Michael Sicinski
Interview w/ Kirby Dick and
Amy Ziering Kofman
Last
year, the University of Chicago Press published a collection of writings by
Jacques Derrida, entitled The Work of Mourning. This volume is a collection of eulogies,
tributes, and personal statements which Derrida wrote in honor of various
fellow thinkers of the post-structuralist generation – Barthes, Foucault,
Althusser, Deleuze, Levinas, Lyotard, and others. With the more recent passing of Pierre Bourdieu and Monique
Wittig, one could almost feel justified in suspecting that post-structuralism
and its practitioners were fading into history.
However,
Derrida, the new documentary by Kirby Dick (Sick, Chain Camera)
and Amy Ziering Kofman (a former student of Derrida’s), serves as an exuberant
rejoinder to such declarations. Like
its subject, Derrida the film is bursting with life, teeming with ideas,
and firmly rooted in the contemporary moment.
It is a portrait of the philosopher as a man, engaged with the world
around him, willing to treat that world as a laboratory for the advanced
thought it is not always willing to acknowledge it so desperately needs. Jacques Derrida, often called the “founder
of deconstruction,” is depicted against type, as a systematic builder of
concepts, albeit radically anti-foundational ones. And yet, as this film shows, he himself is ensnared in
paradox. What happens to thought when
“deconstruction” becomes a label, allegedly as applicable to Seinfeld as
to Nietzsche? What becomes of
deconstruction’s critique of power in light of the founding of the “Derrida
Archives,” in Paris and in Irvine, California?
And how can filmmakers produce a biographical documentary, in the age of
the “decentered subject”?
To
its credit, Derrida does not dwell on this last problem (or worse, try
to illustrate it). Instead, Dick and
Kofman proceed with their project, the suspect nature of biography serving as a
tacit assumption. The resulting film is
a funny, poetic, and slyly intellectual filmic document of Jacques Derrida,
captured from multiple angles, all determinedly incomplete. From classroom segments, interviews, vérité
sequences, and, most crucially, passages from Derrida’s texts, the documentary
constructs a rigorous yet ultimately impressionistic portrait of a complex man.
The film, as the directors make clear below, is not an “intro to
deconstruction.” Instead, Derrida leaves the viewer with a feeling
of significant but partial
accomplishment, a sense that the work of understanding is both just beginning,
and (as Derrida himself would have it) always already underway.
I
spoke with Dick and Kofman during their visit to the San Francisco
International Film Festival in May 2002.
MS: The two of you come from
different backgrounds, Amy’s being the more academic, and Kirby better known as
a documentary filmmaker. How have these two different kinds of ethos resulted
in the film’s hybrid form?
AZK: There really was a
cross-pollination. When I saw Sick, I thought, that’s way up there in
terms of intelligence and theory. I’d
been working alone for about two years, at least, and I wanted to work with
someone who I could collaborate with. It was getting to be too much for me,
without any kind of filmmaking expertise.
MS: Are there specific
examples of what Kirby brought to bear on what you’d already done? How did the
differences work themselves out in practice?
AZK: I think we just kept
pushing each other. There was a certain
demand I always placed on the movie to fulfill certain intellectual ambitions,
and I could never compromise those. And
Kirby was right on-board with those demands. Because of that, it just luckily
ended up being a good set-up. And also,
there are certain “Kirbyisms” that I don’t know that I would’ve been inclined
to do, things I picked up quickly. And then my editing was certainly informed
by things I noticed that he would do.
For instance, Kirby likes to let things roll longer than most
documentary filmmakers do.
KD: One of the plans of
working with Amy was to adhere exactly to the demands that she had for the
film. At no point did she want to compromise what her initial ambitions for the
film were. And that was a very stimulating, creative environment to work
in. One of the reasons I wanted to do
this film is that, not only did I think that I would never get another chance
to make a film about a philosopher, but to have a film with this ambition, is a
chance that I knew would never come around again. So that was a real pleasure.
