Trafic n°100 – L’écran, l’écrit

There’s a beautiful idea at the heart of the 100^th issue of Trafic, which is to get thirty-six different writers to write their equivalent of Serge Daney’s Tracking Shot in Kapo – to reflect on an important essay or film book that has personally marked them. The issue is at its best when the essays are the closest to the original spirit of Daney’s journal: cinephile, erudite, personal, heartfelt and as Deleuze would characterize Daney’s thought, both optimistic and pessimistic. If Daney was able to reflect on his life and pinpoint Jacques Rivette’s On Abjection as offering a moral compass for his life, then these responses are too at their best when they conjure a life, morality and a way to live with the cinema.

The issue proceeds chronologically from the foundational studies of the early twentieth century through the Occupation to the post-war period to the events of May ’68 all of the way the present day. This is an ethos that developed in the context particular to the history of French film culture.

So Jacques Aumont joyfully imagines a conversation between Jean Epstein (whose Bonjour Cinéma graces the cover) and the Cinema screen, Jean-Louis Comolli goes in depth on the influence of Freud’s L’Avenir d’une illusion on his life and its appropriation to film analysis, and Pierre Gabaston writes about André Malraux and his importance. Two of Trafic’s committee member Patrice Rollet and Raymond Bellour both write on Surrealism through their essays on André Breton and Ado Kyrou. While the other two editors Sylvie Pierre Ulmann writes about introducing Glauber Rocha to France and Marcos Uzal on Barthélemy Amengual’s fine book on Jean Eustache.

The essays work best when there is a sense of surprise to the choices and when the most obvious work by their authors are not the ones that are discussed. Though you can find Luc Moullet writing on François Truffaut’s Certain Tendency essay (perhaps already too commented upon, but the more Moullet the better) and Jean Narboni on André Bazin’s Montage, Interdit (one of his most famous essays), you can also find Dominique Païni on Rivette’s Lettre sur Rossellini and how it helped him both as a critic and programmer, Fabrice Revault meditating on his own film-going pleasures that parallel Roland Barthes’ in En sortant du cinéma, Jean-Michel Alberola on the relation between music and film spring-boarded from Louis Skorecki’s Contre la Nouvelle Cinéphilie, and Dork Zabunyan on how Daney’s essay on Federico Fellini’s Ginger et Fred articulated how he perceived Rome when he was living there. The essays on Claude Ollier and Jean Collet are also superb and the filmmakers Eugène Green and Philippe Grandrieux respectfully have essays on Robert Bresson and Samuel Beckett.

The pleasure from reading these articles comes from how they offer new perspectives on previously read texts and how they create a desire to revisit them. They provide historical context about the earlier pieces and how they were received and how their meaning has evolved over time. The articles provide thoughts and understanding that go beyond their particular analysis. For example, Jean Louis Schefer in his letter describes the influence the bible had on the cinema (you can probably imagine a dozen classical Hollywood films based on its scripture), which for me was particularly resonant after seeing Martin Scorsese’s Silence whose testing of faith while the world is collapsing is another new example. A recently discovered Daney essay Godard, morale, grammaire analyzes the use of language in Godard films, which made me think of the complexity of language mixed with the disruption of social norms in the films of Matt Johnson. And if I had to play this game myself I would probably pick one of the following books: Peter Bogdanovich’s Fritz Lang in America, Raymond Durgnat's Films and Feelings, Annick Bouleau's Passage du cinéma, 4992, Don Owen's Captain Donald’s Quest for Crazy Wisdom or Zoé Bruneau's En Attendant Godard.

One wonders what Daney would think of the journal, cinema or even of the depressing state of the world today? Zabunyan would highlight how Daney described the mannerism of the eighties as cinema’s second death, which implies that it would live through it and reemerge. The importance and continuation of cinema would be that there are still films that communicate a thought and which necessitate a rebounding, an engagement (to use of Daney's tennis metaphors) that would necessitate a response through film criticism. When I think of some films that illustrate some of Daney’s last ideas they would include the scenes in Joaquim Pinto’s What Now? Remind Me (which he has a cameo in, through archive footage) of the gay couple watching an old Hollywood film on their couch together or the utopian environmentalism of Sebastião Salgado in Wim Wenders’s The Salt of the Earth (Wenders being an early close friend to Daney).

