Différance, the Spectral, and the Work of Mourning in
Aaron Valdez’s dissolve
By Jennifer Proctor
Aaron Valdez’s short film dissolve (2003) opens with a shot of a translucent bubble floating easily on a current of air, sweeping past house windows and thick bushes, settling nowhere before the shot dissolves into a foggy mountain landscape. Cut to a close-up of a dandelion dissolving into a thicket of flowers. Cut to sun flares dissolving into a silhouetted child holding a canoe over his head. Cut to sparkling ocean water dissolving into a budding branch. Consisting entirely of a sequence of dissolves extracted from found educational and instructional films and Hollywood movies of the 1950s through 70s, dissolve presents a rhythmic chain of binary images constantly in flux. In a state of persistent dissolve, each shot bears a trace of its dyadic counterpart, and no image achieves full intensity; the dissolve serves to displace the presence of its images in space and time. In its play of dialectical difference—the continuous falling away of presence and emerging into being that defines the dissolve—the film thus demands a reading drawn from the work of deconstruction advanced by Jacques Derrida. The relational formal structure of the film functions as a play of différance, a set of meanings produced by the “between-being” of dissolving images that are never fully present, nor fully absent. The film is haunted throughout; haunted by traces of its own images, by the persistent reminder that death affirms existence, by the notion that memory can be produced only through rupture. The film, then, is fundamentally about the work of mourning, a sense of loss that simultaneously ensures the presence of the lost object. As such, dissolve serves as a cinematic analog for the play of différance and provides valuable platform for theorizing about the application of deconstruction to the cinematic form.
DISSOLVE: FORM
the dissolve as ergon
In its simple, standard usage in the institutional lexicon of cinema, the dissolve operates as “a transition that superimposes a fade-out over a fade-in.” [1] In conventional narrative cinema, the dissolve traditionally functions as a transitional device signaling specifically a change in diegetic space or time: a shift in historical moment, a change in location. As Christian Metz has noted in his semiotic analysis of narrative film, such optical devices function largely as “filmic punctuation” which “separate large, complex statements and thus correspond to the articulations of the literary narrative…” [2] The dissolve functions as a non-representational optical effect and therefore not as a meaningful unit in and of itself; it only becomes coherent once attached to visual referents (shots) in the context of a narrative that triggers the spatial or temporal shift. As such, the conventional dissolve falls under the rubric of what Derrida calls (via Kant) the parergon, an integral but secondary aspect of the body of a work of art, such as a frame: “Hors-d’oeuvres stuck onto the edging of the work nonetheless, and to the edging of the represented body to the extent that…they supposedly do not belong to the whole of the representation.” [3] Dissolves, in classical cinema, function not as necessary elements in the narrative trajectory but as useful ornaments for the conveyance of scene transitions.
However, dissolve adopts the dissolve as its primary unit of enunciation and meaning, shifting its function as a transitional device to that of a transformational device. The film strips its images of a narrative trajectory, eliminating the teleological movement necessary to carry a transition from an origin to a destination (spatial or temporal). Detached from narrative signifiers, the dissolve serves to transform one abstracted image into the next, relying solely upon differences between shots for intelligibility. Yet the film consists solely of shots in a state of dissolve; with the exception of a few seconds at its opening, no static or fully visible images remain intact in the composition of the film. Each image contains a visual trace of the preceding or subsequent shot in some stage of emergence or disappearance.
