Serge Daney

Serge Daney (June 4, 1944, Paris – June 12, 1992) was an influential French movie critic who went on from writing film reviews to developing a “television criticism” and onto building a personal theory of the image. Although highly regarded in French and European film criticism circles, his work remains little known to English-speaking audiences, largely because it has not been consistently translated.

At the Voltaire High School in Paris Lycée Voltaire (Paris) , Daney received his first film teachings from Henri Agel, one of the most respected critics of the time. With two high school friends, Louis Skorecki and Claude Dépêche, he founded a short-lived film magazine called Visages du cinéma which only saw two editions, on Howard Hawks (containing Daney's first published text - a review of Rio Bravo called "An Adult Art") and on Otto Preminger.

In 1964, Daney joined the French film magazine Cahiers du cinéma with a series of interviews of American film directors (notably Howard Hawks, Leo McCarey, Josef von Sternberg and Jerry Lewis) conducted with Jean Louis Noames (aka Louis Skorecki) during a trip to Hollywood. He writes regularly for the magazine which was moving on from its "yellow cover” beginnings (the time of André Bazin, François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Éric Rohmer and Jacques Rivette - roughly 1951-1959) and was about to enter a period of heavy theoretical debates and radical political engagement after 1968.

Between 1968 and 1971, Daney also makes a series of travels to India, Morocco and Africa and starts lecturing cinema at the Censier University (Paris III). After Cahiers’ failure to create a “Revolutionary Cultural Front”, Daney took the responsibility of the magazine in 1973, supported by Serge Toubiana. Together, they operated a "return to cinema" for the magazine and also invited thinkers from outside the field of cinema: Michel Foucault, Jacques Rancière and Gilles Deleuze.

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