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French Philosopher and UC Irvine professor, Jacques Derrida, is the subject of the documentary &#

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While Jacques Derrida might not be a household name, filmmakers Amy Ziering Kofman and Kirby Dick thought a documentary on the famed philosopher was due.

“There’s a great deal of interest in him and his work,” Dick said. “There’s a generation of people that have studied his work and struggled with it or were inspired by it, and I think this is an opportunity to come back to it.”

Ziering Kofman, a first-time director and a former student of Derrida at Yale, is herself a woman of that generation. She first hatched the idea of making a documentary film on the “Father of Deconstructionism” when she saw Derrida at a UCLA guest lecture in 1994.

“Sitting in the audience, I realized he’d be a really cool subject,” she said. “There should be some record of him on the planet, and I realized I had never seen any cinematic images of him.”

After two refusals by Derrida, Ziering Kofman took initiative and showed up at the Paris native’s doorstep with a full film crew. While there was initially no structure to the project, the directors’ main objective was to create a film inspired by Derrida’s writings and ideas.

“There was reluctance on our part to do a Derrida primer, an ABC or how-to on Derrida,” said Ziering Kofman. “The motivation was to have the challenge of trying to make a film that works through all the things I had gotten reading Derrida’s work.”

Ziering Kofman and Dick followed Derrida intermittently over several years, filming him in Paris, South Africa, New York and UC Irvine, where he teaches.

The constant presence of cameras led to some resistance by Derrida, whom Ziering Kofman empathizes with.

“We were sort of a vulture figure,” Ziering Kofman said. “He knows that we, or at least the film, will outlive him. So I understood and was empathetic to his plight that part of his antagonism and agony in dealing with us was his agony of what it means to be a person who’s going to be posthumous.”

Ziering Kofman and Dick had over 75 hours of footage, featuring everything from archive dedications to the daily search for car keys. However, with no traditional documentary arc to follow, the editing process proved highly challenging.

“The whole thing was continually in flux,” said Ziering Kofman. “There was no, ‘let’s copy what they did with Freud,’ or ‘there’s a great one on Nietzsche we could do it like.’ We kept on struggling through the editing process.”

Eventually, Dick and Ziering Kofman decided on a musical structure of movements or “nuggets,” each fragment having its own leitmotif: love, death and so on. However, the directors needed a way to connect the visual images with Derrida’s work. The use of multiple cameras elaborated on Derrida’s idea of the Eye, the One, the Other and margins in relation to center.

A more concrete connection to Derrida’s writing is Dick’s idea of narrating quotes from Derrida’s many books, a technique that Ziering Kofman resisted at first.

“I, being an academic and a student of Jacques’, was very reverential,” she said. “I said, ‘You can’t just take out a paragraph. It won’t work.’ But when Kirby just read a few passages of Jacques’ over Paris landscapes, I was stunned. It reads like poetry.”

Dick and Ziering Kofman’s poetry finally took shape at the 2002 Sundance Film Festival, where it was nominated for the Grand Jury Prize. It has since earned acclaim from critics, audiences and Derrida. Ziering Kofman hopes the film will bring viewers closer to the writings that inspired her as a student.

“To sit down, read a text, and read it carefully together is to do it justice and to take it seriously,” she said. “What I hope this film achieves is that in some ways it’s working through certain spaces that that type of close reading would bring you to.”