The meaning of the film, then, resides less in the content of the shots or sequences, but in the relations between images. The dissolve functions as a “between-being” or “being-between” of the images, the (unlocatable, unspecifiable) site of the articulation of difference. As such, the dissolve becomes the ergon of the film, no longer a punctuating element but the “inside” of the work, its substance and its meat. However, as we shall see, the dissolve, as an operation that functions as a “between-being,” serves to complicate the relationship of inside and outside, resisting the reductive logocentric impulse to describe opposites as self-contained, mutually exclusive categories.
dissolve as différance
The term “dissolve,” even in its scientific connotations, suggests a process rather than a result. It is an act of becoming: “to become dissipated or decomposed,” “to become fluid,” “to pass into solution.” [4] Dissolving is also a condition of existing between states, a form of being that denies easy identification, a “being-between.” Notably, the introduction of the verbal noun “dissolve” was prompted by the development of the dissolve in cinema as a way of defining the operation as both action and object. The term itself depends upon a contrast of the linguistic distinctions between noun and verb to fully capture the active meaning of the dissolve as a process in film. The play of différance at work in dissolve, then, finds its origins at the very level of the film’s title.
Like the dissolve, whatever its definition, différance, in Derrida’s formulation, is itself a process, or, perhaps, a practice. It is, he is careful to delineate, “neither a word nor a concept,” [5] but the “playing movement that ‘produces’—by means of something that is not simply an activity…differences, these effects of difference…. Différance is the non-full, non-simple, structured and differentiating origin of differences.” [6] In his critique of Western metaphysical notions of presence, he challenges the logocentric principle of non-contradiction by hypothesizing that all concepts depend, for their very being, on the existence of their opposites; indeed, all concepts contain their opposites in some way. In other words, a concept can only be comprehended—is only intelligible—by its difference from that which it is not. Peter Brunette and David Wills describe this formulation succinctly: “Every concept… has its opposite somehow inscribed within it, in the form of what Derrida calls a ‘trace,’ which, like a footprint, is paradoxically there and, as a sign of an absence, not there at the same time.” [7] Thus, neither term (the concept or its opposite) is fully present or fully actualized; its absence partly constitutes its presence. The play of différance, then, serves to displace presence, in both space and time, as difference (spacing) and deferral. Différance makes possible these spatial and temporal differences between terms, and itself exists between oppositions as an unlocatable, inexpressible non-origin. “Différance,” maintains Derrida, “is not, does not exist, is not a present-being in any form…it has neither existence nor essence. It derives from no category of being, whether present or absent.” [8] Différance defies a logocentric conceptualization of existence—or, at least, works on its margins.
dissolve, then, in its departure from narrativity, seeks also a de-centering, a shift away from originary presence. In part, it accomplishes this by reframing the dissolve from its conventional applications as a narrative transition into an abstracted, sublimated pairing of visual differences that function outside the realm of teleology.
In other words, the dissolve’s sole purpose in the film is to produce difference; it does not serve any diegetic trajectory, it does not emerge from an origin or travel toward a destination. Although the opening shot of the floating bubble holds Derridian significance (to be discussed later), the film’s beginning and endpoints are largely arbitrary; one could easily imagine looping the film by splicing together the opening and closing shots, eliminating a center altogether. Furthermore, the film’s rhythmic pattern approaches a climax in its increasingly rapid pace of shortening shots and follows with a denouement of gradually slowing dissolves, begging a structural analysis that would locate the geographical climax of the film. Yet the film deflects the centrality of its visual crescendo. The temporal climax contains a stretch of rapid dissolves, yet the move toward shorter dissolves occurs at the level of the frame, gradually shifting, in this section of the film, from a set of ten-frame dissolves, to nine, eight, seven, eventually culminating in a series of six-frame dissolves. The frame-by-frame change in duration—difference by deferral—is virtually imperceptible to the eye, so that the spectator can only apprehend an impression of change, rather than locate it at a specific moment or in a specific shot, and, arguably, the spectator only recognizes the climax in retrospect. Thus, the center lacks fixity, and it is only through a subtle play of spatio-temporal differences that a central climax is perceptible at all. Indeed, to the extent that the film contains a climax, it is a rhythmic, formal apex, rather than a narrative one. The film, then, challenges logocentric narrative codes in its reformulation of the structures of dissolve and rhythm and inverts the hierarchy of the domination of narrative over form.
