Deconstructing Derrida
By Paul Mendoza
April 26, 2003 9:00 p.m.
While Jacques Derrida might not be a household name, filmmakers
Amy Ziering Kofman and Kirby Dick thought a documentary on the
famed philosopher was due.
“There’s a great deal of interest in him and his
work,” Dick said. “There’s a generation of people
that have studied his work and struggled with it or were inspired
by it, and I think this is an opportunity to come back to
it.”
Ziering Kofman, a first-time director and a former student of
Derrida at Yale, is herself a woman of that generation. She first
hatched the idea of making a documentary film on the “Father
of Deconstructionism” when she saw Derrida at a UCLA guest
lecture in 1994.
“Sitting in the audience, I realized he’d be a
really cool subject,” she said. “There should be some
record of him on the planet, and I realized I had never seen any
cinematic images of him.”
After two refusals by Derrida, Ziering Kofman took initiative
and showed up at the Paris native’s doorstep with a full film
crew. While there was initially no structure to the project, the
directors’ main objective was to create a film inspired by
Derrida’s writings and ideas.
“There was reluctance on our part to do a Derrida primer,
an ABC or how-to on Derrida,” said Ziering Kofman. “The
motivation was to have the challenge of trying to make a film that
works through all the things I had gotten reading Derrida’s
work.”
Ziering Kofman and Dick followed Derrida intermittently over
several years, filming him in Paris, South Africa, New York and UC
Irvine, where he teaches.
The constant presence of cameras led to some resistance by
Derrida, whom Ziering Kofman empathizes with.
“We were sort of a vulture figure,” Ziering Kofman
said. “He knows that we, or at least the film, will outlive
him. So I understood and was empathetic to his plight that part of
his antagonism and agony in dealing with us was his agony of what
it means to be a person who’s going to be
posthumous.”
Ziering Kofman and Dick had over 75 hours of footage, featuring
everything from archive dedications to the daily search for car
keys. However, with no traditional documentary arc to follow, the
editing process proved highly challenging.
“The whole thing was continually in flux,” said
Ziering Kofman. “There was no, “˜let’s copy what
they did with Freud,’ or “˜there’s a great one on
Nietzsche we could do it like.’ We kept on struggling through
the editing process.”
Eventually, Dick and Ziering Kofman decided on a musical
structure of movements or “nuggets,” each fragment
having its own leitmotif: love, death and so on. However, the
directors needed a way to connect the visual images with
Derrida’s work. The use of multiple cameras elaborated on
Derrida’s idea of the Eye, the One, the Other and margins in
relation to center.
A more concrete connection to Derrida’s writing is
Dick’s idea of narrating quotes from Derrida’s many
books, a technique that Ziering Kofman resisted at first.
“I, being an academic and a student of Jacques’, was
very reverential,” she said. “I said, “˜You
can’t just take out a paragraph. It won’t work.’
But when Kirby just read a few passages of Jacques’ over
Paris landscapes, I was stunned. It reads like poetry.”
Dick and Ziering Kofman’s poetry finally took shape at the
2002 Sundance Film Festival, where it was nominated for the Grand
Jury Prize. It has since earned acclaim from critics, audiences and
Derrida. Ziering Kofman hopes the film will bring viewers closer to
the writings that inspired her as a student.
“To sit down, read a text, and read it carefully together
is to do it justice and to take it seriously,” she said.
“What I hope this film achieves is that in some ways
it’s working through certain spaces that that type of close
reading would bring you to.”
