Double Exposures: Derrida and Cinema, an Introductory Séance

Abstract

is an art of the ghost.Here, the ghost is me.-Jacques DerridaThe promises of an introduction are many: it is an opening, an initiation, an overview, and setup or mise-en-scene for an encounter or encounters between unaligned phenomena. Its temporal conjugations are those of beginning that is also return, carrying something of the rhythms of haunting, contretemps that Derrida describes in Specters of Marx as a repetition and first time.1 For the encounter staged by an introduction to be worthy of its name, it must not simply prescribe series of relations and fixed course but must also open itself to difference and the unforeseeable or incalculable. In this sense the introductory encounter may produce that captures scene of spatial and temporal heterogeneity in which all parties and all parts are doubly exposed, opened up to forces that leave them mutually inflected, affected, and even altered.In the technical language of photographic media, the term double exposure refers to an image produced when camera's aperture allows light to pass through the lens and onto sensitized substrate within its dark chamber more than one time. outcome is superimposition of several temporally discrete impressions within the same frame, which by accidental development or by design simultaneously testifies to these separate instances and their mutual entanglements by virtue of being together in single visual field. Spirit photographs and early filmic ghosts owe their existence to the technique of multiple exposures. They bear the traces of the ghostly encounters and spectral economy occasioned by the advent of photographic media and the age of technical reproducibility. But such tricks and special effects are but the most explicit manifestations of the fundamental fact to which each and every photographic and filmic impression testifies: all photographic images are spirit photographs, and all films are haunted. In his 1993 text Aletheia, consecrated to the photographs of Kishin Shinoyama, Derrida addresses these inextricable links, stating No phantasm and thus no specter (phantasma) without photography-and vice versa; he extends these thoughts to film in Cinema and Its Ghosts, his 2001 interview with Cahiers du cinema, where he remarks on the thoroughly spectral structure of cinema.2 Photographic media conjure, capture, animate, and generate spatial and temporal experiences marked by presence and absence, perception and hallucination, singularity and differance-in word, the flickering work of phantom techne.It is in this spirit of such exposures and their mutual hauntings that we introduce this special issue of Discourse dedicated to Derrida and cinema. We have assembled reflections on the generative encounters between Jacques Derrida and Derrideaninspired thinking and the variable configurations of technologies, techniques, texts, cultural practices, infrastructures, and institutions called cinema. encounters of this introduction are both repetition and first time, which is to say that this introduction is return to an event that has already happened, that is already there at work in the work, but also that its returns are generative of novelty, new questions, and new pathways of thinking.Repetition, ReturnsDerrida makes clear in Of Grammatology's opening pages that his conception of writing exceeds the confines of print culture to include cinematography, choreography, and any number of visual, musical, and pictorial modes of expression and inscription.3 He returns time and again to the key questions of film and media theory. To name but few entries of bibliography still being devised, still being discovered, reread, and translated in Derrida's wake, one may consider his reflections on mnemotechnics in Freud and the Scene of Writing; on the frame and parergon in Truth of Painting; on photographic media and ghosts in The Deaths of Roland Barthes, Copy, Archive, Signature, Aletheia, and Athens Still Remains; of video in Videor; on the experience of being filmed in Echographies of Television, Tourner les mots and Trace et archive, image et art (his 2002 intervention at the Institut national de l'audiovisuel); and on storage, inscription, and archives in Archive Fever}This quick gloss on some of the primary texts, including ones that have recently come to light, does not account for the numerous commentaries that have arisen because of them, nor does it address the abiding activity of Derrida's thought in contemporary scholarship. …