A twelve-film season presented across ten programmes, with an accompanying critical dossier devoted to the work and thought of Serge Daney.
Curated by Arta Barzanji and Gerard-Jan Claes
Institute of Contemporary Arts, London · 29 August–7 September 2025
Presented in partnership with the Brussels-based film journal Sabzian
Serge Daney (1944–1992) was one of the major film critics of the twentieth century. Across Cahiers du cinéma, Libération and, finally, Trafic, his criticism continually expanded beyond individual films towards television, travel, politics, images and the changing place of cinema in the world.
For decades, however, much of Daney’s writing remained unavailable in English. The publication of the first volume of The Cinema House and the World in 2022, followed by new translations and scholarship, began to change that situation. Serge Daney and the Promise of Cinema developed alongside this renewed English-language encounter with his work, but approached it from another direction: through the films around which his thought formed.
Rather than treating cinema as an illustration of criticism already written, the programme returned to works and filmmakers that recurred across Daney’s critical life. The selection considered their place within his writing, the geographical and formal breadth of his interests, and the different periods through which his criticism developed. No selection of this scale could represent the range of Daney’s cinema; the programme instead attempted to trace some of the contours of the cinematic map across which he travelled.
The screenings were developed alongside a special issue of Sabzian edited by Arta Barzanji and Gerard-Jan Claes. The dossier and season offered two complementary routes into Daney: one through his writing and its contemporary afterlives, the other through collective encounters with the films that sustained his thought. Every screening was accompanied by a guest introduction and a printed text by or about Daney, extending the encounter with his criticism through both contemporary responses and his own writing.
View the original ICA season page
PROGRAMME
The programme moved across different periods, countries and modes of cinema, from films that shaped Daney’s earliest understanding of the medium to filmmakers and works that remained recurring points of reference throughout his career.
Opening: Night and Fog + Moonfleet
Night and Fog — Alain Resnais, France, 1956
Moonfleet — Fritz Lang, USA, 1955
29 August 2025
Two films that entered Daney’s understanding of cinema at an early age and remained foundational to his thinking: Resnais’s confrontation with the ethics of images and Lang’s tale of childhood, apprenticeship and the gravity of the world.
Introduction: Pierre Eugène
Nord-Sud Conversation: Daney/Sanbar + Roundtable Discussion
La preuve par Prince — Serge Daney, 1988
Conversation Nord-Sud: Daney/Sanbar — Simone Bitton & Catherine Poitevin, France, 1993, 46 min
30 August 2025
The programme began with La preuve par Prince (1988), the only film Serge Daney made, a short in which he edits images from television, followed by Conversation Nord-Sud: Daney/Sanbar, his filmed dialogue with Palestinian historian Elias Sanbar around images, memory and differing approaches to visual history. The screening was followed by a public discussion on the continuing significance of Daney’s criticism.
Roundtable: Pierre Eugène, Kate Ince, Gerard-Jan Claes, and Arta Barzanji
Miss Oyu
Kenji Mizoguchi, Japan, 1951
30 August 2025
Mizoguchi was a recurring reference point for Daney: a filmmaker through whom questions of space, duration, desire and moral form could be thought together.
Introduction: Gerard-Jan Claes
Too Early/Too Late
Danièle Huillet & Jean-Marie Straub, France/Egypt, 1981
31 August 2025
Daney was among the critics who resisted the clichés surrounding Straub and Huillet’s cinema, attending instead to the political and moral precision of their images. His writing on Too Early/Too Late became one of his defining reflections on distance, landscape and the position from which a camera looks.
Recorded introduction: Jonathan Rosenbaum
She Wore a Yellow Ribbon
John Ford, USA, 1949
31 August 2025
Ford remained one of Daney’s central filmmakers from his earliest criticism through his later writing for Libération. She Wore a Yellow Ribbon provided a way of returning to his understanding of Ford’s cinema as simultaneously narrative and contemplative, demanding an alertness to fleeting details within the image.
Introduction: Arta Barzanji
Orphans of the Storm
D.W. Griffith, USA, 1921
2 September 2025
Daney encountered Griffith’s film again through its late-night television broadcast in the 1980s, turning questions of framing, projection speed and musical accompaniment into a reflection on what it means not merely to schedule a film, but to show it.