One of the things that concerned me, and something I try to do, is to look at
the film from the perspective of the imagined audience. Because for me, that’s
one of the theoretical pleasures of making a film – speculating this mass other
and how they receive, not only your work, but you, actually. It’s hard to separate the two, and there’s a
certain narcissistic pleasure . . . so, that’s one of the reasons I make films.
To think through that experience, to put it out in a way. With all films, it’s important. But I think
with this film, I think it was most important, because of the preconception,
the predisposition toward the material, which we knew would be there. And so
it’s nice to be able to think through it from the point of view of an audience
which might not have any knowledge of Derrida, and at the same time, to reach
in the other direction, which is, how can we dive as deeply into his thinking
as possible? So that stretch made it challenging but comfortable.
MS: It seems like a certain
viewership, coming blind to the movie, might expect it to be a primer on
deconstruction, which it resolutely isn’t.
KD: And we were very clear at
the beginning of the project that we didn’t want it to be.
MS: Why?
AZK: [long pause] Well, I
came to Derrida reading him myself. I
think I took the first theory courses that Amherst offered. So he had just hit colleges (or my
college), and Derrida wasn’t part of the curriculum. You couldn’t study him when I was in college. I took the stuff really seriously, and even
refused for a long time to even use the term “deconstruction,” unless
it’s in a historicizing context, just to refer to what was appropriated and
categorized by other people as . . . something. So for me, deep down in my soul, if you really understand reading
that word, it’s not about being able to apply, or explain. It’s not a doctrine,
it’s not a dogma. It’s a way of
reading. And the way you learn how to
read and think isn’t be someone telling you A, B, C, D . . . It’s by doing the
work of reading a film. So I wanted to
present a film where, maybe you don’t think you know what deconstruction is, or
it doesn’t tell you. But it messes you
up in a certain way, and by the end of it, you’ve done the work. You know something about deconstruction
without the film having said, in an enunciating fashion, “this is X, this is
Y.” Because that way doesn’t end up
giving you what deconstruction is anyway.
An analogy I’ll make, or something Derrida says in the film, you kind of
have to do your homework. To know what
deconstruction is, or to think you know what it is, you have to do a lot of
work – quiet, private work, reading, thinking, considering. Otherwise, Derrida would have written it
down in one page. What Derrida does is
that he performs close readings of different texts. He doesn’t sit there and say, “Here’s a book on
deconstruction.” He says, “Let’s read Plato’s Pharmakon.” So likewise,
let’s read a film called Derrida.
What do we learn about from it?
We learn about biography in a complicated way. We learn about issues of voyeurism and specularity. You learn about all that. So, you’re getting it, but you’re not
getting a doctrine that declares A, B, C, D.
You get something that’s in the spirit of Derrida’s gesture. It’s just a close reading. Whether it’s a film like E.T. or a
film by Trinh Minh-ha, if you do a close reading of E.T., it’s telling
you a lot. It is a deconstructive text
as well. It’s not like Trinh’s privileged or Godard’s privileged, because they
break the fourth wall, or have Brechtian instances, or self-referentiality. . .
One of the sad things about this movie is that it’s immediately pegged as
“deconstructive” because it has these self-reflexive moments, which now
everyone thinks easily as, “oh, it’s unwinding, unspooling . . .”
MS: You mean the mise-en
abyme segments, Derrida watching Derrida?
AZK: Not only that, but the
sound technician taking the microphone out of the pocket, or “wait a minute,
there’s a camera here,” all those camera crews depicted in turn. And that’s part of it, but that’s not
really it at all.
KD: There’s something
interesting here, because I was talking to someone about this yesterday, and
this may not be true, but in some ways, people walk away feeling like
they understand his thinking to some degree.
