Derrida on film

Derrida probably has to be one of the worst missed opportunities of film, ever. Not that any movie about Derrida could be a great movie, or fully capitalize upon its subject himself. But filming someone who thought specifically about film philosophically and at length, as well as genre, narration, light--all sorts of things that make up what film is or is supposed to be--how often can one actually submit a thinker to what he thinks, merely by turning on this device (the camera, for example)? Probably more often than we ourselves think, but still--to generate a record of a thinker thinking this record, this is what the film could have done.
Instead, it sits Derrida in front of a TV, where he watches himself being filmed, and narrates unintelligible sentences from all over his corpus in a profound-sounding voice with dark dreary music. The sentences are unintelligible because they are taken out of context--and if one retorts that this is what film does, and especially film that subjects itself to certain elements of Derrida's thought, well, this one has completely misunderstood Derrida. Or only understood about one half of what he says. For this means one thinks it is proper to film to deconstruct--which one interprets by "take out of context," juxtapose, etc., but "affirmatively," no doubt, which means even less here than "deconstruct"--and this completely evades the problem of what is proper in general simply by reduplicating it, by achieving or trying to achieve some ironic distance with respect to it. Along with these unintelligible sentences is the music, which would be good by itself, but placed to the film merely makes one wish the parts where anyone is speaking were cut out and all we got was simply Derrida walking to music. Then there are the interlocutors: asking only the most banal questions, except for a few ("do you get nervous about writing," which of course was actually deleted from the main film). Even "which philosopher would you like to be your mother" is boring, even though Derrida himself likes it. It is boring because it is a puzzle, a puzzle only, and Derrida simply gives you back the answer to the puzzle, without thinking--his granddaughter--because he frankly loves puzzles and loves confusing puzzles with thinking. Now the film could document this confusion, even reflect it--which by another name we could call dissemination, or the calculation of the incalculable--but instead it remains content with the fact that it has asked Derrida a neat, smart, ironic question: the interlocutors are simply that pretentious. There is no reflection: and that is the only way anything filmic could actually come close to thinking in the manner of Derrida--that is, by reflecting on and on about itself in such a way that it becomes confused with mere mechanism. Instead, the film savors every repetition, acts as if with each one it is getting closer to the real thing, what its all about... this is as far from going through reflection to Derridian thought (the being-shoved-back, the blockage or breakdown that does not admit one through), as we could get.
And Derrida himself: I recommend that everyone listen to a 2002 discussion on religion, if one wants to hear what Derrida is like. Here he is bored, annoyed at the camera crew, impatient as he sits and waits for them to film... tired from a day actually thinking. The film we have here is a document of his relaxation time taken away from him... with this the case, how great of a film, how accurate, how interesting could it be? Within it, the only parts that we see an approximation of Derrida are when he is speaking in public or taking a tour in South Africa--like in the discussion on religion, here he is charming, interested, and brilliant, because he is talking to people who want to think with him, even if they oppose or even hate him. In the end, I think I would trade this two minute clip of Foucault talking about Bachelard for the entire movie Derrida, because, quite frankly, here we see a thinker on or in (and this is what Derrida was all about, perhaps both in and on) film:


Engaged, entertaining--here is a philosopher with a body. With teeth, with eyes. A mind with hands, as an image--the camera has trouble tracking it as it moves, meanders, gestures... This is something you don't get with the angelic white light background throughout Derrida. This is not to say that Foucault was more bodily than Derrida... it could easily be asserted the other way around (and I think it is, from most reports I read, at least regarding how they talk). It is only to say that here we have an interesting film, a film that does something with the thought that it shows us. And it's merely a documentary. Derrida, which is supposed to do so much more than this, horribly fails in comparison: it only has the intelligence to look at Derrida's hands when he speaks of the hands, like it is taking orders but executing them sloppily, too slowly, with dumb, clumsy fumbling. Indeed, these close ups of hands, precisely when the hand is spoken of, tell us something: the entire thing is a fetishization, even a worship of Derrida's thinking... showing us not what Derrida says or what would question what Derrida says, but what it thinks it sees Derrida say--and not even an in interesting way... only in a way that is too satisfied that this is the only way to depict Derrida--that is, by showing his hands when he talks of hands. How boring! It doesn't even disgust, it is that banal. That is, it isn't voyeuristic, it isn't risky--it couldn't be horrible in this way, it is too weak, to stupidly confident in itself to do that. Derrida pushed the filmmakers to get rid of footage of him choking on the bagel that we see him make in one scene--like his stupid servant, they of course did not push back but complied... this would have been the most interesting part of the film, indeed--Derrida choking a little on his bagel! Embarrassing, funny, cruel... it just might make the film as interesting as the Foucault piece. Evidently this required too much effort on the part of the filmmakers, too much questioning of what they thought: that Derrida should always be obeyed, for he has figured it all out. The horror is that one can have a two hour film that wastes itself and its situation--and not even interestingly. That Derrida might get the seven or so hours of time required of him by the filmmakers--we might have gotten something actually thought by him instead of the attempts he so graciously makes at thinking, at responding to the unbelievably boring questions of the interlocutors, to the unbelievably boring, banal task of the whole film in general. "Whatever you want to say about love..." we see in the clip above--what the hell is that? It's outrageous: frankly I can't believe Derrida didn't explode at them, kick them out of the house. And the movie has the gall to show this utter stupidity as if it were all part of the glory that is Derrida: that he gets a little annoyed at a stupid question! Unbelievable! These are the types of people who think The Work of Mourning is Derrida's most authentic, touching, and genuinely sad book... as if a book that collects all his works on the deaths of his friends wouldn't be so!! The idiocy is unbelievable! And it prevents the possibility of happiness, even joy occurring in them--and excludes mourning, sadness, melancholy from his other works.
In the end, we must assert that this film is not representative of Derrida, even though it represents Derrida. And though that might be consistent with one part of what he has to say about representation--that we of course cannot have a film that is representative of anyone, fully--well, that is to only willfully distort what he says to only include half... and the most boring, most banal half, even if it is asserted affirmatively, hopefully, excitedly, as it sometimes is in this film. The task is to try and represent, to indeed integrate the impossibility of this full representation, and as impossible--this horrible, utterly boring film can't even make an attempt to try and think that this might be possible.