Introduction: Pierre Eugène
Ceddo
Ousmane Sembène, Senegal, 1977
3 September 2025
Daney’s writing on Ceddo centred on speech, language and oral tradition, resisting reductive expectations of African political cinema and attending instead to the film’s distinctive forms of narration and address.
Introduction: James S. Williams
City of Pirates
Raúl Ruiz, France/Portugal, 1983 · 35mm
4 September 2025
Ruiz’s dreamlike cinema offered Daney another kind of critical encounter: a labyrinth of memories, cinematic references and seductive forms in which meaning continually threatens to slip away.
Recorded introduction: Adrian Martin
Doomed Love
Manoel de Oliveira, Portugal, 1979 · 35mm
6 September 2025
The discovery of Oliveira’s Doomed Love was a revelation for Daney and his contemporaries at Cahiers du cinéma. Its extraordinary duration and continual negotiation between literary narration and filmic space made it central to his thinking about what cinema presents and what a spectator sees.
Introduction: Ricardo Matos Cabo
Van Gogh
Maurice Pialat, France, 1991
7 September 2025
The season concluded with one of the films Daney encountered near the end of his life. Pialat’s Van Gogh became for him a means of thinking about cinematic presence, off-screen life and the continued capacity of cinema to show bodies, gestures and worlds extending beyond the limits of a single film.
Introduction: Michael Witt
SEASON GRAPHICS
SCREENING TEXTS
Each screening was accompanied by a printed text by or about Serge Daney, selected in relation to the film being shown. The handouts extended the programme beyond the introductions, allowing audiences to encounter Daney’s criticism — and writing responding to it — alongside the films themselves.
Many of the English translations were drawn from Serge Daney in English, the long-running weblog edited by Laurent Kretzschmar, and were reproduced with his permission. A further text was taken from Semiotext(e)’s The Cinema House & The World: The Cahiers du Cinéma Years, 1962–1981 and reproduced with permission from the publisher. Two new English translations were commissioned specifically for the season: Daney’s texts on City of Pirates and Maurice Pialat’s Van Gogh, both translated by Sam Warren Miell and subsequently published on Serge Daney in English.
Night and Fog + Moonfleet
“A Citizen of the World” — Arta Barzanji & Gerard-Jan Claes, 2025
Original publication: Sabzian, 25 June 2025, as the introduction to the Serge Daney and the Promise of Cinema dossier.
Read on Sabzian
Nord-Sud Conversation: Daney/Sanbar
“Before and After the Image” — Serge Daney, 1991
Translated by Melissa McMahon
Original publication: Revue d’études palestiniennes, no. 40, Summer 1991.
English publication: Discourse, vol. 21, no. 1, Winter 1999, pp. 181–190.
Read on JSTOR
Miss Oyu
“Mizoguchi and the Dentist” — Serge Daney, 1988
Translator not identified in the available source; English translation drawn from the unpublished Cinema in Transit project, with later modifications.
Original publication: Libération, 12 December 1988, as “Mizogochi and the Hard Law of Desire.”
English source: Serge Daney in English, 2020.
Read on Serge Daney in English
Too Early/Too Late
“Cinemeteorology” — Serge Daney, 1982
Translated by Jonathan Rosenbaum
Original publication: Libération, 20–21 February 1982.
English source: e-flux, 2023; translation originally prepared for Rosenbaum’s 1982 New York Straub-Huillet retrospective.
Read on e-flux
She Wore a Yellow Ribbon
“John Ford for Ever” — Serge Daney, 1988
Translated by Laurent Kretzschmar
Original publication: Libération, 18 November 1988; later collected in Devant la recrudescence des vols de sacs à main (Aléas, 1991).
English source: Serge Daney in English, 2019.
Read on Serge Daney in English
Orphans of the Storm
“Griffith Shows Us a Thing or Two” — Serge Daney, 1988
Translator not individually credited.
Original publication: Libération, 8 November 1988; later collected in Devant la recrudescence des vols de sacs à main (Aléas, 1991).
English source: Serge Daney in English, 2017, as part of the Ghosts of Permanence translation project.