If there is anything a little disappointing with Trafic is that there is something non-unified about it and some of its different essays can appear to be contradictory. Other times it can be bland, obscure, too theoretical or set in its past views. In this particular issue some of the debated points throughout the essays include the merits of Bazinien realism, the fragmentation into groups, the respectability of cinema, and a hope for its future. Not that contradictions are bad or that the journal doesn’t have its own editorial position (which it does) but it's its constant return to its same old positions and polemics (with its stiff text-only format, which wasn’t always the case) that can sometimes be stifling. I would have also liked to have seen more on Stanley Kubrick or Alain Resnais in this issue (two of Daney’s favorite filmmakers) or a mention of one of my favorite film critics, Iannis Katsahnias. But as Trafic's full lengthy list of published authors at the back suggests, it does regularly expands its scope towards others and its project and history is quite impressive.

But to end on a graceful note, it is perhaps Stéphane Delorme’s editorial Ensemble from the latest issue of Cahiers and his review of this issue of Trafic that made me better appreciate it. Delorme writes, 

The word ‘ensemble’ doesn’t have a good reputation these days. What’s fashionable instead is fragmentation and specialization that leads quickly to narcissism and shortsightedness. We learn quickly to find our place and to claim our territory. We learn to judge too quickly the pieces without seeing the ensemble. We must instead rise to the occasion and see that an ensemble exists.

These days there is too much a focus on dividing people and thinking about the individual. Delorme at Cahiers and the Trafic team are trying to bring people together, allow for thought to develop from a group, and to unite through the cinema. A message that is even more vital now with every sad thing (and there are many) that is happening in the world. It’s good to think with others. This issue of Trafic illustrates some new ways of thinking about reading a text and opening up to the world to better understand how to live with films.

Serge Daney’s La Maison Cinéma et le Monde – 4. Le moment Trafic

The recent publication of Serge Daney’s last two years of writing, La Maison Cinéma et le Monde – 4. Le moment Trafic 1991-1992 (Éditions P.O.L.), reveals many of his major ideas and how they culminated at the end of his life. The book primarily deals with the launch of his new journal Trafic, through his original three articles for it Journal de l’an passé, Journal de l’an nouveau, and Journal de l’an present; interviews about it and his philosophy, and some of his last few essays and public conferences.

The book is important for bringing together many of these texts that have long been unavailable or difficult to find. The many interviews – fundamental  in his role as a passeur – offer a more casual, anecdotal and richer portrait of Daney, which shows a different side of him then that of Perseverance. Through a close attention to these texts, many of his views become clearer, sometimes even in opposition to his earlier writing, and a more precise picture of Daney finally emerges.

Many of the points in the book are just statements, but which have a lot of meaning for Daney, and he does not necessarily unpack them, so they must be taken at face value. The following is a selection of translations of some of these key points and quotations which represent some of the major ideas of one of the greatest film critics of the twentieth century. - D.D.

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A list of some of Daney’s favorite filmmakers would include the classical carré d'as American directors of the Cinéma Mac Mahon (on Jacques Lourcelles, “the commitment to his tone and being assured in his Mac-Mahoniens taste are intact, and we feel the author being proud of never changing his mind on what’s essential”), the French and nouvelle vague directors of Alain Resnais, Jacques Tati, Robert Bresson, Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques Rivette, Jean-Claude Brisseau (‘Céline is a film of our time’), Philippe Garrel and Leos Carax (more on them below); the more challenging avant-garde films of Guy Debord, Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub, Akira Kurosawa (the book includes a review of his autobiography), Sergei Parajanov (The Color of Pomegranates, particularly), Pier Paolo Pasolini, Hans-Jürgen Syberberg, Johan van der Keuken, Raúl Ruiz, Manoel de Oliveira; and Stanley Kubrick (‘the only visionary of contemporary cinema’).

