Derrida

Rating:
Summary: Artistically Interesting - Philosophically Light
Review: The producers of this film seemed to be more interested in making a philosophically relevant piece of art than a primer on deconstruction. This was certainly their prerogative, and in some ways, ironically, a more fitting experiential sort of primer; but it seemed to me squandered access to one of our time's most celebrated minds.

20-30% of the movie was shot by a 3rd or 4th camera with the primary camera in the picture blurring lines of story teller and subject and there were protracted segments of Jacques buttering bread or walking down the street that were thick with irony. However, it seemed this film was more about the cleverness of the filmmakers than the thoughts of a powerful mind. There is little discussion of deconstruction and the interviewers get him to talk at length about topics clearly not central to his program. Eventually the ubiquity of the unsteady cam shots and "decentered" (yes, I know, another artistic representation of Derrida's method) visual focus became a distraction. There is some footage from seminars that is outstanding and periodic quotes are helpful and appropriate. On the whole I have to rate this DVD highly because there is nothing like it - but it represents a bit of a missed opportunity - there is no reason 2 weeks of access to this man should not result in 5 stars. 85 minutes of compiled lecture and seminar clips would be a more helpful introduction to Jacques Derrida


Rating:
Summary: Derrida
Review: "What if someone came along who changed not the way you think about everything, but everything about the way you think" An interesting film, which actually deconstructs itself. Derrida buttering toast, nice.

Rating:
Summary: unbelievably self-absorbed and insipid
Review: Agree with the prior customer views, big time. On Derrida's resistance to the project, he gets no complaint from me. He clearly gave extraordinary access and tried very hard to cooperate, but the crew was so intrusive and inefficient with lights and mikes and the questions so insipid, that he just seemed constantly amazed at what he was being subjected to. Alas, name it Derrida Butters His Toast if you want to do some self-inflated student art project. I learned close to zero about Derrida the thinker, other than he seems to be a nice old French fellow with a long standing marriage and a successful practice in teaching and writing.

Taking on a project with this potential, spending years with this level of intimate access, and calling it Derrida, suggesting breadth of content, but bringing little insight about his thinking to the screen outside of mostly silly gimmicks, is a sad sad thing.

Rating:
Summary: Felt... unfinished.
Review: Derrida (Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering Kofman, 2002)

Kirby Dick (Sick, Private Practices) and first-time director Amy Ziering Kofman take a look at, arguably, the most important and influential philosopher of the twentieth century, Jacques Derrida. And perhaps "take on" is the best way to understand the dynamic of this film.

Kofman's intention was to get away from the philosophy, for the most part, and get to the quotidian existence of Derrida's life. Which is all well and good, except that people who go to see a film about Jacques Derrida are going to want the philosophy. But looking at it strictly from the slice-of-life aspect, the film still comes off looking like a student project. (Co-director Kirby Dick, who came in after the start of production, mentions the "naivete" of the footage that had already been shot in interviews. Indeed.)

It probably doesn't help that Derrida keeps throwing monkeywrenches into the works himself. It's not as if he feels uncomfortable with the camera, though his reactions at times may be mistaken for such; it is more that Derrida feels an acute sense of being filmed, which at times makes him reluctant and at times makes him somewhat mischievous. (Kofman is from Los Angeles; during a lecture, for example, Derrida mentions that the last film the class looked at from LA was footage of the Rodney King riots, and goes on to pull the parallel out farther.) The end result being a documentary with no finesse about a subject who is reluctant to be a subject.

One thing of note, though: the wonderful score by Ryuichi Sakamoto (Wild Palms, etc.). It is brilliant, and perhaps does a better job of underscoring things here than does the direction. Lovely.

While a look into the life of Jacques Derrida is a rare and wonderful thing, and needs to be treasured, I wish Dick had been the author here, or a similarly gifted documentarist. What we have could have been-but wasn't. ** ½

Rating:
Summary: Sure to spark lively debate...
Review: Derrida does what so many other monographs on famous people does, alienates the subject and gives us an interesting, stilted look into his/her life.

