Screen Replays

In memoriam Peter Brunette (1943–2010)

In the summer of 1984 I attended a conference at the University of Toronto entitled “Semiotics of Cinema: The State of the Art.” I gave a paper in a panel on deconstruction and cinema, which seemed to be the first such panel at a film conference in North America; one of the other participants was Peter Brunette. I remember relatively little of the conference—Umberto Eco was a keynote speaker, the feminism-Lacanianism approach was dominant—but can clearly recall two things: sitting on the lawn with Peter sketching out the broad framework of a book called Screen/Play that we would write together,¹ and running into Jacques Derrida, whom I had met only briefly once or twice before, at the coffee machine. He was giving a summer seminar on the same campus.

Our book had its own shelf life and has now long been out of print. On more than one occasion we entertained the idea of revising it, but that never happened, and Peter died too suddenly in 2010. At the time we wrote our book there was only a rather limited amount of work published by Derrida on the visual arts, most notably in The Truth in Painting (University of Chicago Press, 1987), and nothing on cinema. We therefore set about “applying” his ideas to questions of cinema, concentrating on film as writing, and questions of mimesis and the frame and attempting to nudge film theory toward other types of writing as well as toward a different configuration of the field within the emerging new media.

In April 1990, Peter and I interviewed Derrida at Laguna Beach for an anthology of articles by seventeen scholars that was published as Deconstruction and the Visual Arts² and in which we and our collaborators were able to refer to a broader range of texts (the topic was in any case broader than just cinema). During that interview our invitation to Derrida to speak further about cinema met with only limited success, being required to circumvent his protestations of “incompetence.” So now in the spring of 2014, with almost thirty years having passed since the conjuncture that was Toronto and almost ten years having elapsed since Derrida died, I pause to wonder how different a book on Derrida and film theory might be written today, given the full range of material now published as Penser à ne pas voir,³ which opens with the retranslation of our 1990 interview, and especially given the Cahiers du cinéma interview “Cinema and Its Ghosts” that gives rise to this special issue of Discourse.

Over the last thirty years my work in film studies has, to say the least, become increasingly spotty. I do not pretend to know where that field now is, what its major currents are, and so on. It is a very long time since I attended a meeting of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, and although a glance at the 2014 conference program shows its interests to be extremely diverse, the sort of film theoretical work that fascinated me as a young scholar in the 1980s is barely represented (hidden in the middle of the program is a panel entitled “The Return to Classical Film Theory”). Similarly, I have for a long time stopped reading Cahiers du cinéma on anything like a regular basis, whereas it was previously my preferred journal for keeping abreast both of European cinema and of a certain informed, scholarly, and often theoretical film journalism (articles published there in the 1970s by such writers as Jean-Louis Comolli, Jean Narboni, Jean-Pierre Oudart, and Pascal Bonitzer represent the touchstones of a very different thinking of cinema). That Antoine de Baecque and Thierry Jousse, both of whom had stints as editors of Cahiers in the 1990s, should seek out Derrida for an interview (published in the fiftieth anniversary edition) is a not insignificant indication of the journal’s continuing commitment to thinking cinema. But of course, the beginnings of that interview itself (July 1998) are already nearly sixteen years old, situated in some vague midpoint terrain...