It is interesting to hear Daney discuss many emerging directors, who would never really receive full critiques, and revisit older ones, both which are quite perceptive in how they would evolve throughout the nineties.

Daney, “Actually, the most important director is certainly Manoel de Oliveira… Eighty-five-years-old. He’ll never be for the majority. But he continues making films in a way that is absolutely stupefying, which is both anarchic and completely insolent.”

Daney really likes Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather Part III and David Lynch’s Twin Peaks (“au charme absolu”). Daney wrote “There are some really good things in Spielberg.” Luc Besson’s Le Grand Bleu is “the most important film of the eighties,” a lot better than Jean-Jacques Annaud’s L’Ours.

According to Daney, La belle noiseuse, “I don’t think it really interested Rivette,” while Le Pont du Nord is his chef-d’oeuvre.

On François Truffaut’s Le Dernier Métro “one of his worsts,” but L'amour en fuite is “magnificent.” For Daney, Truffaut’s Paris, “is by a director of the 19^th century, who esteems it, it takes place in Walter Benjamin’s passages.” And, “But either way, I find, in myself and with those around me, that the figure of Truffaut has been growing in esteem since his death. All of his ‘minor’ films are great, and only some ‘serious subject’ films are sometimes shallow. The Truffaut voice, neutral, a little high pitched, is unforgettable. I think that we’ll miss it.”

Daney really likes Van Gogh by Pialat.

On Nanni Moretti, “I for one, I need Moretti. We’re the same age, he’s one of those rare directors who speaks about the world as it is. There are maybe only five or six directors like this today, not enough.”

“Jean-Pierre Oudart once said (or wrote) that what was surprising about Mon oncle d'Amérique, was that the film would be the same if America didn’t even exist. This was a real intuition.”

On Wenders’ newest film at the time, “There’s a lot in it which doesn’t work. The whole last section, for example, isn’t convincing.”

Talks about the introduction of race and European style in some eighties American directors, for Daney, “Spike Lee is interesting because it’s someone who, against all expectations, has never renounced his political conviction. Jarmusch’s is a European cinema… Soderbergh, we don’t know yet. Sex, Lies, and Videotape was malin. But I don’t know how far he can take his project.”

“I saw Drugstore Cowboy, an unknown little film by Gus van Sant with Matt Dillon and the old Burroughs, and I found it formidable. In my usual fashion, I told myself that I needed to follow this director. Two years later, I realize that all of Paris, or at least all of the serious cinephiles in it, were praising My Own Private Idaho. One must no longer ‘fight for’ Gus van Sant.”

 “Abbas Kiarostami, a magnificent Iranian director, makes us think a lot, but at the same time, it’s really strange since it’s the same as Rossellini. We ask ourselves through what alchemy does an Iranian all by himself discovers, or rediscovers or continues, this hypothesis of Rossellini and certain other Italian directors.”

Bertrand Tavernier, for Daney, is “an efficient type, cultivated, who really knows a lot, and who really likes cinema. Because of this, today, he complains a lot against those who don’t like his films.”

Some films that he hated: Peter Weir’s Dead Poets Society and Lars von Trier’s Europa.

“One night, it’s been a few year already, there were two of us, S.T. and I, and we were spending time with a director. Everyone loved Woody Allen’s Crimes and Misdemeanors. Everyone except for our host, who got really upset when S.T. awkwardly described its characters as ‘formidable’.”

