Derrida and the Cinematograph: Or the Culture That We Don't Have

Abstract

I saw French films made during Occupation, and especially American films that returned after 1942. I would be totally incapable of listing titles of films, but I remember the. sort of films I saw. ... I have a passion for cinema; it's a kind of hypnotic fascination, I could remain for hours and hours in a theater, even to watch mediocre things. But I have not least memory for cinema. It's a culture that leaves no hace in me. It's virtually recorded, I've forgotten nothing I also have notebooks where I keep reminders of titles of films from which I don't remember a single image. . . . During periods when I go to movies a lot, particularly when I'm abroad in United States where I spend my time in movie theaters, a constant repression erases memory of these images that nonetheless fascinate me.-Jacques Derrida (2001)I have watched all kinds of movies, but I would not be able to quote them. I haven't forgotten anything of those movies, yet their memory has left no traces. Thus, from this memory, memory of cinema, traces did not remain.Through this aporetic rhetoric, Derrida confesses that when he remembers films, he retains a memory of past, although explicit traces of this past disappear. He confesses this by suggesting that cinema would be privileged medium that enables memory not to leave traces. What is interesting in Derrida's interview with Antoine de Baeque and Thierry Jousse in Cahiers du anemais not only his avowal concerning cinema-he doesn't possess a mastery over heritage of cinematic culture but does enjoy intense familiarity with dark movie theaters-but also very singular role of cinematic image within deconstruction of visual arts.Since trace is one of major figures of writing Derrida constantly uses in texts that discuss visual in general, such as painting, drawing, and photography, one should be surprised to learn that cinema, singularly, leaves no traces, whereas in deconstruction the arts are generally discussed in terms of trace. The cinematic image, as Derrida elucidates in this interview, seems to entail a radical exteriority vis-a-vis this singular form of inscription. In other words, not only does cinematic image not leave traces, not only does it not trace (as drawing and painting or photography do) but, according to Derrida, it appears to be deeply divergent from writing model that he had proposed based ona concept of trace or text that was not reducible to alphabetic writing, to writing on page, to writing in a book. . . . I've said that is that world was that was that this gesture is that voice is a writing, that voice is a system of traces, that there is nothing outside text, and that in a certain sense nothing borders, from exterior, this of trace,'If everything is trace, if the world [is] trace, if experience [is] trace, how do we think through absence of cinema's traces? Does it mean that cinema doesn't strictly belong to a type of scriptural model-that of trace-and escapes from borders of that which Derrida tells us is borderless, that is, logic of writing? Within this generalized and archi-global logic of where nothing borders and thus exceeds text to exterior, how is it that cinematic image alone can be exception to this law? How does one understand Derrida's conception of cinema as a type of medium, a medium of impermanence of images, one that he says produces an emotion that is completely different from that of reading, which imprints a more present and memory in me?2 Books, he admits, didn't do same thing for me.3Instead of backdrop of writing's active memory-which seems closer to Derrida's concerns when he encounters Rem- brandt's drawings or Valerio Adami's, Jean Atlan's, and Salvatore Puglia's paintings-Derrida associates cinematic image with a type of passivity. …