In some senses that’s true, but in some sense there’s a misunderstanding
of it. It’s an initial misunderstanding, which I think in some ways is
deliberate in the film. When one reads any great writer, your first take is
almost always a misunderstanding. But
it’s that misunderstanding that thrusts you into the work. You think, “Well, that’s interesting enough
for me to read, and to finally understand even with repeated readings.” At least for me, that was one of the objectives. Some people say, “This film deconstructs
Derrida.” It does not, in my
mind. Amy might think differently. But what the film does is to put signposts
up and to allow you to get your first understanding (which is a
misunderstanding), and thereby get past the idea that his work is impenetrable,
that’s it’s antagonistic. . . Like I said, one of the things we constantly
encounter is the preconception, which we have to acknowledge going in to the
film. So, to me, it’s really phenomenal
that people come away saying, “I want to read him.” That’s a very rare comment when people encounter Derrida, in any
form. You never hear that. “I want to read him.” You usually get people who’ve said “I’ve
tried to read him, over and over, and I’m not going to read him anymore.” That’s
the common response. So in this way there was a certain agenda with the film,
which was to offer that experience.
People aren’t going to have that experience when they sit down and read
it, but still, I think in some way they have a support system. There is an
explanation, and there is a primer element to the film. A certain range
of issues are dealt with. And they
develop an affection for him, and that helps when the reading gets rough.
AZK: That was the
overwhelmingly surprising response, the number of people who came up to me
after seeing the film in the test screenings and at Sundance, saying “What
should I read?,” “This was incredible,” “Thank you for making me think
again.” They’re not used to going into
movies and being pushed or stretched. So there was that comment from the person in the Q&A [in San Francisco]
who said, “it was obscure, I really couldn’t understand the quotes, why did you
include them?” And one response I’ve
given at other points, and didn’t that night, was, I’ve always been most
interested in things I couldn’t understand.
You need to see and hear it over and over again.
And that’s not a bad
thing. That’s kind of cool, when
something is over your head, but not intimidating. That’s intriguing.
MS: There’s a certain
preconception about documentary that after viewing it, you’ll have achieved a
certain mastery.
AZK: And just like with the
biography, there’s an issue of what you know and what you don’t know, it’s the
same with the [onscreen] quotations.
There’s an issue of what you understand and what you don’t understand,
and the spaces in-between, a continual position of knowledge and non-knowledge,
non-mastery and mastery. The other
thing I was going to say about why we didn’t make it a deconstruction primer
is, likewise, the analogy that it takes time and work. I mean, when I say “E=mc²,” you don’t expect
that because there’s a quantum physics equation, people would say, “explain it
to me, and I can understand it in one page.”
But somehow because it’s a philosophical statement or gesture,
“deconstruction,” they think they should be able to get it. And it’s not fair. You have to do a lot of physics to understand how you get that
equation. And to a great extent, the
same thing is true of the word “deconstruction” in Derrida’s work. And it never was a term he privileged
or intended to be excerpted. That’s
also why I’m very rigorous about this.
It was appropriated, it was declared, and it was repositioned onto his
work, as if that’s what his work’s about.
But I just maintain his works are close readings. He wasn’t making a manifesto. And yet it’s become a manifesto or a
buzzword, but that’s not what he’s about.
KD: I agree with you about
“deconstruction,” but I think there is a manifesto quality to his work, in a
way. There’s a tone.
AZK: Yeah, there’s a
consistent ideology, I would say. But
he was setting out to do work, the work of critical reading. Period, end of sentence. “Deconstruction” is something else.
MS: Kirby, Amy mentioned Sick,
and I was wondering what sorts of continuities you may see between Sick
and Derrida?
KD: Well, one thing is that
I’m willing to use very low-end cameras, sometimes second cameras and third
cameras, and incorporating that into set-ups or shots with higher-end cameras.