“It’s at this moment that the hypothesis of a resistant-cinema which obliges us to take into consideration the resistance of the characters moving towards their death. It’s without a doubt why, after our incursion, that S.T. decided to return to the subject in Cahiers (N.450) on that annoying question. And when he asks why Olivier Assayas centers all of his film (Paris s'éveille) on a character that, finally, ‘has no chance of escaping their faith’, it’s a question that I could not help but be too familiar with. Didn’t I feel obligated to side myself more with Louise at the end of Assayas’ film? No, because I wasn’t close to the character nor was she sympathetic. No, because throughout the film, through time passing and cinema making it dialectic, I still did not become attached to her. No, because the vitality of Louise did not carry the project… I felt the need to detach myself from the auteur…”

On Philippe Garrel and Leos Carax:

“For my generation at Cahiers, we’ve never really become directors. [On film sets, for example, I get bored too quickly. It exasperated me.] The most important director of my generation, was Garrel, a compagnon de route for Cahiers. Though perhaps less so now. Carax, on the other hand, wastes too much energy trying to decide his projects, though he doesn’t have a problem with desire. But I really like Leos, he’s a really gifted boy, but what he’s interested in isn’t always interesting.”

“I left Les Amants du Pont-Neuf just as I did Mauvais Sang: perplexed and affected. Is it because I re-see Leos, an auditor in the cinema class I was teaching, already anachronistic, fiercely listening and intensely quiet, which makes me ask myself, with each new film, what are his ‘references’?”

“I was giving these courses with Danièle Dubroux, and this young boy intrigued us. He seemed a lot more intelligent than the others, he also looked like he was only twelve. He wasn’t even enrolled in the course, and would just sit at the back of the class, and wouldn’t say anything. But he had this gaze, always extraordinary for someone out in public, who was benefiting from our course, this intrigued us. We took the risk and we proposed to him to write for us. One day, I asked him to write about young French filmmakers. He was so young himself. He first said yes, but withdrew by saying this magnificent phrase, ‘There’s only I that could fulfill it, but I’m not going to.’… Leos, it’s like Rivette. When we run into each other on the streets, we get a coffee together. There, we get into pure emotion. But, for the most part, the cinema that I defended, which I represented, including Leos, though not entirely, but a lot, is constituted by people that now don’t even give a damn to even call me. It’s a life choice. A little sad. But I know that if I was friends with Tavernier, he would take care of me.”

On meeting Chris Marker,

“I remember also, this time in Hong Kong, of my only encounter with the hard to find Chris Marker. It was on such a hot day and we imagined (perhaps to jauntily, I think) the pure and simple disappearance of cinema, its content diluting, its lack of vitriol. As if it was the dream of the 20^th century wasn’t going to survive the disenchantment of the awakening of the turn of the 21^st century. Here we were.”

On the role of festivals,

“The good ones, those that are a medium-sized ones. Not too large, like the Cannes machines, or too insignificant, like some smaller ones. But more so the friendly ones like Rotterdam or Locarno. There there can sometimes have real cinematographic events.”

Surprisingly, a few positive comments on Michel Ciment and Positif,

“The era of  regular film magazine publishing is over – I think of the courageous little magazine Positif with the elegant Michel Ciment – where you could accompany an unknown Wim Wenders up to the point where the bourgeois from Cannes could no longer ignore him. This was in the seventies.”

“The situation today in France is confusing. I wouldn’t know how to fix it. They should get several of us to brainstorm potential solutions. Even people like Michel Ciment know there’s something wrong.”

On the original Cahiers project and his relation to it,

“Oh, the Cahiers jaunes years, those were the bible. It was the absolute truth, without  a doubt. You would follow it with your life to death. I started reading it in 1959, the N.97 issue, which had Hiroshima Mon Amour on the cover. Then we started going to the Cinémathèque with peers from the lycée. There we met Douchet, the only one that kind-of spoke to us. We quickly realized that a long saga has just reached its conclusion in front of our eyes. That of the nouvelle vague – they won. I loved Cahiers for reasons that might not have been too pure deep down. First, for its writing. After for its independent spirit. A magazine capable of taking down in two lines The Bridge on the River Kwai, this film that was immensely popular and that all of France loved. I told myself: ‘Such bold writers do need really strong arguments.’ But I wasn’t wrong. Because these guys who wrote only two lines on River Kwai would also devote ten pages to Fritz Lang’s The Indian Tomb. I was taken over by a fury: Cahiers was always right. In fact, I had the impression of discovering a world that wasn’t official.”

