January 7, 2003

THERE'S AN OLD stereotype about great thinkers looking interplanetary – didn't Einstein look like he'd just been frazzled by a secret time machine? – and Jacques Derrida fits soundly into that mold. He has a Bride of Frankenstein shock of very vertical, bristly white hair, a fatal-ski jump Gallic nose, and brows so vast and furrowed they might be Peruvian mountain terraces. His whole demeanor suggests cosmetic vanity was discarded like trash somewhere between birth and kindergarten. It's crusty. It's thinky. It just graded your term paper more assiduously than you probably wished.

On the purely physical plane, Derrida is as great a camera subject as his life work is most emphatically not. His profile is Rushmore-definite while his thinking is metaphilosophical-abstract, and the combination conspires to both juice and dog Derrida, a new documentary. Shot by veteran nonfiction filmmakers Kirby Dick (director of the punishingly intimate Sick: The Life and Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist) and Amy Ziering Kofman (producer of Taylor's Campaign, about a streetperson's run for a Santa Monica City Council seat), this feature knows it's up against an ephemeral wall. Therein lies its grace, humor, and admittedly partial insight.

You might ask: Do I care about the father of deconstruction? Do I even get what that means, after all this time? Is the trend not over? Can we not stop dubbing everything "deconstructive" already? Derrida figured you'd ask, and it has its ways of sussing out the answers, wherever and whenever they can be found.

Kofman is the more vocal of the two inquisitive filmmakers. She's also clearly an ex-acolyte, and in cahoots with Dick she chases the seventysomething Derrida across three continents to raid his privacy and push his pointy face into his theories. In practice, of course, applied to the man himself, they don't fly so well – though he'll allow the codirectors to capture him spreading marmalade on his morning toast, Derrida (or "Jacky," as his wife calls him) is very cagey about keeping the camera crew at arms' length where his innermost thoughts, family relations, and private life are concerned.

He's willing to share a personal-history outline. Born to Sephardic Jewish parents in 1930s French-controlled Algeria and expelled from school at age 10 by anti-Semites, Derrida moved to Paris in his teens to study philosophy. There he experienced further instances of racism and classism that would henceforth color his perception of every established value system.

That earned skepticism underpins all of Derrida's later theoretical breakthroughs, which are expounded in 45 successive books (from 1967 onward) and have been translated into 22 languages. To simplify, deconstruction argues that "truth" in any realm – literary, social justice, political, theological – should never be accepted without carefully weighing the basic concepts and the authorial interpretation it's funneled through. Ever critical of language, Derrida is particularly attentive to the slippery way in which biography becomes fact. Can we truly know a historical personage, or even their still-extant achievements, sans actual interaction with them?

Facing the progenitor of its own harshest genre inquisition, this documentary can't help being serenely bemused by the ideological contradictions the still-breathing subject affords. ("Everything about cinéma verité is false," a curmudgeonly Derrida says at one point.) Though a vigorous and willing public personality, Derrida is Buffalo King when it comes to addressing his personal past and present. Following him to lecture gigs in South Africa and the United States, the movie captures his discomfort in the face of a blinkless camera crew that is illustrating his media-filtration culture ideas. Pity the feckless British TV interviewer who dares to present Seinfeld as an example of deconstruction. "Deconstruction as I understand it does not produce any sitcoms," Derrida grumbles, before adding a final rejoinder: "Do your homework and read."

Cleverly layered in terms of visual and structural gambits, the film reaches its logical apotheosis when Derrida is captured on digital video, critiquing his performance on a previously shot digital video. A rose is a rose is a rose – but what if it knows as much, indeed?