I did that in Chain Camera which was all shot on Hi-8. So that’s
something that’s extended all the way through those two films and makes them
continuous for me. Obviously Sick is much more of a biography, or what’s
thought of a biography, than this film. But still, there are a lot of
similarities because they’re both about one unique person and his range of
thinking and the range of his work. And there are a lot of issues that come up
there, in terms of how you can push something as far as you can and still have
the audience aligned empathetically with the subject. One of the things with [Derrida],
someone came up to me and said the film was welcoming. And not that I think all
films have to be. But I think that my films tend to be, even though the subject
matter might not be perceived to be.
But I think we definitely wanted to have that quality with this film,
where the name, the notion, “Derrida,” conjures up such antagonism,
trepidation, whatever. So I think audiences come in like, “Can I understand
this? Will I be able to deal with it? Is it going to be clear enough for me?”
And so a lot of the film, a lot of the humor in the film, was really meant to
counter that prevailing image of Derrida’s work. And I have a lot of ideas as
to why that is the case, but if you read it, it’s just thinking. There’s
no reason to have the attitude, especially in the popular press, and even with
the academic presses, that it is so difficult, so controversial. And yes, in
one sense he is. But oftentimes that [perception] just totally obscures what
his thinking is. So the idea of just taking that entirely out of the picture,
like just saying sometimes he isn’t, but sometimes he is a friendly man, and
helping people get past those issues of controversy and focus more on his
thinking – that’s one of the objectives.
MS: One thing which seemed
interesting about Sick, revisiting it after having seen Derrida,
is that there’s this kind of two-step process of deconstruction whereby a
standing opposition is initially flipped, to take the subordinate term and make
it dominant, and then to show how they actually interpenetrate. And it
seems that in Sick, Bob Flanagan is deconstructing this pleasure / pain
dichotomy which most of us use to structure our lives.
KD: Right. Amy’s commented on
that. I think that’s true. But also, I think that you’re working with material
and you want to examine it from all sides. So that just sort of happens through
the process of examination too.
MS: One other similarity I
noticed was that in both Sick and Derrida, we have the
introduction of the subject’s family, and I don’t want to say that they’re
uncomprehending, but there is this other, quite different register which is
introduced.
KD: Yes, I guess it allows
you to get at the subject from another angle which [he] isn’t in control of
presenting. And all the humor in that situation comes from that. I mean, I
think that’s done fairly often in documentaries, right? Particularly with subjects who are artists.
MS: Right, it tends to depend
on the subject. Thinking about the structure of Derrida, in comparison
to other contemporary biographical films – for example, Jim Shedden’s Brakhage
– that’s a film which takes a totally different structure which clarifies what
you don’t do, such as bringing in talking heads, authoritative figures.
There’s an assumption that the way to make a figure’s importance clear to a
wider audience is to bring authority to bear. This is something that, by and
large, Derrida eschews.
KD: That’s always a problem.
One of the only times I saw it done really successfully was in Crumb,
where the authority figures were giving Robert Crumb more stature but at the
same time . . .
AZK: They were being
undermined.
KD: Exactly. But in many
ways, I find that authority figures create more problems than they’re
worth. The biographer begins to focus
on them. And it also becomes very reductive because you normally take a few
statements that they make, and so then those statements seem to bracket
everything underneath it, even though oftentimes those remarks were just off
the cuff, or you just happened to get that moment, or it was something short
enough to make a soundbite out of.
AZK: What we did to get
around that problem... Before, we had screenings which totally ignored anything
that positioned or “authorized” Derrida.
Obviously we wanted this to be able to reach a mass audience. So we spent a lot of time trying to solve
this problem. That’s why we use the media clips at the start. Because that
immediately ironizes it, because it’s
not our material, and because we play with problems of media throughout. We
sort of complicate what their gesture of authorization is, but we’re presenting
it for those viewers who don’t even know who the guy is, to give some sense
that Derrida is pretty well-known, and to introduce the word “deconstruction.”
We just wanted to get those things dispensed with. That was the only gesture I
would make towards any conventional biographical positioning. We figured out
that we can use the media clips to provide this narrative. There’s some really
cool stuff we ended up doing, playing much more in-depth with how that
narrative is just a version of Derrida himself.
