How is it that a central figure in French film writing — an editor of Cahiers through the 1970s and a contributor to the daily Libération — is getting translated into English so late? Hamrah’s answer, in the introduction to this book, points to the politically charged conditions of his critical practice. In some sense, “an engagement with Daney means a rejection of America and its hollow film review sector.” I’ve certainly never read an American film review that made considered references to Engels and Mao.
This first volume of Serge Daney’s collected writings — a chubby 700-pager — is bathed in the cultural wake of May ‘68 in France. He utilizes Althusser’s concepts of Ideological State Apparatus and so on, while also aware of the revisionism of the Communist Party of France, of which the philosopher was a leading member.
In addition to witnessing the high tide and retreat of revolution, Daney was also situated in a transitional moment in film history. As Hamrah explains, he had one foot in the classical studio system at its most rarified, and the other foot in the pupal stage of late Cold War culture. “He was fortunate enough to arrive on the scene in the 1960s, but not too early in the ‘60s, at the twilight of the classic auteurs, when they were still making films but they were their last films.”
Reading through the massive collection of critical notices (on the cinema of Hawkes, Peckinpah, Preminger, Edwards, Jerry Lewis [!], Rossellini, Tati, Godard & Gorin, Spielberg, Coppola, and plenty more), you can put together an elementary criteria for what exactly defines an auteur.
An auteur puts forward a single ideology or vision of society; a director can say the same stuff again without being an auteur. An auteur marshals a unique set of formal strategies to realize the vision. And finally the thematic and formal consistencies should add up to an oeuvre.
The concept always had a “tang of snobbery” to it (using Bordwell’s memorable phrase), especially considering the opposite number of an auteur: a hired gun, a journeyman artisan. That is, something belonging to an earlier and less developed economic system. But perhaps the high end dream-manufacturing of auteurism’s heyday (when Europe’s film industries had to essentially start from square one after WWII) has already been superseded.
A lot of international cinema these days may resemble what Cahiers under Daney’s editorship called “Esperanto” cinema: a universal film language, easy to learn and employ:
The notorious “erasure” of the filmmaker becomes an axiom. Generalized transparency. The filmmaker chooses neither his subjects nor his media.
Another interesting passage, this time from a piece on Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979):
The history of cinema goes hand in glove with the history of war. The French army was one of the first operators of the Lumiere brothers’ invention. Once it became global, waged by everyone against everyone, war drove all of modern European cinema, from Rome, Open City to The Carabineers. Bazin has written about the delight taken in the “spectacle of urban destruction” that he called the “Nero complex,” for which he considered cinema to be the privileged site.
The most comprehensive look at Daney’s critical doctrine comes from a central, serialized essay for Cahiers called “The Critical Function.” It’s certainly his most explicit engagement with Marxist concepts.
“People will say that this is stating the obvious. That every Marxist knows (as part of his ABCs) that the dominant ideology belongs to the dominant class and that film is yet another tool for the bourgeoisie to impose upon us its vision of the world.” What saves these assertions from being doxa in the mouth of the critic is to elucidate, on a text-by-text basis, “how” the vision is imposed.
For Daney, the process trades on each film’s “specific relation” between utterance and enunciation, the discourse in the foreground, and the social backdrop that maintains it. The enunciation is conscious, like the individual vision of a great auteur filmmaker, but the utterances are spontaneous, unconscious reflections of social ideology. “…behind the auteur and his rich subjectivity, a class — ultimately — is always speaking.”
Daney’s key text by Mao is the Talks at the Yenan Forum on Literature and Art, but he could have easily quoted from On Practice: “In class society everyone lives as a member of a particular class, and every kind of thinking, without exception, is stamped with the brand of a class.”
From these brief thoughts on the class utility of art, Daney pivots into the more obscure (to me), “Marxist-Lacanian” language of the desire for pleasure articulated by ideology. “Ideology gives pleasure. Ideologies give pleasure. But stepping out of ideology does not mean stepping out of desire, trading its illusions for the (scientific) profit of an overarching gaze or an unhappy (pleasureless) conscience.”
All films have militant positivity — that is, they all put forward an ideology that is deliberate addressed to a certain audience. Daney’s question is “whom does [the enunciation] serve?”
Along with the resurgence of international Communism (now ebbing away in the mid-’70s) , Daney here also takes concern with the persistence of the fascist movement. All these reflections of sexuality and desire as entangled with politics was prompted by the initiative taken by fascist aesthetics.
Fascism poses two questions today: one of power as an exception (bourgeois democracy’s exit) and one of the eroticization of that power. On these questions, the economic tradition of Marxism, which we have inherited along with that of revisionism, falls silent.
He seems to pick up class analysis only to put it down, in favor of psychoanalysis. Rather par-for-the-course with the New Left experience.
For being a leftwing critic, Daney had some striking opinions on certain classic political films. Judgment at Nuremberg (1961) he found boring. And most shocking is his seven-line pan of How Yukong Moved the Mountains (1976), a documentary that today reads as a mind-blowing window into the PRC as the Cultural Revolution was winding down. “The directors have greatly underestimated the double, triple, quadruple play between power and the Chinese masses.” Okay then…
The eighth and final part of the book is headed “Volleys.” I had taken it to mean that this section would contain polemical correspondence.
But actually, Daney also liked to write about tennis. Especially tennis as it appears on TV. The television camera and screen love the arrangement of a tennis match, and moreover, “it’s tennis, more than many other sports, that produces the clearest, most legible emblematic image of modern sport.”
All in all, this first volume of Daney’s collected work was an interesting read. Daney’s brief life took place in an era of revolutionary high tide throughout the world, a result of which was how aspects of Marxist language and the Marxist perspective left their influence on so much of culture and critique. And when the proletarian revolution receded by the end of the 60s, and recently decolonized nations got their native film industries underway, Daney was on the ground to witness the developments of “Third World” cinema.
He’s also a practitioner of postmodernism of the Barthes-type in his practical film criticism, which lends itself to that kind of abstract prose of disembodied concepts. This idiom of critical theory is very hard to read, if you’re not reading lots of it all the time.
Perhaps the most dismaying aspect of this style of thought is the libertarianism it falls into when it comes to matters of reflexive taste. Daney quotes Mao saying that every class in every historical situation creates its own criteria for its cultural products, but the “commitment” to Marxist criticism doesn’t go as far as to discuss what specific needs art fulfills at a given moment.
Formalism and style prevail. Daney doesn’t like works that directly reflect a revolutionary situation, like Yukong. A “Marxist filmmaker” to him would be the immaculate Mizoguchi.
He was content, by the late ‘70s, to ironically look back on this political period as a “caricature” of the commitment of French intellectuals in the ‘20s. He and his comrades were “grieving for a Stalinist politics through a Chinese image-system.”
Many if not most leftwing critics today sneer at the idea of taking seriously a consistent ideological approach to art. They are lax in art, which Daney had identified with Trotskyism. To be a Marxist critic is to be just “Marxist” enough that you look cool in polite society while scandalizing the rightwingers — but all the while insisting, “Don’t worry, I’m not a Marxist-Marxist.”
A. S. Hamrah elegantly captures the petty-bourgeois appetite for the marginal and obscure, for the counter-intuitive insight over solid truth for the benefit of the working masses, in the end of his Introduction: “the only worthwhile things are the ones no one cares about.”
Such are the lasting impressions from this first volume of Daney’s collected writings.
Read Hamrah’s introduction in the Baffler.