Serge Daney Quotes
According to U.S. strategy, if you never see the other, his destruction will be more acceptableso that when Iraqi soldiers surrendered, sooner than expected, it was as if they emerged from a dream, a flash-back, a lost epoch--an epoch when the enemy still had a body and was still "like us.
Daney, Serge. "Montage Obligatoire." Trafic, no. 1, P.O.L, Winter 1991.
Ruling group of France during the French Revolution. The purchase and transportation of an army in the field was a very expensive element of war and was very difficult as well. The Directory urged its generals to live off the land and get their food from the enemy country they were invading. Rarely did they pay for it but typically just took it from the civilians. Napoleon who served under the directory took this principle one step further. He also stole the invaded country’s art—paintings and statues mostly. These he sent back to Paris where they were sold to rich people. This way he could pay the salaries of the troops and buy more weapons and ammunition. Napoleon could conquer so much territory because France did not have to pay for the military effort as other countries did. This is one of the major reasons for example that the Louvre Museum in Paris has so many great Italian and Spanish paintings.
Serge Daney was a French movie critic. He was a major figure of Cahiers du cinéma which he co-edited in the late 1970s. He also wrote extensively about films, television, and society in the newspaper Libération and founded the quarterly review Trafic shortly before his death. Highly regarded in French and European film criticism circles, his work remains little known to English-speaking audiences, largely because it has not been consistently translated.