MS: In that second sequence,
in terms of the ironization, those clips you select involve media people really
bringing the “proper name” of Derrida to bear, with all the appropriate
reverence. And this is intercut with a very different Derrida, this gentleman
with his wife, looking for his keys. (In part, I took this is a possible
parallel to Spurs and Nietzsche’s marginal “I forgot my umbrella”
comment.) It seems like these moments are doing at least double duty. They
announce that we are not in the space of hagiography, and at the same time they
implicitly argue that these trivial details do have a kind of significance.
AZK: Yes. I think the film is
trying to show that these moments are not “nothing.” In some ways that’s what Derrida is trying to do as well. In
biography, you can’t dismiss the anecdote. There is something, but there is a
sort of blind stupidity to it as well. And you have to decide. For instance
there’s the sequence where the cameraperson is “looking up at the star,” and
then we intercut to the sequence [of the experts] authorizing him, based on the
proper name. Then we have the long sequence with Derrida walking, which a sort
of National Enquirer version of the story: he took drugs, he was
arrested, and so on. So we’re trying to
offer another commentary on the media, ironizing this desire to pigeonhole the
proper name. What do you do with this different register of fact? Does it
matter, does it not?
KD: And I think that one of
the things about the key section, having it at the beginning . . . there is so
little archival footage of Derrida, of him just in casual situations. Even with
us. I was so used to having subjects
just say, “Fine, keep shooting, it doesn’t really matter, we’ve been working on
this for years, I trust you . . .” [And Derrida was different.] It wasn’t like
he was obsessively controlling. We
spent hours interviewing him, there were hours worth of things to talk
about. But that footage near the
beginning is the only footage I know of Derrida interacting with his wife. It’s very significant in that way, as Amy
said. The media clips give an added
significance to that as well.
AZK: But there also was what
you picked up in the gesture of the high and low, the reverent and the
normal. So that people would know right
off the bat that it isn’t this genuflecting position [Kirby and I] are going to
be in.
MS: The first time I saw it,
those moments really did seem to be going to lengths to show that Jacques
Derrida puts his pants on one leg at a time, like anyone else. But with a second viewing those moments
really unfold. They’re really tender, really touching. And they’re something which is usually
considered marginal.
AZK: When I saw Jacques
before the San Francisco screening, he was saying now that he’s heard a little
bit through the grapevine, “People keep saying it’s funny, that I’m
funny.” Because I think when he viewed
it at home in Paris, it’s like, he’s alone with his wife. It may be amusing but
you don’t really know that people really are picking up on your wit. And I said
to him, “That wasn’t unintentional. Your work is funny. You are funny.”
And it’s important to me to explore what that’s about. So it was important to me
to look for clips that included that [aspect], because again, that’s not
nothing.
MS: I wanted to ask about the
Derrida passages quoted in the film. I noticed that with a couple of key
exceptions, they tended to be excerpts from later, post-1980 texts. How did you go about selecting which texts
would be represented?
AZK: That was hard. Kirby mostly went through the first pass,
because I had such a different relationship to Derrida’s work that I couldn’t
get outside of it enough to excerpt it.
KD: There was a certain
strategy I used. I noticed in his
writing that he tended to open and close texts with a kind of flourish. Usually he’ll open a text with a brilliant encapsulated
analysis of the issues he’s going to proceed with. It seems like he spends some time working on the opening several
paragraphs. And at the end, sometimes
he would shift into this somewhat surreal kind of writing. So one of the things I did was I looked at
the beginnings and ends of each text.
Derrida is very difficult to excerpt, for many, many different reasons,
unlike Lacan, who I’ve read a lot of. You could excerpt nearly every line. It’s just the way he writes. But with Derrida, I was looking for writing
which was more poetic, and I find that that happens more at the beginning and
the end. And also, the excerpts tend to deal with issues of specularity,
narcissism, issues of improvisation, of identity. These are issues that, when you’re dealing with a film about a
biographical subject, are very related.