As a decentered sequence of visual pairs, dissolve then functions as a cinematic play of différance. Though its dissolving binary images do not take the form of dialectical opposites, they nonetheless bear the visual trace of one another in varying degrees of presence displaced in time, so that no term is ever fully present nor fully absent. As one image of the dyad fades into view, it displaces, in light and intensity, the presence of the other, and yet, as the original image fades away, its presence must not be totally displaced or the (illusion of the) dissolve fails. Indeed, Valdez’s decision to truncate frames from either side of the extracted dissolves, so that only the dissolving portion remains, points to the extent to which the dissolve, as a photographic operation, relies on an additive and subtractive process of blending images—each image depends on the degree of presence or absence of its visual complement for its own existence and for the illusion of transition/transformation to be successful. In addition, dissolve, by including only dissolving images and eliminating the fully realized head and tail frames that traditionally mark the start and end of the transition, further complicates the notion of the dissolve as a transitional or transformational device. In Derridian fashion, the dissolves in dissolve retain visual traces at all times, suggesting that no transformation is ever complete, that an evolution into radical alterity is impossible, that independence does not exist—even in the process of change, the “other” is always already inscribed, and always will be. dissolve, then, exemplifies the play that produces difference—it is a play of différance.
Yet the film’s production of difference is not limited to the dissolve; of course, the dissolve would be unrecognizable without its own oppositional trace. Part of the purpose of the dissolve involves an elision of the cut—it sutures over the hard edge between shots—so as to displace the presence of a cut and generate an illusion of continuity. Thus, the dissolve bears the trace of the cut, its opposite which it attempts to render absent, made all the more evident in the film in its rhythmic play of dissolves and splices. In dissolve, the splices between dissolving dyads remain visible, creating a jarring and exaggerated rupture in visual flow. The cut, here, breaches the dissolve (as well as the fluid, “invisible” edit of conventional filmmaking), underscoring the non-presence of continuity and pointing up the dialectical relationship of the dissolve and the cut: the dissolve serves as an immersive, continuous operation, while the cut represents a surface rupture. The splice, then, by making visible that which the dissolve attempts to efface, denies the self-contained fullness of the dissolve; yet the dissolve, in displacing the cut, denies its full presence or actualization. Thus, each traces the other through their function as visual spacing. Our reading, our experience of the film, therefore lies in between the play of continuity and breaching presented by these cinematic operations.
Yet the splice also renders the film surface visible, and in so doing denies the fullness of the film text. The splice serves as a trace of the film’s production, posing a duality between the film’s material and its visual content, a juxtaposition that has long concerned structuralist and materialist filmmakers (and theorists of these forms) and called into question issues of film (as) language and the semiotic possibilities of cinema. An elaboration on linguistic and modernist concerns of the relationship between film content and form exceeds the scope of this discussion and has been addressed comprehensively elsewhere. Instead, the significance of the tracing of the film’s production here works to underscore the film’s status as a construction of found footage, that is, as film made up of its “others,” strung together with little attention to a persistence of illusion. Indeed, the film explicitly denies cinematic illusion, rendering its film text “false” in contrast to the “realistic” illusion of classical cinema. dissolve, paradoxically, is a creation from discards, a recycling that both produces an original artifact and relies upon pre-existing material. The film undoes the hierarchy of cinematic illusion over foregrounding of form, of original creation over reuse of manufactured elements—an undoing of privileged terms that is at the heart of the deconstruction project.
