The Cinema House and the World: The Cahiers du Cinema Years, 19621981 [Hardcover]

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.

One of the greatest film critics of his generation, Serge Daney wrote for Cahiers du Cinéma before becoming a journalist for the daily newspaper Libération. The writings collected in this volume reflect Daney’s evolving interests, from the auteur approach of the French New Wave to a more structural examination of film, psychoanalysis, and popular culture. Openly gay throughout his lifetime, Daney rarely wrote explicitly about homosexuality but his writings reflect a queer sensibility that would influence future generations. In regular intellectual exchanges with Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, and Roland Barthes, Daney wrote about cinema autobiographically, while lyrically analyzing the transition from modern cinema to postmodern media. A noted polymath, Daney also published books about tennis and Haiti’s notorious Duvalier regime. His criticism is open and challenging, polyvocal and compulsively readable.“The Cinema House and the World is filled with a sense of Daney’s live-wire excitement, not in regard to his experience of viewing flms but, rather, from the pleasure of his own thought process. There’s nothing egocentric or bombastic in this delight. Daney never positions himself above or ahead of flms; he approaches them and keeps some distance. The book is wildly quotable and fervently memorable...Daney was an institutionalist who primed the terrain for future flmmakers, whose ideas were validated not by his flms but by the flms of others. Through his own work and in the publications that he invigorated and preserved, he cultivated and inspired critics who would perpetuate the stringent and self-questioning Cahiers legacy that also liv