“Such a pleasure to like Lang when my cleaning person also watched his films. Even when I was reading Plato, I was also seeing Lang. Such a pleasure for a kid like me.”

“I think that the two last great films where there was something real in terms of an aesthetic and spiritual work, which was provocative, scandalous, and also really innocent. Films that tried to say: ‘With cinema, we are retaking up this dirty story, but if we didn’t, we would always stay within it and we would reproduce it.’ Between 1975 and 1980, there was one film that we ‘missed’ at Cahiers, and that was Salò by Pasolini, and then he died shortly after, and inversely, there’s a film that we spoke highly of, Syberberg’s Hitler, in 1978, that none of you have probably seen, due to the fact that it was never shown again. I think that this was one of the last times that a director that we were not really close with ideologically, Syberberg, thought the cinema in terms of an art-form. This meant a material practice, that of manipulations, language, could displace the field, stop things from becoming fixed, stir up a dialectic, include some humor, to change the perspective: this little Hitler is not like the adult, a spiritual ideological practice.”

And on the early impact of his generation,

“We believed that we could still fight for the cinema, while in fact it was almost entirely constituted, with its great directors. But regardless, I think I was part of the last generation to define the canon, to specify who was a great director and who wasn’t. For the American cinema, the nouvelle vague already did everything earlier. But Jacques Tourneur, for example, was us. If one day Boris Barnet is recognized, one of the greatest Russian directors, it would be without a doubt because of us.”

“One must return to the origins. The image of man has changed, but through Barthes, with his formulas, he was able to diagnose it. Notably through: ‘structuralism, intelligent commentary around the object’. This marked an entire generation, especially those at Cahiers, who started reflecting, reading and writing. In this structuralist ambiance, the cinephiles were like second-class citizens, the most arrogant. They benefited from a sector, that of cinema, which wasn’t too developed intellectually, but through it we were able to do whatever we wanted. After the Barthes of Mythologies, they were able to rediscover things that seemed entirely natural but that, in fact, reflected an ideology. Therefore we prioritized liking an American cinema, with a conviction in taste that I still won’t ever discredit, which we call these days ‘B films’. Well, it wasn’t, in the most strict sense B films, but lets just say these really minor or failed films, which had a personality due to the fact that they were less supervised projects. Where Cukor was trying to get away with anything under Selznick, Nicholas Ray received everything he wanted from the president of Republic Pictures to make Johnny Guitar, a magnificent film, which was made in absolutely incredible conditions. We then had the tendency to be the first petits malins – I don’t know if there were some before us, to such an extent – perhaps even miscalculating the directors themselves, as they turned out to be not as intellectual as we thought. It was fun to bring these objects into a more classic culture, thought, philosophy, critical program, while in fact they were all starting to slowly become for the majority: products… After this pioneering moment, we eventually became more adventurous, arrogant. We started watching pornos, peplums – I still think today, that Cottafavi, the director of Les Légions de Cléopâtre, is a vastly superior director, in principal, to Peter Greenaway.”

On the death of cinema,

“I never heard this discourse on the death of cinema in the intellectual milieu. I talked about it with Wim Wenders at a certain period. It was always frowned upon. I was always forbidden to tell him too much, I was put back in my place. It’s been ten years that I’ve been feeling this way. So it has to become the dominant discourse.”

“By the end I was getting tired of being reproached by others for what they described as my ‘pessimism’. To provoke, I would tell people that the cinema was dead – maybe since Rossellini! But it didn’t provoke anyone, it just made everyone sad.”