In addition, the use of found footage further obscures the location of the film’s origin or center. In its use of discards to create a new vision, “what is demonstrated again is that both apparently opposed gestures participate in the same structure, that of the supplement, and that in the film’s construction the materiality of the signifier is constantly elided, providing the lure yet inscribing the impossibility of an intact origin.”[9] As a collage of incompletes, of films of multiple origins, of sequences ripped from their original contexts, the film performs a de-centering gesture. The film’s conscious attention to its own production, through splices and found footage, therefore further underscores its value as a deconstructive text.
the spectral and the work of
mourning
The dissolve, like other forms of superimposition, naturally conjures the notion of the spectral. Since Georges Méliès, “filmmakers [have] most commonly employed double exposure to depict ghosts or to display characters’ thoughts.” [10] The superimpositional aspect of the dissolve produces ghostly effects, creating images (and beings, places, objects) which only partially exist. The spectral nature of the dissolve, then, lends itself to the deconstructive project:
A specter is both visible and invisible, both
phenomenal and non-phenomenal: a trace that marks the present with its absence
in advance. The spectral logic is de
facto a deconstructive logic. It is in
the element of haunting that deconstruction finds the place most hospitable to
it, at the heart of the living present, in the quickest heartbeat of the
philosophical. Like the work of
mourning, in a sense, which produces spectrality, and like all work produces
spectrality.[11]
The dual images of the dissolve, both visible and invisible in a process of dissolving that never allows either image to reach full actualization, thus haunt one another through their own visual traces. In its rhythmic structure, dissolve consists of a constant falling away of presence as new presence emerges, a kind of death and resurrection, such that the primary image in each dyad bears a trace of its subsequent shot that “marks the present with its absence in advance.”
More significantly to a deconstructive reading of this film, however, is that the dissolve produces mourning, a sense of grievous loss that simultaneously celebrates that which is lost, that is, affirms that which is absent. The dissolve in dissolve, dependent as it is for recognizability on its usage in conventional cinema, promises the actualization of an image, the destination of the transition; yet, in this film, the dissolve never follows through. The image never becomes fully present; we never arrive at the destination. The loss of the promised image therefore causes us to mourn. The film re-engages us as the next dissolve begins, yet only produces further loss as the dissolve wanes, and the cycle continues. In effect, a spectator can watch the film without fully seeing anything. The film’s economy is organized around loss and a denial of plenitude, so that no image ever presents itself in full to the spectatorial eye. In its threat to the notion of presence, then, the dissolve in the film threatens our own ontological status and confirms our mortality. It displaces being and defers fullness, reminding us of the inevitability of our own end (our ontological opposite), which itself is merely (temporarily) displaced and deferred. Absence—indeed, death—haunts the film, and haunts us as spectators.
Yet dissolve is not as hopeless (or as masochistic) as this reading might suggest, for in its avowal of impermanence, the film nonetheless embraces the notion of rebirth and perpetuity. Even if the dissolve fails to deliver an actualized image, in its pattern of repeated dissolving couplets, the film assures us that the promise of actualization will be made again, that the process of actualization involves a constant becoming, an emerging-into-being, a spectral repetition. Likewise, the spectral, for Derrida, holds a “hauntological” status: “it is always still to come…a ghost never dies, it remains always to come and to come-back.” [12] The phantom belongs not to ontology or Being, but to another realm in which it persists, undying. That which haunts us in dissolve thus confirms the notion permanence (if not, exactly, presence). And, if death must be inscribed by its opposite, then the film assures us that life repeats, that as inevitable as death is, so is new life, and that the pattern of life and death repeats cyclically.
The work of mourning that follows loss in the film, then, serves to recognize the trauma of absence, but it also reinscribes the (presence of the) valued lost object. In mourning, “…trauma is endlessly denied by the very movement through which one tries to cushion it, to assimilate it, to interiorize and incorporate it. In this mourning work in process, in this interminable task, the ghost remains that which gives the most to think about—and to do.” [13] Mourning itself involves a kind of reincarnation, a promise of life after death in the memory of the mourner, a production of spectrality. Our mourning for the loss of presence, that is, the loss of our own ontological place in the dissolve, on some level therefore affirms and reinscribes our existence, however fleeting it may be. At its heart, the film embraces the bittersweet paradox of being, that to celebrate life, we must celebrate death.
