Serge Daney, Zapper

This chapter considers Serge Daney’s transition from a film critic schooled in New Wave cinephilia to a television critic fascinated with the possibilities of the small screen and status of cinema as an old medium. Daney challenges foundational film theory and introduces the language of belatedness, aging, and delay into his writing on the “adult art” of film. In the 1980s he chronicled the experience of watching cinema on television and engaged in a process of “archaeology” focused on absent or damaged images rather than the imaginary plenitude of the screen. Daney’s work at the threshold between media provides a key reference point for film studies in the late twentieth century because it questions both the modernist euphoria of theory produced decades before and the enthusiasm surrounding new media. Daney instead constructs a retrospective theory of film that reveals its diminution over time and the persistence of its utopian ambitions.