Derrida

Dir. Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering Kofman

I bought a ticket to Derrida because the premise sounded great: is there any way to do a documentary on a major deconstructionist without him inevitably deconstructing the process of filmmaking as it’s going on? And, just as I expected, there were a lot of moments where Derrida commented on the whole oddness of the filming process. Which, of course, led to a lot of meta-filming, with a camera filming the filmmaker filming Derrida. (Actually, at one point we see a shot of the camera following Derrida, then we pull back to get a shot of that second cameraman, so there’s a camera filming a camera filming the filmmaker filming Derrida.) Derrida says sometime in the documentary that the process of winnowing down hours of footage into an hour-long (actually, 90min.) documentary means the documentarians are in a sense being autobiographical - they reveal themselves in the footage they choose to include. Which made me think of the idea that each text - this documentary, in this case - contains its own means of deconstruction, which led to me thinking about things in which each fragment contains a picture of the whole. What is the word for the latter phenomenon? Another question that springs to mind: I think it’s useful to remember that all documentaries are artificial settings, of course (I suppose that’s the quest of Nick Bloomfield et al when they insert themselves into their documentaries), but is there a modern audience that doesn’t recognise the artifice of the situations, and the impossibility of removing the documentarian’s own biases, even in supposedly objective texts? Don’t we recognise this as we read, say, the columns of William Safire in the New York Times? (This should not in no way be taken as approbation of Safire, who as an editorial columnist often displays the lovely ability to blithely ignore facts.) It’s not like the deconstruction is complete - nowhere in the film is it mentioned that Kofman was Derrida’s student. Anyway, back to the documentary: my watch-watch test (i.e. how long it takes before I check my watch to see how much time has passed, which I tend to do when I’m bored) clocked in at about 45 minutes, which is pretty damn good for a documentary.

Great laugh-out-loud moment when a radio interviewer tried to ask Derrida a question about Seinfeld and was forced to explain the premise of Seinfeld. Also a great moment when Derrida pulls down books from his shelf, and he holds two Anne Rice books in his hand…. Man, I got so used to normal film 16:9 aspect ratios it was jarring to see something in 4:3 (at least, that’s what this felt like)…. Ryuichi Sakamoto’s music is really jarring - it made the transitions sound really portentous, which didn’t fit the mood at all, given that Derrida came across as actually rather endearing and endearingly normal at that. And Kofman’s reading of Derrida’s texts also suffers I think from a too-serious tone. Actually, I didn’t feel I got any deeper insight into Derrida’s thought from this documentary, but I think that’s the filmmakers’ point, to make him seem accessible. He really isn’t a poseur or pretentious (unlike many of the grad students that worship him? heh). Still, it would’ve been nice if Derrida had been made to answer criticisms of deconstruction…. It was cute that Derrida’s wife calls him Jackie… It’s showing at the Brattle on Jun 3, you Harvard folks… Ratio of films with male-peeing scenes to total films seen: 4/5 - Woo! Finally! A film without a pissing scene! Which is good, since I’m not sure I want to see Derrida deconstruction going to the loo.