Dr Kate Ince, Reader in French Film and Gender Studies in the School of Languages, Cultures, Art History and Music, has secured a £36,000 AHRC Network grant to run the project 'Serge Daney and Queer Cinephilia.’
Serge Daney is a central figure in film and television criticism of the post-war era. From 1964 he wrote for the leading French film journal Cahiers du cinéma, and was its Chief Editor from 1973 to 1981. He then went on to write for the French daily Libération and to found the film magazine Trafic. He died in 1992.
Daney's criticism incorporated psychoanalytic, Marxist and media theory, and offers many points of connection with current film and media studies, particularly studies of queer cinema (the New Queer Cinema of the 1990s and more recent productions). His connections with queer cinema have received some attention from US scholars, but none in Europe.
In France, Daney is acknowledged as a key influence by a broad range of philosophers, theorists, critics and filmmakers. However, his work has never been systematically translated into English, and has not received the international scholarly attention it deserves.
The network that is being led by Dr Ince will address these areas in a set of three workshops to be held in Paris, Frankfurt and Birmingham in 2018 and 2019. They will establish an international network of scholars, critics and curators who will develop future research on Daney and queer cinephilia.