Serge Daney and Queer Cinephilia (2024)

meson press

Serge Daney and Queer Cinephilia, edited by Pierre Eugène, Kate Ince, and Marc Siegel

2024 •

Marc Siegel

French critic Serge Daney was a central figure in film, television and media criticism of the second half of the twentieth century. He died of AIDS in 1992, just as the concept of queer cinema entered international film studies and just before the start of the digital era that has transformed film culture. This collection of new essays investigates the legacy of Daney’s work alongside considerations of feminist, queer and digital cinephilia and contemporary practices of film curation.

Carte postale à Serge Daney

Andrea Inzerillo

How come a queer festival dedicates a whole section (the History of Cinema section of the Sicilia Queer filmfest) to Serge Daney? I will try to answer by telling a bit about the story of this section and above all about its ambition: I hope that in doing so I will be able to offer some possible ideas regarding the crucial question about what relationships can exist, or can be created, between Daney and the queer.

Cinema – Arte, Tecnologia, Comunicação

Meta-cinematic Cultism: Between High and Low Culture

2016 •

Fátima Chinita

Meta-cinema can depict film viewers’ attitudes towards cinema and their type of devotion for films. One subcategory of viewers - which I call meta-spectators - is highly specialized in its type of consumption, bordering on obsession. I contend that there are two main varieties of meta-cinematic reception, not altogether incompatible with one another, despite their apparent differences. As both of them are depicted on meta-cinematic products, the films themselves are the best evidence of my typology. My categories of film viewers are the ‘cinephile’, an elite prone to artistic militancy and the adoration of filmic masters; and the ‘fan’, a low culture consumer keen on certain filmic universes and their respective figures and motifs. I will base my rationale on four films that portray such reception practices: "Travelling Avant" (Jean-Charles Tacchella, 1987, FRA), "The Dreamers" (Bernardo Bertolucci, 2003, UK/FRA/ITA); "Free Enterprise" (Robert Mayer Burnett, 1998, USA); "Fanboys" (2009, Kyle Newman, USA).

HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe)

The Story of a Myth: The “Tracking Shot in Kapò” or the Making of French Film Ideology

2016 •

Jean-Marc Leveratto

“Furtive, Steady Glances: On the Emergence and Cultural Politics of Lesbian and Gay Film Festivals.” Dissertation. Montreal: McGill University, Department of Art History and Communication Studies, 2008.

Ger Zielinski

Daney in English: A Letter to Trafic

Jonathan Rosenbaum

A detailed examination of why more of the work of Serge Daney isn't available in English.

“Luxe, Calme et volupté”: Iconography of the French Riviera in Cinema

Felicity Chaplin

In Making Paradise: Art, Modernity and the Myth of the Riviera, Kenneth E. Silver remarks that “it was the status conferred on the coast by art ... that transformed the Riviera from a physical space into a site of the imagination.”1 Painters, photographers, sculptors and architects “turned geography into myth.”2 This paper extends Silver’s study by considering the way in which cinema has contributed to the mythology of the French Riviera. In this paper, I propose an iconographical study of representations of the French Riviera in a sample of films from French, Hollywood and British cinema, including Varda’s Du côté de la côte (1958), Godard’s Pierrot le fou and Deray’s La Piscine (1969) and I will look at the way cinema reworks motifs associated with the Cote d’Azur in literature, art, photography and mass culture. I also consider how familiar tropes – scenic coastlines, sumptuous villas, swimming pools – persist in cinema today, using the particular example of Woody Allen’s Magic in the Moonlight (2014) and the debt it owes to earlier representations. In a more general sense, this paper examines the way art and culture overdetermine representations and notions of place, creating typical images and associations in the cultural imagination. Cinema draws on these images and associations and it is the task of the iconographer to trace their origins and destination. 1. Kenneth E. Silver, Making Paradise: Art, Modernity and the Myth of the Riviera (Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press, 2001), 25. 2. Kenneth E. Silver, Making Paradise, 25.

Third Text

2023 •

Jay Murphy

Permutations of cinephilia: aesthetics, technology, and social consciousness

2014 •

Hugo Ríos-Cordero

Pedagogies of the Image between Daney and Deleuze

Garin Dowd

This paper examines Gilles Deleuze’s employment of the concept of the ‘pedagogy of the image’ which was first developed by the film critic Serge Daney in two seminal essays in the mid-1970s in Cahiers du cinema. It will seek to foreground the ‘Daney effect’ (Bellour, Trafic 50: 75–86, 2004) in the second half of Cinema 2: The Time-Image where the influence of Daney, along with Bonitzer, Bergala and other film theorists is most pronounced. It will examine the ‘traffic’ of the image and of ideas of the image between Deleuze and Daney as each, in the course of the 1980s, sought to address mutations in the scopic regime. Thus the paper proposes the trope ‘pedagogies of the image between Daney and Deleuze’. Keywords: pedagogy of the image; Gilles Deleuze; Serge Daney; Cahiers du cinema; Straub/Huillet; Godard