“But Carax, he’s not going to be able to do as he likes! He’s going to go to America and get destroyed! No, no! I don’t know why there’s something inadmissible in the fact that the cinema is going to die. Look at the numbers if you don’t want to believe me. And if you don’t want to believe me, who will you believe? I thought that I was partially credible! I’ve heard enough people telling me: ‘Your article is magnificent, but I’m not going to see the film, it’s not my thing.’ As if my review was an end in itself. Or others: ‘You’re acting in bad faith. Cinema is not going to die. Even though I don’t go anymore, I stay home and watch VHS tapes with my children…”

“No, but really, I couldn’t care less about seeing films in movie theaters. I saw some films all by myself in theaters, and to be honest, it was embarrassing. Especially for comedies, such anxiety!”

Daney offers some fascinating answers to what is cinema?: “I always thought that cinema wasn’t actually wonder in front of a moving image, but the reverberation of sound, the sentiment of time, waiting for something, something fatal.”

The need to write, “For me – it’s really personnel –, I never understood how for some they could watch all of these films without talking about them… I think there should always be a need to discuss, write, with interruptions sometimes where the film can speak back. It’s like a tennis match: the roles go back and forth. And for me, as a cinephile, I call this the oral tradition, it’s an ensemble of social practices.”

A fascinating book, La Maison Cinéma et le Monde – 4. Le moment Trafic 1991-1992, is an essential read for more on Daney’s thought later in his life. If only now his radio show Microfilms can be made more widely accessible and also his many printed interviews (a blind spot of these compilations)! There’s still a lot to learn from Daney and these texts still offer a great compass to navigate cinema today. It might sometimes be a bleak perspective, but it's the truth, for those who even care.

Serge Daney’s Last Texts

What thou lovest well remains, the rest is dross

What thou lov’st well shall not be reft from thee

What thou lov’st well is thy true heritage

Whose world, or mine or theirs or is it of none?

First came the seen, then thus the palpable

    Elysium, though it were in the halls of hell,

What thou lovest well is thy true heritage

            - Ezra Pound, Canto LXXXI

Daney’s life was coming to an end. He contracted AIDS and in this period it was a fatal disease since the international medical community did not know yet how to respond it. Toubiana described Daney’s state of mind in this period as, “It was a stage in his life when he was settling scores, with extreme clarity, without lenience towards himself or others. That is the way it was, and the only demonstration of friendship was to be there.” An example of this settling of scores was a letter he sent to Cahiers. The film The Sheltering Sky at first glance would appear to be made as if it was for Daney. It is by Bernardo Bertolucci and it is about this world travelling couple that decided to go on an epic hike through the North African desert; there the man would catch a fatal STD. But Daney’s letter to Cahiers was an angry rant against Bertolucci and how with The Sheltering Sky that he was now corrupted by these prestigious international productions. 

 Daney’s last major essays continued this settling of scores. They appeared in his new journal Trafic which he created in 1990 with Raymond Bellour, Jean-Claude Biette, Sylvie Pierre and Patrice Rollet. It was a journal of intense theoretical reflection on cinema, culture and politics. Its text-only pictureless design recalled the Cahiers of the Seventies years. The Ezra Pound quotation that opened the first issue contributed to the final and melancholic tone of his last essays there. For example, in the issue with his last contribution when he was alive, it was dedicated to his mother Huguette Daney. They were diary entries of his last two years alive. They comprised of an intense theoretical reflection, settling of scores, and revelations of personal secrets. These traits combined gave these final essays a Rivettian conspiracy quality.

These essays were also similar to Bazin’s late writing as they were both near-death theoretical reflections. In the essays Daney analyzed Bazin’s concept of a transcendent realism in an increasing televisual society. Daney asked what it meant to be human in a media-pervasive world of corrupt politics. The last of these essays also ended rather abstractly with an analysis of humanity as illustrated by an animal documentary, a Bazinian predilection par excellence, that he watched on television. They were also full of references to thinkers and directors such as Roland Barthes, Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Marie Straub.

