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The Cinema House and the World: The Cahiers du Cinema Years, 1962-1981
Maybe someday
26
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
9/100Critics
44/100Scholars
Author:
Serge Daney, A.S. Hamrah, Christine Pichini
Publisher:
Semiotext(e)
Date:
September 6, 2022
The writings of one of the greatest film critics of his generation on the auteur approach of the French New Wave to a more structural examination of film.
What The Reviewers Say
... 597 heady pages.
... it is his discussion of the real-world implications of movies that gives his naturally abstract inclinations a spark of life, investing his criticism with a passionate energy and a propulsive sense of purpose. To put it bluntly, it takes a little while for the book to get good.
Dense with theoretical tangents, promiscuously associative, and characterized by a prose that shifts constantly between the poeticism of Continental philosophers like Walter Benjamin and Jacques Derrida and the casual tempos of first-person journalism, Daney’s writing isn’t 'clean' or easily digestible—there is no easy transmission of facts and ideas, but rather a kind of intellectual grazing. Much like Daney himself—who, often penniless, traveled to places like India, Hong Kong, and Africa, covering film festivals, familiarizing himself with the local film culture, finding tour guides in the young men he took as fleeting lovers—his writing wanders in unpredictable directions. It resists translation and has an unsettling, conflicted quality, best embodied in Hamrah’s observation that Daney 'loved the American cinema' but 'resisted where it comes from'.
Daney keeps plot synopsis to a bare minimum, if he bothers with it at all. While he can be blunt in his valuations, more often you have to cling tightly to the winding turns of his writing in order to extract anything resembling a 'conclusion'.
