a series of discussions with Serge Toubiana. There are two books in German, Von der Welt ins Bild. Augenzeugenberichte eines Cinephilens (2000), a selection of essays edited by Christa Blümlinger, and a translation of the Toubiana discussions, which is out of print (Im Verborgenen. Kino. Reise. Kritik, 2000).

Openly gay throughout his lifetime but decisively private about his homosexuality, Daney rarely touched on the subject in his articles. Nevertheless, as a prominent gay critic in a predominantly heterosexual male film culture, he remains of almost singular importance for international francophilic, queer cinephiles. This primarily has biographical reasons. But is there more to Daney's queerness than a mere erotic interest in boys and men? Can a queer perspective elucidate aspects of his work that have hitherto remained obscured? How does a queer Daney circulate and what does this circulation make possible both for thinking about Daney and for thinking more broadly about film criticism and programming? Daney referred to himself as a cinéfils – a play on words linking cinephilia with kinship to produce a "son of cinema." But where are the daughters? What about the cinéfilles? Can a "queer Daney" open up a critical space for a feminist cinephilia as well? This one day workshop will bring together critics, scholars and curators to discuss the queer and feminist implications of Daney's work.

• International Daney programme [PDF, 87 KB]

Queer and Feminist Cinephilia

Workshop 3 of ‘Serge Daney and queer cinephilia’ project
10 May 2019, University of Birmingham.

Taking account of the findings of the first two workshops but focussing on contemporary cinephilia rather than on Serge Daney, this workshop will ask ‘what forms has feminist and queer cinephilia taken since 1968?’ The 1970s and 1980s were the era of video collectives and early feminist film festivals, joined first by lesbian and gay then queer film festivals (now held in scores of cities across the world) from the moment of New Queer Cinema onwards. The digital era has seen an expansion of cinephilic practices, from websites and blogs to today’s online communities and social media groups, with the curation and exhibition of hard-to-see material a vital addition to these activities. Over these decades, how has feminist and queer cinephilia developed? Has it diminished or intensified? What are its dominant cultural forms in the twenty-first century?

• Queer and Feminist Cinephilia programme [PDF, 37 KB]

Serge Daney and Queer Cinephilia

Edited by Pierre Eugène, Kate Ince and Marc Siegel

Contents

Introduction: Kate Ince and Marc Siegel

1. Pierre Eugène, "Serge Daney and Homosexuality: A Matter of Smuggling"
2. Andrea Inzerillo, "Carte Postale à Serge Daney"
3. Theresa Heath, "Clip Reels and Community: Queer Cinephilia at the Queer Film Festival"
4. So Mayer and Selina Robertson, Club des Femmes, “Revolt, She Said: Queer Feminist Film Curation and the Freedom to Revolt”

CHANGING AND EXCHANGING: SERGE DANEY MIDSTREAM

5. Garin Dowd, “Cinephilia Falls to Earth: Thinking the Image after Daney”
6. Bamchade Pourvali, “Thinking the Future of Cinema”
7. Claire Allouche, “Showing Cinema Where It Happens: Serge Daney, a Global Cinema Critic”
8. Hervé Joubert-Laurencin, "Ping-ponging with Daney"
9. Simon Pageau, “A Few Diaries in the Early Volumes of Trafic”
10. Raymond Bellour, Sylvie Pierre, Patrice Rollet, Marcos Uzal, Pierre Eugène, “Serge Daney and Trafic: Round Table with the Members of the Editorial Board”

DIGITAL DANEY

11. Pierre Eugène, “Serge Daney and the Robots”
12. Chloé Galibert-Lainé, “A Video Exploration of a Viewer’s Account: L’oeil était dans la tombe et regardait Daney”
13. Philipp Dominik Keidl, “Cinephilic Fandom”

Available on Open Access from Meson Press (PDF)