“Cinema was dying,” Daney proposed… At this late period the directors that Daney admired now disappointed him. These directors included Wim Wenders, Bernardo Bertolucci, Olivier Assayas and even Jacques Rivette. (Daney shortly before even made a documentary with Claire Denis on Rivette for the Cinéma, de notre temps series, Jacques Rivette - Le veilleur.) Daney returned to Cahiers in this period as he was no longer getting along with the staff at Libération. He helped organize an impressive issue on the political activity in the U.S.S.R. and the fall of communism in Romania. Antoine de Baecque would spend a lot of time to interview him as a major resource for his Cahiers history books. But still the fast-approaching 40^th anniversary of Cahiers would leave him ambivalent. Daney wrote in his Journal de l’an passé, “The 25^th of May. Cahiers is now forty. Its televisual commemorative celebration is something sad.”

The publication of the Cahiers history books and its 40^th anniversary motivated Daney to write one of his most famous essays – The Tracking Shot in Kapo – which was published posthumously in the Fall 1992 issue of Trafic. This essay discussed his relationship with Cahiers by psychoanalyzing his own life and how it intersected with Cahiers when he was a teenager. (Daney wrote, “Rivette was 33 and I was 17…”) Through Cahiers Daney discovered Rivette’s critique of Gillo Pontecorvo’s film Kapo, On Abjection. Daney had never actually ‘seen’ the film but he described that he had ‘seen’ it through Rivette’s critique. [Paul Louis Thirard criticized Daney for not bothering to see the film for himself since he argued that Kapo might not have even included an abject tracking shot... (Positif, N.543)] In the essay Daney wrote,

Rivette never recounted the film’s narrative in his article. Instead he was content to describe one shot in a single sentence. This sentence, now engraved in my memory, read “Just look at the shot in Kapo where Riva commits suicide by throwing herself on electric barbed wire; the man who decides at this moment to track forward and reframe the dead body in a low-angle shot – carefully positioning the raised hand in the corner of the final frame – deserves only the most profound contempt.” Henceforward a simple camera movement must be the one movement not to make. The movement one must — obviously — be abject to make. As soon as I read those lines I knew the author was absolutely right… Over the years “the tracking shot in Kapo” would become my portable dogma, the axiom that was not up for discussion, the breaking point of any debate. I would definitely have nothing to do or share with anyone who did not immediately feel the abjection of “the tracking shot in Kapo.

Daney’s memory of Rivette’s critique was very precise. What stood out for Daney in this Cahiers critique of Kapo is Rivette’s moral perspective on the film and his strength of conviction. (It may also be worth mentioning that Truffaut was not once mentioned in Daney’s article on Kapo. Toubiana would make up for this in a few issues later of Trafic when he would publish his essay Truffaut, domaine public.) At the heart of Daney’s conception of Cahiers was a strong belief in the courage to denounce something that was wrong. The same idea was seen in Libération when in 1987 Daney switched sections from the cinema pages to Rebonds where he could then address the problems that were going on in French society. Between the years 1987 to 1990, in this ‘post-cinema’ period, Daney wrote mostly about cultural products that he strongly disliked

Restless in France (Cahiers du cinéma, Trafic)

Restless (Cahiers, Sept. 2011, N.670) w/ Cahier Critique by Dominique Païni, À celle qui est trop gaie.

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Restless (Trafic, March 2012, N. 81) w/ an Essay by Marcos Uzal, L'automne déjà, À oriois de Restless de Gus Van Sant.

Lincoln in France (Cahiers du cinéma, Positif, Trafic)

Lincoln (Cahiers, Feb. ’13, N.686) w/ Événement Critique by Jean-Philippe Tessé, L'impossible, and a Réplique by Jean-Sébastien Chauvin, Dans un fauteuil.

  

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Lincoln (Positif, Feb. ’13, N.624) w/ Actualité Critique by Christian Viviani, Les Moyens de la Fin.

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Lincoln (Trafic, June ’13, N.86) w/ an Essay by Bernard Benoliel, Lincoln center. À propos du film de Spielberg et de quelques autres.