153 x 230mm, 224 pages, black and white printing, perfect bound, softcover, 2023

Translated by Nicholas Elliott

Footlights (1983) was the first book by Serge Daney, a film critic admired in his lifetime by Gilles Deleuze and Jean-Luc Godard and recognized since his premature death in 1992 as the most important French writer on film after André Bazin. Containing texts from the same period as the first volume of The Cinema House and the World, Footlights stands apart in Daney’s body of work as the only collection of his essays he conceived of as a book, organizing his seminal pieces from Cahiers du Cinéma by theme and linking them with original texts that reflect in a personal voice on the doubts, battles, and illuminations of a generation of film lovers inspired by the explorations of Lacanian theory and roused by the collective aspirations of Maoist dogma. In pieces on fellow travelers Godard and Straub-Huillet, on films ranging from Pasolini’s Salò to Spielberg’s Jaws, and on the difference between film language and television discourse, Daney offers the definitive portrait of an era of radical hope and disappointment.

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