PositiveBookforumDense with theoretical tangents, promiscuously associative, and characterized by a prose that shifts constantly between the poeticism of Continental philosophers like Walter Benjamin and Jacques Derrida and the casual tempos of first-person journalism, Daney’s writing isn’t \'clean\' or easily digestible—there is no easy transmission of facts and ideas, but rather a kind of intellectual grazing. Much like Daney himself—who, often penniless, traveled to places like India, Hong Kong, and Africa, covering film festivals, familiarizing himself with the local film culture, finding tour guides in the young men he took as fleeting lovers—his writing wanders in unpredictable directions. It resists translation and has an unsettling, conflicted quality, best embodied in Hamrah’s observation that Daney \'loved the American cinema\' but \'resisted where it comes from\' ... The Cinema House & the World—a Herculean undertaking by translator Christine Pichini—represents a sizable response to years of editorial resistance from unwilling publishers ... That relatively slim 2007 translation by Paul Grant is, perhaps, a more accessible introduction to Daney’s school of thought, though it lacks the scope, curiosity, and sense of play of Pichini’s tome, in which you will read about films you have never heard of, consider classics through a new lens, and see the world, as Daney did, as a film bustling with latent meanings, infinitely interconnected. It should come as no surprise that, toward the end of the book, Daney begins to reckon with the implications of small-screen spectatorship and the politics of television—televised debates, sports events, and news broadcasts, those simulations that purport to be reality ... Our own era is eager to beautify or sensationalize suffering, but Daney offers a different vision, best exemplified by his active gaze. He insists that we take the image seriously as not just a productive way of looking at art, but as a way of better understanding our own place in life.