DISSOLVE: CONTENT
the
haunted cycle of the mundane
The imagery in dissolve further asserts the motif of rebirth and resurrection and the dialectical work of mourning. The opening shot of the bubble gliding on air provides a poignant entrée into the deconstructive project at work in the image content of the film, and introduces the motif of cyclicality. The (circular) bubble is a container filled with breath drawn from the air of the atmosphere. Blown and released into the frame from offscreen, it travels as a vessel containing life (breath as soul), a thin membrane (as a hymen) tenuously separating the breath inside from the air outside. The relationship of the bubble’s interior with its exterior is thus complicated: what is outside is contained within, but in transmuted form (air as breath). Breath is drawn from air and released into the air; both are air and not-air, breath and not-breath. But the bubble is a vessel doomed to burst (to melt, to dissolve), releasing its contents and reintegrating breath into the atmosphere from which it was drawn. Thus the bubble represents the re-cycling of life: a bringing into being of life/breath, and a relinquishing of being upon its demise that will enable new being to emerge.
The everyday, even mundane imagery of the rest of the film repeats the cycle of disappearance and reemergence. Dissolving images of historical, multi-temporal, multi-cultural, multi-ethnic quotidian life pervade the film as an almost literal visualization of planetary life “flashing before our eyes.” A shot of a child running dissolves to a child on a swing. Cut to a car dissolving to a stagecoach. Cut to men in their office dissolving to the exterior of a looming skyscraper. Cut to a baby nursing dissolving to a tractor rolling across a farm. Cut to car headlights dissolving into the night sky. Cut to a close-up of a man in contemplation dissolving to a long shot of a mountainside. Cut to indigenous people constructing a straw teepee dissolving to an employment office. We see babies wrapped in blankets, children reading, a couple skiing, traffic jams, teachers at the chalkboard, sunsets, well-to-do families strolling the city street, as well as footage of anatomical, biological, and geological processes such as cell division, muscle contraction, brain activity, reactions of the nervous system, steam billowing from a volcano, eclipses, cloud formation. The film explicitly avoids cinematic spectacle to foreground the ordinary; with few exceptions, images in the film were captured with standard lenses, at standard speed, at eye-level, in monochrome, and without special effects. In its exploration of the play of différance, the film seeks to universalize life through its everyday images to encapsulate the mourning work that suffuses our own daily existence.
The historical register of the images, together with the rhythmic structure of the film, further builds upon the motif of life (and time) repeating in a cyclical pattern. As 16mm found footage, the visuals in dissolve exhibit an image quality—grainy, low definition, low contrast—that marks them as remnants of the past, as cinematic found objects that signal a link with a bygone era. Certainly, styles, fashions, and trends point to the found films’ production as from an earlier historical period as well.
The use of found footage invokes the notion of the absent—these images are historically past, no longer as immediately accessible to us (removed in time and space), and their suggestion of absence invokes a sense of mourning. Indeed, old films arguably engender nostalgia as well, a response related to mourning. Like mourning, nostalgia acknowledges a loss, but takes it a step further by yearning sentimentally for the return of an era which is no longer present. Absence inscribes found footage, prompting a desire to conjure the spectral in an attempt to restore presence.
The visual cycling of dissolves from movies of previous decades—namely the 50s through 70s—which constitutes the film’s structure thus signifies a cycling of time, a cycling of generations. The fact that the diegetic material of the films bears historical marks as well—the Civil War, the Enlightenment, the Old West, ancient civilization—as well as cultural signifiers—the United States, Africa, Europe—suggests the intertwining of time and space throughout the cycle. Indeed, the film’s heavy emphasis on images of maps and geological processes, especially volcanic eruptions, meteorological events, the night sky, sunsets and sunrises, and picturesque landscape shots, brings into relief a cycling of geologic time and the dynamism of Earth’s processes which govern our own capacity for survival. We are complicit in geologic recycling; ultimately, in the economy of the film, we are merely another element reconstituted and metamorphosed, reinvented in new form.
