Mutants We All: Jean-Louis Schefer and our Cinematic Civilization

What does it say when our civilization’s greatest myth claims that God abandoned the human form because it was without redemption? [...]what traumatic scar on our culture and art has this left? Serge Daney writes, in his assessment of the influence of film-going on his own childhood: I know of few expressions more beautiful than the one coined by Jean-Louis Schefer when, in L’homme ordinaire du cinéma, he speaks about the “films that have watched our childhood.” Because it is one thing to learn to watch movies as a “professional”—only to verify that movies concern us less and less—but it is another to live with those movies that watched us grow and that have seen us, early hostages of our future biographies, already entangled in the snare of our history. According to Schefer’s argument, there is no surprise that this new technology of the moving image should generate film texts that obsess over the technological motors that make possible both society’s technological practices and the technological arts. According to its documentation in Theory Kit, the online database: “The Tracking Shot in Kapo” is one of the last texts written by French movie critic Serge Daney before his death in June 1992.