I attended a screening of this movie this afternoon in my university's english department, this afternoon. The question-and-answer period that followed, however was anything but tame, and that's when I, perhaps, realized the value of this film, to get people to ask questions.

The whole idea of a biographical picture on Derrida seems almost unnecessary, considdering his feelings on the subject of biography (which are made clear almost immediately in the film). So we must ask the question, why this film, why is it necessary? Moreover, the crew spent a considerable amount of time shooting the philosopher so the fact that they included such insipid questions raises a question in itself...why are they there? Perhaps they are there to show that Derrida can inprovise better than he claims he can. Perhaps they are there to remind us that deconstructionalism cannot be defined.

Whatever the case, it will certainly spark lively debate, however, I'm not quite sure if this film is really a serious profile of the philosopher or something of a slightly cruel burlesque. After all, we often find ourselves unintentionally laughing at his attempts to answer questions with the restraint and rigour that philosophy demands.

And finally, an observation, while the english muffin has often been cited as the film's one look into his "true life," I'd like to propose yet another alternate title, "Derrida's Joke" (which references one of the early scenes in the film when he makes the joke about the philosopher falling in the well while looking up at the stars). These few moments allow us to see his tastes outside of the cloak of rigour that he wears, almost definsively throughout the movie. They help make the film worthwile.

Rating:
Summary: Two Worthwhile Scenes, lots of Forgettable Platitudes
Review: Derrida's refusal to be a subject, mentioned by another reviewer, is one of the very few interesting elements of this film. In one of my two favourite scenes, Derrida points out the inherent tension between the viewers' expectations that they are 'seeing Derrida', and the fact that he is not the same when viewed by a camera. My other favourite scene is Derrida's response to question about which philosopher his mother would have been. This was probably the only good question in the whole film. Other than these two scenes, the film is filled with banal shots of Derrida's life that tell us little about Derrida the person and reveal nothing about his intellectual thought.

Rating:
Summary: elegant man probes,mines words,life-worlds,time,places,
Review: Despite all the super-ficialities expounded on the negative features of this work Derrida the man who probes behind things,times and durations, meanings of: words, seeing, touching, feeling.,all this is here for one to contemplate(or not)
So it was a California Crew (who made this film) Who needs to get some market Hook into their subject; living in Hollywood does that to people, New York is even worse. But leaving this, Jacques comes through here discussing, "hands" that hands age whereas the "eyes" are those as childhood, the act of looking has no age.

What about Love?
"I cannot speak in generalities about love" . . . "You must ask, pose a question".
This leads anyway to a brief excursion, "exergue" into what is BEing, that we love something, or someone, we love a person, but do we simply love things, qualities about that person,or the person him/herself eradicating the qualities, Tough question since "does he she make alotta of money"(end of quote)or have a fantastic body something Americans seem to be interested(obsessed)with/ in, especially when a film is being made.

The graphics the cinemagraphic feel(s) are fantastic the opening of the movement in a car it what looks like on-his-way-to work Paris it has a wonderful rhythm,the overweight apartment buildings (Six High, Ten across) slowing gliding on (the unseen road) like a wave. Derrida even probes the idea of "archive" what is testimony in the very act of making a film. He kindly explains to his Parisian class on this intrusion with a film crew to his left, " a gauche"

We see his library to the ceiling in a modest part of the home, the entire place is small,cramped, more contemplative.

"Did you read all these books?"

No "I read about four five of them, but I read those five very well"

We see him buttering a bagel or English muffin with sometransparent-like light-green/brown jelly anda large cup of black coffee,gently then returning the glass lid to the butter container: some breakfast! then saying good buy to his wife Marguerite also off to work.

Derrida has a wonderfully elegant glass office,computer dominating the desk with typical assortment of books mixed with writing ledgers with tablets,hard ansd softcards, scrap paper (S)outside; well with a glass ceiling and glass walls/windows to the front off his yard, no flowers just green; with interesting green elegant plants placed, mostly inside.

