Movie 666

By D’Aporia

What is really known about Derrida? White hair, for starters…

I finally got to see Derrida the movie and can now confirm the not so favorable responses. Here is what I think.

1.

Granted that the filmmakers spent some effort following Derrida around, filming him talking in what are mostly celebratory events like an NYU talk (I happened to be there, Mon Selavy) and the opening ceremony of the Derrida Archive at UC Irvine, etc., the film fails to make clear what their intention really was, if there was any. In other words, the film is neither explanatory nor personal, and I wouldn’t call it “a practice of deconstruction” either. From the perspective of different audiences based on my talks with other attendees afterwards, here are two majosr responses: for those who have read and hence some understanding of Derrida’s writing, they didn’t get to know Derrida as a living person with all his idiosyncratic habits and characteristics and so on; and for those who never read him, they certianly felt constantly bombarded by truncated, dense quotations taken out of context and accompanied with ill-matched images.

At the end of this film, you don’t get to know Derrida the person better and his philosophical thought remains opaque, if not murkier. That, I believe, has to do with the the incongruous nature between logocentrism and imagocentrism, if there ever was any, and more pertinently, perhaps a lack of deeper understanding of both Derrida the person and his thoughts. The filmmakers fail to integrate all of the materials into a coherent and meaningful portrait.

2.

There is also, according to my sensitivity, a latent and unspoken hostility between the intruding filmmakers and the object of their filmming. After asking many personal questons to no avail, the filmmakers tried fruitlessly to probe Derrida with questions either too big (”what is love?”) or too small (”Tell us your love life”). As a result, the film (un)knowingly captured nothing expository but instead garnered defiant resistance from Derrida when confronted by those penetrating and omnipresent cameras. More often than not we see images of a stalemate or impasse - actually quite ironic for a “movie” (i.e., moving images) that goes nowhere. Derrida, both the man and the film, remains impenetratable.

3.

The film also suffers a great deal from filmmakers’ tacky or immature choice of camera movements from time to time. For example, whenever there is a mirror in the room, the camera surely and spasmodically pans to and fro from the mirrored image of Derrida to the real Derrida, as if commenting on his talk. Easily not-excusable for competing with and usurping the centrality of Derrida’s narrative, such “MTV-like” camera maneuvering only distracts already thinning audience attention and begets only sparingly cheap laughs. The uncurbable and impulsive pan, and the infantile atrraction to mirrored image as baby learning his/her limb coordination in front of mirror, all reveal the filmmaker’s uncertainty and incompetence of the visual medium and therefore destroy, or deconstruct, an engaging situation that has been slowly built up thus far. Befittingly, the film title Derrida needs an addendum or to be hyphnated as Derrida - Attack on the (In)Deconstructable Philosopher.

4.

Which brings to my afterthought question: “Is philosophical thought filmable?” This question becomes urgent in the tradition of “presenting thoughts not by logo but though visual medium,” especially when the purportedly suitable genre of documentary for biography fails to present “the person” of a philosopher whose life and thought seems inseperable from who he is. Perhaps to portray Derrida we need animation or other visual medium or even a newer, though not necessarily better, mastery and experimenting of the film language that can explore the philosopher with the capacity of both realism and abstraction. Director Derek Jarman’s and writer Terry Eagleton’s Wittgenstein comes to mind as an example that apparently chose to portray the personal (Wittgenstein’s homosexuality) over abstract thoughts. Wouldn’t it be interesting to make a series of film about philosophers that are quite unfilmable?

A final note

Derrida in Korean means to iron clothes or ironing. Not only the sound, the images, the folds, perhaps the whole Derrida film, along with Derrida, requires some ironing… da da da da…

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