Conversation Nord-Sud : Daney/Sanbar, dir. Simone Bitton, Catherine Poitevin, 1993, 46 min.
Book tickets
‘I increasingly feel that barbarism now holds a universal potential, and I am convinced that resistance must be nothing less than universal.’ - Serge Daney
During the Gulf War, Serge Daney wrote that conversation – what he called ‘a typically Franco-Arab art’ – could no longer take place between him and his Arab friends. Saddened by this realisation, an opportunity was created to offer him a space, both real and cinematic, in which this interrupted dialogue might be rekindled. The choice of his interlocutor was immediately obvious: Elias Sanbar, a Palestinian, historian, editor of the journal Études palestiniennes, and collector of images – an exile who archives the memory of his people: press photographs, family albums, postcards, and more. For Sanbar, the image serves as proof of his identity. Daney spent most of his life watching films, yet always refused to keep still images. On both sides, there was a strong desire to confront these two attitudes toward the image and to make of them, in a way, a parable of North-South relations.
Conversation Nord-Sud will be preceded by the only film Serge Daney made, the short La preuve par Prince (1988), in which he edits images from television. 'When a body puts time on its side, we call that style. And when there is style, television has no choice but to record.'
This will be followed by a roundtable discussion featuring the programme curators, Arta Barzanji and Gerard-Jan Claes, joined by film scholars Pierre Eugène and Kate Ince, to discuss the enduring significance of his criticism.
During the Gulf War, Serge Daney wrote that conversation – what he called ‘a typically Franco-Arab art’ – could no longer take place between him and his Arab friends. Saddened by this realisation, an opportunity was created to offer him a space, both real and cinematic, in which this interrupted dialogue might be rekindled. The choice of his interlocutor was immediately obvious: Elias Sanbar, a Palestinian, historian, editor of the journal Études palestiniennes, and collector of images – an exile who archives the memory of his people: press photographs, family albums, postcards, and more. For Sanbar, the image serves as proof of his identity. Daney spent most of his life watching films, yet always refused to keep still images. On both sides, there was a strong desire to confront these two attitudes toward the image and to make of them, in a way, a parable of North-South relations.
Conversation Nord-Sud will be preceded by the only film Serge Daney made, the short La preuve par Prince (1988), in which he edits images from television. 'When a body puts time on its side, we call that style. And when there is style, television has no choice but to record.'
This will be followed by a roundtable discussion featuring the programme curators, Arta Barzanji and Gerard-Jan Claes, joined by film scholars Pierre Eugène and Kate Ince, to discuss the enduring significance of his criticism.
Pierre Eugène is a Lecturer in Film Studies at the Université de Picardie Jules-Verne (Amiens, France) and a member of the Cahiers du Cinéma editorial board since 2020. His research focuses on the history of French criticism (in particular Serge Daney and the Cahiers du Cinéma), the links between cinema and poetry and film aesthetics. He recently published Exercices de relecture, Serge Daney 1962-1982 (Éditions du Linteau, 2023) and co-edited with Kate Ince and Marc Siegel the essay collection Serge Daney and Queer Cinephilia (Meson Press, 2024). He’s also the driving force behind the website daney.net, which contains a searchable database of all Daney articles.
Gerard-Jan Claes is a filmmaker, lecturer, author, both founder and artistic director of the cinephile platform Sabzian, and co-founder of the independent film distributor Avila. As a filmmaker, he collaborates with Olivia Rochette (Belgium, 1987). Their shared filmography consists of Because We Are Visual (2010), Rain (2012), Grands travaux (2016), Mitten (2019) and Kind Hearts (2022). Since 2009, the duo provides audiovisual work for choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker and her dance company Rosas. Claes teaches at P.A.R.T.S. and LUCA School of Arts in Brussels. With Stoffel Debuysere, he edited the publications Hong Sangsoo. Infinite Worlds Possible (2018), Wang Bing. Filming in a Land in Flux (2018) and Out of the Shadows (2021), and more recently, with Stéphane Symons, Francis Alÿs. The Nature of the Game (2023).
Arta Barzanji is an Iranian filmmaker, critic, curator, and lecturer based in London. He teaches at Southwark College and is an AHRC-funded PhD candidate at Roehampton University. His practice-based doctoral research focuses on film criticism and dialectical thought. Arta is an alumnus of the critics’ programmes at the Locarno and Ghent Film Festivals, and his writings—published in both Farsi and English—have appeared in outlets such as MUBI Notebook, Cineaste Magazine, and Documentary Magazine. As a curator, Arta has collaborated with London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), programming seasons dedicated to Amir Naderi, Cinema-ye Azad, and Serge Daney. Arta’s current film project is a feature-length documentary titled Unfinished: Kamran Shirdel.
Kate Ince is Professor of French and Visual Studies at the University of Birmingham (UK), and has published widely on French cinema, women’s cinema (Varda, Breillat, Hansen-Løve, Sciamma) and feminist film theory: in The Body and the Screen (2017) she proposed a feminist phenomenological model of female subjectivity to assist feminist film theory’s progress beyond psychoanalytic feminism. She recently (2024) co-edited the essay collection Serge Daney and Queer Cinephilia with Pierre Eugène and Marc Siegel and is now working on various essays on Alice Diop’s Saint Omer (2022), Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance (2024) and Julia Ducournau’s Titane (2021) and the continuing #MeToo ‘wave’ of feminist activity in France.
Gerard-Jan Claes is a filmmaker, lecturer, author, both founder and artistic director of the cinephile platform Sabzian, and co-founder of the independent film distributor Avila. As a filmmaker, he collaborates with Olivia Rochette (Belgium, 1987). Their shared filmography consists of Because We Are Visual (2010), Rain (2012), Grands travaux (2016), Mitten (2019) and Kind Hearts (2022). Since 2009, the duo provides audiovisual work for choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker and her dance company Rosas. Claes teaches at P.A.R.T.S. and LUCA School of Arts in Brussels. With Stoffel Debuysere, he edited the publications Hong Sangsoo. Infinite Worlds Possible (2018), Wang Bing. Filming in a Land in Flux (2018) and Out of the Shadows (2021), and more recently, with Stéphane Symons, Francis Alÿs. The Nature of the Game (2023).
Arta Barzanji is an Iranian filmmaker, critic, curator, and lecturer based in London. He teaches at Southwark College and is an AHRC-funded PhD candidate at Roehampton University. His practice-based doctoral research focuses on film criticism and dialectical thought. Arta is an alumnus of the critics’ programmes at the Locarno and Ghent Film Festivals, and his writings—published in both Farsi and English—have appeared in outlets such as MUBI Notebook, Cineaste Magazine, and Documentary Magazine. As a curator, Arta has collaborated with London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), programming seasons dedicated to Amir Naderi, Cinema-ye Azad, and Serge Daney. Arta’s current film project is a feature-length documentary titled Unfinished: Kamran Shirdel.
Kate Ince is Professor of French and Visual Studies at the University of Birmingham (UK), and has published widely on French cinema, women’s cinema (Varda, Breillat, Hansen-Løve, Sciamma) and feminist film theory: in The Body and the Screen (2017) she proposed a feminist phenomenological model of female subjectivity to assist feminist film theory’s progress beyond psychoanalytic feminism. She recently (2024) co-edited the essay collection Serge Daney and Queer Cinephilia with Pierre Eugène and Marc Siegel and is now working on various essays on Alice Diop’s Saint Omer (2022), Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance (2024) and Julia Ducournau’s Titane (2021) and the continuing #MeToo ‘wave’ of feminist activity in France.
Book tickets
02:00 pm
Sat, 30 Aug 2025
Cinema 1
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