Serge Daney’s Militant Film Criticism

In 1962, a new Paris-based ciné-club hosted preview screenings for Agnès Varda’s Cléo From 5 to 7. After each screening, according to the scholar Kelley Conway, the hosts handed out a questionnaire. Among the respondents was the future film critic and Cahiers du Cinéma editor Serge Daney, then a precocious cinephile of 17. He loved it. The feature, which follows an actress in close to real time as she meanders around Paris awaiting her biopsy results, plays out in anticipation of a catastrophic diagnosis. “And so everything,” Daney wrote, “takes on a new value and relief, opening out onto a kind of lucidity, and onto love.”