He visits Nelson Mandela's cell of 18 years on Robyn Island South Africa.Quite powerful boat ride. Then discusses "forgiveness" to a primarially white student body.Derrida believes in "irony" that it should challenge the commonsense, what we expect. We are always compelled to give the answer everyone already expects to hear. So "improvisation" is also important for it disrupts the stereotypical discourse we hear everyday.

We see him "thinking" as well, When asked a question like "Can/If your mother could have been a philospher and if she was how would that have changed things"

"Give me a moment. . . ." . . . it is a good question. . . "

There can never be "pure forgiveness" but "to forgive" to further a cause, or fashion change through forgeveness some part of reality,of time or the future(l'avenir) Derrida endorses.

There is some walking in this film as well as the opening crossing a street "Watch Out! Derrida exclaims (not shouting) to his hosts in New York University.". . . like the philosopher looking at the stars while falling into a well. . . "

If you are unfamiliar with Derrida, this is a good place to start, there are well tthought of excerpts spoken over the images and motions and movements, amnay from "Archive Fever"

His exposition of Echo and Narcissus was also interesting,, "all speech is blind" for it stops whatever else can be thought. And what then of philosophy, that it has wandered through history that it has always fed on its own anxiety, its own pain.

"I would have liked Hegel and Heidegger to speak about their sex lives"

Why?"

"Well it is something they never spoke about, they always kept their personal lives out of their texts."

Rating:
Summary: Ambivalence
Review: I BOTH loved AND hated this film, which I guess is the kind of ambivalent response that a self-consciously self-deconstructive deconstruction of the deconstructor par excellence would/should/could generate. On the one hand, the film did a good job of humanizing Derrida for me. The man is explicitly (conversely from his writings, which are implicitly)charismatic and ironic and witty. On the other hand, that aspect of Derrida--and Derrida himself--is constantly supplemented by a self-indulgent pretention on behalf of the film's makers. I kept wanting more of Derrida in "Derrida" (at the same time I understood and appreciated what the filmmakers were doing), for he is himself precisely the "play" his writings have always already highlighted in philosophical discourse.

Rating:
Summary: A metamentary...
Review: I like the way this meta-documentary shows Derrida reflecting on the film itself. It shows how hard it would be to produce a stereotypical biography of a philosopher who is still alive. The film would definitely have been nothing like this if Derrida was dead.

Rating:
Summary: More entertaining than, um, philsophically stimulating
Review: I really enjoyed this one. It would be especially good to see right after reading Derrida's own Archive Fever, which this film draws from both by quoting some of its passages, and by "deconstructing" the filmmakers' own efforts to get at who and (or perhaps versus) what Derrida is. I agree with a reviewer for The Guardian, who wrote that the filmmakers "produce an enthralling, playful film that constantly frustrates our desire to know the 'truth' about this man, while deconstructing the very format of the biography in a manner that Derrida would doubtless give his blessing to." And on the DVD's extra features, he does just that, at a New York opening of the film.

Those looking for penetrating and critical analysis of Derrida's work and ideas should go elsewhere. As Derrida basically says at one point in the film, such people should "do their homework" and go READ. The music works very well, and many of the ragged, unedited edges purposely left in the film extract a playfulness from Derrida, and from his philosophical methodology itself. So in that sense it's about Derrida and his ideas, but it's also about how biographical efforts themselves (which we all make when we "get to know" anyone in our lives) are fraught with illusions and impossibilities.

My favorite parts were about love; the filmmakers ask him to say something about it, and he says he can't, but then he does, nicely deconstructing the question, of course, separating "who" we think love from "what" we love them for. Sure, the film is a hagiographic portrait, but ultimately, I think we're being asked a good question: what do those who revere Derrida love him for? Shouldn't they separate the two? but if they do, how well can they do so?

Good companion film: Notebook on Cities and Clothes.