Derrida

dir. Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering Kofman

Opens Fri April 4 at the Little Theatre.

Near the beginning of Derrida, a television interviewer establishes the impressive credentials of Jacques Derrida, the French philosopher and father of the theory of deconstruction. Filmmakers Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering Kofman contrast this clip with footage of a forgetful Derrida at home as he searches for his keys. The juxtaposition is funny, to be sure, but it also humanizes a man known to be a great and at times difficult thinker, and Derrida continues that tone throughout, making you laugh as you learn some of the basics of the man's ideas.

Deconstruction is one of the most playful of the modern philosophies. Dismissed by some as merely contrarian, playing both sides of an argument against the middle, it questions the very assumptions that underlie critical thought. One of the most basic branches of philosophy is metaphysics, which concerns itself with the nature of reality and the relationship between mind and matter. It should be telling that after all these thousands of years, nobody's quite gotten it right yet. Derrida's approach is to break it down to the words we use to describe Being. Are you someone or something? When you love someone, do you love that person or do you love elements (beauty, intelligence) of that person? Derrida looks beyond the big question into the bits that make up the question. Deconstruction examines how you think about things.

Amy Ziering Kofman discovered the writings of Derrida when she was in high school, and was immediately smitten. She continued with philosophy through college, eventually studying with Derrida himself while doing graduate work at Yale. After college she was a producer on the documentary Taylor's Campaign, about a homeless man's run for city council in Santa Monica, CA, and with that experience under her belt she decided she needed to make a documentary on Derrida. "Part of the pleasure or desire to make this was that it raised the bar for me," she told me at the Sundance Film Festival. "It's one thing to read someone, it's another thing to have to interview them, contend with their work, and somehow attempt to do justice to it cinematically."

She decided she needed help, and after she saw a rough cut of Kirby Dick's Sick: The Life and Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist, an empathetic and evenhanded documentary about the loving side of sadism and masochism, she decided he would be perfect. Of that movie, she said, "In my view, [Dick] was instinctively holding to a Derridean precept, a system of opposites in which neither dominance nor submission is privileged." She asked him if he would like to come aboard this documentary, and having read some French theory himself, he jumped at the chance.

"There's this constant belief that American audiences want something dumber, as dumb as possible, and I don't think so," Dick said. He was drawn to the challenges of this movie, of capturing a thinker's thoughts in a cinematic way.

When I wrote the first paragraph of this review, where I imply the footage of the forgetful professor was put in to humanize him, I was misleading you. The reason I wrote that was to reach out to people who may never have heard of Derrida and give an example of how this is a fun movie that happens to have some big ideas in it. It's more complex than that, even if it's no less fun. Throughout this ersatz biography of a modern philosopher, both Derrida and the filmmakers are questioning the whole notion of biography. Derrida says when he's home all day he never changes out of his bathrobe, but when the filmmakers show up he's fully dressed. His mentioning that is his way of talking about how the camera changes his behavior, but at the same time he is acknowledging something we already know about documentary films. He opens us up to look for the truth behind the image.

According to Kofman, "That's what we were hoping for. Not to explain things, but to get people turned on, and move the space of thinking a little bit; to make people stop and think about what thinking is about." Go ahead and read that quote again. It seems convoluted on the surface, but it actually makes perfect sense. If the current cinematic climate is defined by the dumb fun of the Hollywood blockbuster, where action scenes trump dialog and the plots don't make any logical sense, it's good to know that smart films can be fun too.

For those who want to do a little extra thinking, the screening on Friday, April 4 will be introduced by Charles Mudede and Nic Veroli of the Seattle Research Institute (www.seattleresearchinstitute.org), and as of press time their talk was to be called "The Birth and Burial of Jacques Derrida, RIP."