Read on Serge Daney in English
Ceddo
“What Did They Say?” — Serge Daney, 1979
Translator unknown for this English version.
Original publication: Cahiers du cinéma, no. 304, October 1979; later collected in La Rampe: Cahiers critique 1970–82 (1983).
English source: Serge Daney in English, 2019.
Read on Serge Daney in English
City of Pirates
“City of Pirates” — Serge Daney, 1984
NEW ENGLISH TRANSLATION — commissioned for the season
Translated by Sam Warren Miell
Original publication: Libération, 25 February 1984; later collected in Ciné Journal.
English publication: Serge Daney in English, September 2025.
Read on Serge Daney in English
Doomed Love
“Doomed Love” — Serge Daney, 1979
Translated by Christine Pichini
Original publication: “Manoel de Oliveira et Amour de perdition,” Cahiers du cinéma, no. 301, June 1979, p. 71.
English publication: The Cinema House & The World: The Cahiers du Cinéma Years, 1962–1981 (Semiotext(e), 2022).
Reproduced for the screening with permission of Semiotext(e).
View the collection at Semiotext(e)
Van Gogh
“Pialat’s Dream” — Serge Daney, 1992
NEW ENGLISH TRANSLATION — commissioned for the season
Translated by Sam Warren Miell
Original publication: “Journal de l’an nouveau,” Trafic, no. 2, Spring 1992.
English publication: Serge Daney in English, September 2025.
Read on Serge Daney in English
DOSSIER
Sabzian
25 June 2025
Edited by Arta Barzanji and Gerard-Jan Claes
Published in English and French
Published in advance of the ICA season, the bilingual English- and French-language dossier brought together critics, scholars and translators from several countries to consider the continuing resonance of Daney’s writing. It combined newly commissioned essays with writing by Daney himself, extending the project beyond the screenings into questions of criticism, translation, politics and cinephilia.
Contents
A Citizen of the World
Arta Barzanji & Gerard-Jan Claes
Introduction to Serge Daney and the Promise of Cinema
Turns
Pierre Eugène
About the Practice of Critique
Mónica Delgado
A Melancholy Sky
Mohammad Reza Amiri
The Map and the Road
Emmanuel Burdeau
Close Listening
Christine Pichini
The Blue and the Red
Jun Fujita Hirose
The Fever Dream of Filmed Cinema
Daniel Fairfax
Cinema, Life and Solitude
Serge Daney
Read the dossier in English
Lire le dossier en français
SERGE DANEY IN PERSIAN
Serge Daney and the Promise of Cinema — Persian Edition
Koker Magazine · June 2026
Compiled by Arta Barzanji
One year after the publication of the Sabzian dossier, Arta Barzanji worked with the Iranian film magazine Koker Magazine to develop an abridged Persian-language edition of the project. The dossier brought two texts from the original issue to Persian-speaking readers alongside a new Persian translation by Barzanji of Serge Daney’s “Cinemeteorology”, his 1982 essay on Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub’s Too Early/Too Late.
The publication extended the project into another linguistic and critical context, bringing Daney’s writing and some of the questions raised by the original dossier to Persian-language readers.
A Melancholy Sky
Mohammad Reza Amiri
Cinemeteorology
Serge Daney
Persian translation by Arta Barzanji
A Citizen of the World
Arta Barzanji & Gerard-Jan Claes
Read the Persian dossier on Kokermag
ABOUT THE PROJECT
Serge Daney and the Promise of Cinema was conceived around the idea that criticism cannot finally be separated from the films and encounters from which it emerges. At a moment when Daney’s writing was becoming more accessible in English, the project offered another route into his thought: returning to some of the images, filmmakers and cinematic problems around which that writing had formed.
The screenings, dossier, introductions, printed texts, translations and public discussion were not conceived as separate forms of contextualisation for a retrospective, but as different ways of continuing the encounter between films and criticism. The subsequent Persian dossier extended that encounter beyond the original season, into another language and critical context.
CREDITS
Curators
Arta Barzanji
Gerard-Jan Claes
Presented by
Institute of Contemporary Arts, London
In partnership with
Sabzian
Special thanks
Daniel Turner & Nicolas Raffin — ICA
With support from
Southwark College
Arta Barzanji 