This pattern of formation, deformation, and reformation, of decomposition and recomposition, on the level of both the lifecycle and geocycle, is itself a ghost whose (non)presence haunts the film and, by presenting itself to us, haunts the spectator. The cycle of life represents all who have passed and all who are to come; they are not fully present, yet they do not die, and they are guaranteed always to return. They are us and not-us. The film renders this specter visual (though never fully visible or fully present), and in so doing instantiates what Derrida refers to as the “visor effect”: “…the ghost looks at or watches us, the ghost concerns us. The specter is not simply someone we see coming back, it is someone by whom we feel ourselves watched, observed, surveyed, as if by the law.” [14] The cycle of life indeed serves as law, as an inescapable yet ungraspable principle of our existence. The film, thus, in presenting to us—in reminding us—of our own spectral absence-in-advance, of that terrifying opposite which defines our presence, causes us to mourn. The film reveals that which we must repress in order to survive, that we are perpetually traced by our own eradication.
The use of mundane imagery in the film becomes increasingly significant in regard to the role of memory in the economy of the film. In its conventional use, the dissolve serves to elide the mundane—it provides an ellipsis over that which is unimportant to narrative, and therefore unimportant to our memory or understanding. Yet dissolve foregrounds the mundane as the objects of its dissolves, inverting the ellipsis into positive relief. If, as Freud and Derrida suggest, our memory is selective, and selects out the mundane, retaining only impressions powerful enough to “breach” the resistance of memory, [15] then dissolve functions to present our experience of memory as a play of différance: It makes the mundane more present to us, more fully actualized and accessible to our experience, as it further removes it from us through the denial of full presence in the dissolve. Thus the film simultaneously promises a fullness of experience and immediacy of perception, while distancing us from that experiential plenitude and rendering it further absent from us. Again, we mourn at the failure of the promise and for the loss of our (ideal) individual wholeness.
The persistent repetition of the dissolve, of the motif of life cycling through death and regeneration, further impresses on (breaches) our memory. Yet, the sheer number of dissolves and the rapidity with which they flash across the screen makes impossible a full remembering of the viewing. The volume of images showered upon the spectator therefore serves as a de-centering process in which the spectator leaves with only a vague impression of the film, spotted by a few specific images or details. In essence, our memory of dissolve results from a difference between breaches, a differential cataloguing of those moments we do remember: our memory traces the film. The experience parallels that of memory construction: “It is the difference between breaches which is the true origin of memory, and thus of the psyche,” writes Derrida. “Trace as memory is not a pure breaching that might be reappropriated at any time as simple presence; it is rather the ungraspable and invisible difference between breaches.” [16] In viewing dissolve, our only recourse is to rely upon the differences in breaches for a memory of the film; our memory cannot possibly hold even a fraction of the sheer quantity of images. As spectators, our experience, our sense of self, loses its center and we experience the film in a state of “between-being,” ourselves the subject of a deconstructive procedure.
However, despite the negative connotations of mourning which privilege loss (the absence of the loved person) over affirmation (the spectral presence of the loved person), the film’s organization around removal and absence nevertheless inscribes life and presence within it. The repetition of the cycle of life and of the dissolve throughout the film, along with the dialectical terms “life” and “death,” function as a play of différance in which the ending is the beginning, loss contains renewal, absence implies presence. “No doubt life protects itself by repetition, trace, différance (deferral),” writes Derrida,
But we must be wary of this formulation:
there is no life present at first which would then come to protect, postpone,
or reserve itself in différance. The latter constitutes the essence of
life. Or rather: as différance is not an essence, as it is
not anything, it is not life, if Being is determined as ousia,
presence, essence/existence, substance or subject. Life must be thought of as trace before Being may be determined
as presence. This is the only condition
on which we can say life is death, that repetition and the beyond of the
pleasure principle are native and congenital to that which they transgress.[17]
Life, then, to be life, must contain absence as its native trace, before life is even possible as presence, and the repetition in the film of this binary, and of absence opening up to presence, while invoking mourning, also restores hope, also instills joy.