And they would relate to material of the subject. When put up against a video image of the
subject, there would be a resonance. On
the archive, for example. Whereas other
types of writing might not have the same resonance.
MS: Throughout the film
there’s a concern with the archive, and you both stated that there is a desire
to make a video archive of Derrida. How
do you see the film or video medium as complicating the archive issue? Is there a material difference between the
Derrida Archive in Irvine, CA, which we see, and this videotape document which
can be broadcast, which can be pirated, and has a certain promiscuity?
KD: It’s interesting to think
about, because it seems like eventually this material will be donated to the
Irvine archive, or the one in Paris.
It’s funny, because the material will be so much different in nature.
And just to imagine the two coexisting, the promiscuous and the more formal, is
interesting. There may be that similar
complication between the anecdote and his thinking. It’s paralleled by this footage, which would generally be more
incidental. These are improvs which are in a very non-academic situation,
responses to questions which oftentimes were things we were just curious
about. We wanted to see where it goes,
and its side by side with the more formal questions we asked.
AZK: But I don’t really see
that there’s a difference or a contradiction. In the farthest reach, there’s no
difference between the written materials and the video material. It’s all just
there, for whoever’s going to take it, to do whatever they want to.
KD: Right. But still, I think
for the archivists, it’ll be interesting to see how they categorize it.
AZK: Oh, I think they’re just
going to take it and put it there.
KD: Even so, not all of it
just goes in a box. They’re going to have to go through, date it, who knows. I
know very little about how archives are constructed. Still, it seems like
there’s going to be a separation, which is interesting. At some point a student
or researcher goes into the archive, and where do they go? Some students will
go to the “promiscuous” because that’ll be the easiest thing to go to first.
Will they want to see what we didn’t use? Or others will find this of no
interest. The bleeding together of the two [archival modes] will be an
interesting process. Also, the film not coming from academia, which has its own
standards. . . Even though the film has
been very well-received, there’s a certain suspicion about anybody coming from
a more pop background, about anybody understanding anything academic without
having academic credentials.
MS: Making a film about
Jacques Derrida and his work means that the work enters certain new contexts
where Derrida’s thought hasn’t previously been introduced, including film
festivals, arthouses, maybe the Sundance Channel, etc. It raises interesting institutional
questions. Was that integral to the construction and design of the piece?
KD: I think it definitely
was. One of the things we realized early on was that there’s something somewhat
cinematic, or maybe I shouldn’t say cinematic, but there’s something thrilling
about these ideas, and to present them in this form was a wonderful challenge.
In some ways I’d compare it to my earlier film, Sick. One of the things
I knew was that by taking this kind of footage, and putting it in the closed,
dark environment of the theatre, there was something cinematic and something
thrilling that was going to come out of that. Likewise with Derrida’s
thought. Then on another level, on an
institutional level, there is such anti-intellectualism in this country,
certainly compared to Europe, in most cases, most arenas, and especially
oftentimes with film. There’s a tendency to go in the direction of pop, rather
than the direction of more rigorous thinking. Not to oppose the two, but
there’s always a default and a celebration of the popular. And so putting these
ideas out there into somewhat of a pop context, in a popular medium, that was
one of the projects of the film, to expose his thinking, to expose thinking in
general, philosophy, to a wider audience, and have them think, “well, maybe
that’s not just something I saw and took a couple of classes in, and forgot
about,” but actually something that has a life, something worth study and
consideration throughout your whole life.
AZK: I also wanted to extend
Kirby’s comments in response to your question on institutions. Derrida’s work
is invested in exploring what it means to construct a genre, construct a
border, construct an institution, and his work is always trying to push the
limits of that. So our film, to an extent, is a continuation of that spirit.
(c)
2002 Michael Sicinski