life
as between-being
The prominence attached to images of biological processes in the film calls into question the location of life and being in our composition, a question interrogated by deconstruction in its critique of logocentric mind-body dualism. A full-body shot of a boy dissolves to a graphical outline of his nervous system. A shot of a man’s head dissolves to a plastic replica of his brain. A close-up of microscopic cells dividing dissolves to a child sitting in a chair. In these shots, the film sets up a duality of interior/exterior, recalling the significance of the bubble as a negotiation of inside/outside in the film’s opening shot. In dissolving between these images of corporeal interiors and exteriors, the film offers a sense of wholeness—our bodies, revealed inside and outside, become complete. Yet it is an illusory wholeness: as dialectical terms, each image traces its opposite, so that neither image ever achieves full actualization. The film thus poses the classic Cartesian question: Where, in this topography, do we exist? What constitutes life? Being? And in Kantian form: What is parergonal to our existence, and what qualifies as our ontological ergon?
In a play of différance that resists a logocentric drive for a singularity of meaning, the dialectical pairing of our biological interiors and exteriors provides a de-centering that seeks to locate being, and therefore life, in an in-between space. The film suggests that life exists not in either of these sites, for neither the interior nor exterior is fully actualized in these images, but as an in-between located outside of this duality—a “between-being,” like the dissolve itself. It emanates from a non-originary, non-primary site. With its repeated emphasis on brains and their enclosure in the body, the film offers a potent metaphor for the question of existence: where does thought occur? Although we know thought arises in the brain, we also acknowledge that it is also not purely a physical property. It derives from another source, a source (as yet) inaccessible to logocentric inquiry, but comprehensible (if not fully graspable) through deconstructive practice. Images of bodies and brains, interiors and exteriors in the film, then, trace one another and de-center the logocentric project, suggesting that thought and being are, perhaps, emergent properties, the result of a play among differences.
Conclusions
In the context of dissolve as a marginal, non-narrative work that draws its content from found instructional films and B-movies, the film depends for its force on its difference from classical (namely Hollywood) cinema. In its conventional use, the dissolve serves as a transitional operation which omits information seemingly unimportant to narrative by eliding time and space. dissolve inverts this practice, appropriating the dissolve for its own purposes to foreground the very passage of time and transformation in space and to embrace the mundane. The film thus performs deconstructive work not only in its content, but in the ways in which it challenges the hierarchy of commercial cinema over experimental forms. It engages in a play of différance with other forms of filmmaking to bring hierarchies of power into focus and subvert them. In displacing and thwarting these power structures, the film employs deconstructive strategies to enter the realm of the political. Indeed, deconstruction is able to provide a political analysis by making explicit “the ways in which authority and power constitute themselves through logocentric, oppositional hierarchies that a deconstructive strategy may then seek to reverse and displace.” [18] Given conventional cinema’s grounding in economies of power, the political applications of deconstruction to cinema, especially the avant-garde, harbor powerful potential. Indeed, the experimental, “strategic and adventurous” nature of différance as practice offers the avant-garde a powerful tool for interpretation and invention. [19]
dissolve, then, serves as a useful launching point for developing a deconstructive analog in film. Its engagement with différance within the dissolve, between dissolves, and among other cinematic forms, offers a framework for theorizing about deconstruction at the filmic level. Most importantly, the film offers a play of différance that addresses spectators directly by challenging, even threatening, their own ontological status and encouraging the work of mourning, but also by affirming presence, existence, and, ultimately, life. As such, dissolve, on a cinematic level, enters into and celebrates the existential paradox, that to rejoice in all of life’s pleasures, we must also accept our eventual demise, and, indeed, that it is because we must face death that life appears so full.
Prepared for
Louis Schwartz’s course on Derrida and Deconstruction
Department of
Cinema and Comparative Literature
University of
Iowa
May 4, 2004
© Jennifer
Proctor