Perhaps Macksey and the newspaper reporter have lines that are spoken over the zoomed-in scene we see, of Derrida and Miller posing in a half-serious, half goofy pose for the young woman with the box camera. We don't know know what we might want them to say here. Perhaps not anything. Maybe we just see the silent scene play out. Derrida spots de Man and they wave him over as well, encouraging him, and jogs slowly into the scene and makes a quick pantomime of greeting the young woman as he passes her and jumps into the photo.
The important thing is eventually, in this silence, he arrive at a close-up of Derrida, and he is somewhat absorbed in the beauty of the moment, as he relaxes from the photo pose, as he looks straight ahead. We can see into his eyes.
From there we want to jump somewhere else. We want to jump back in time.
It is several years before. A beautiful spring afternoon. We see the outside entrance of a Paris Metro station in the midst of a little traffic island. A few of the trees are in blossoms. One sees flowers. There is lively gentle activity, with cars and people on the streets.
The sign on the Metro station says Trocadero.
We hear music through this (more on that later)
Up the stairs from the Metro come Derrida and MARGUERITE DERRIDA. Here is she is younger than when we saw her in the maternity ward. She is in her late 20s.
They are smiling holding hands as they walk up. Derrida stops at the top to light a cigarette, and offer one to her, which she declines. The cigarette lit, he picks up his spirit where he left out, looks along the storefronts opposite to the train station, animatedly points to a cafe across the street, and then motions along the sidewalk.
As it happens, what he is doing here for her amusement is pointing out what he claims must be the real-life Parisians locations depicted in the drama La Folle de Chaillot by Jean Girardoux. She knows it and he recites and mimics one of the lines said by the Ragpicker. He pulls her towards the cafe, wanting to sit and have a drink perhaps, but she, with enthusiasm pleads to first go the other direction, up towards...
Friday, April 10, 2020
Thursday, April 9, 2020
Deconstruction: The Second Colleague
Another defect we need to correct in Act One is that if you back and read Macksey's remarks at the opening of the conference, he name checks Derrida. We need to show that moment of course, and maybe here we catch Lévi-Strauss's reaction, or lack of it, on hearing the name.
We could skip over it for now, and use it in nonlinear fashion later. I think it's more powerful to stick to linear storytelling as closely as possible for now, however, especially in Act One, and so I would put this in sequence with Macksey's remarks in the auditorium.
Note: this is why I got stuck where I did before, wth Macksey looking at Derrida across the courtyard while talking to the newspaper reporter. Derrida is approaching SECOND COLLEAGUE and the young woman with the notebook. Macksey is looking at that as he is finishing his line. I was about to have him say Derrida's name there, because he is supposed to say that in the context of the sentence, but it turns out he should already have said it, as we discussed above, in the auditorium.
So what do we have here then? The NEWSPAPER REPORTER has to say the name there, not Macksey, by rule of storytelling. He interrupts Macksey with the name right as we ZOOM over to Derrida being seen by the SECOND COLLEAGUE and the YOUNG WOMAN, out of doors, and the young woman was about to take a picture of the SECOND COLLEAGUE with her box camera, but SECOND COLLEAGUE sees Derrida and interrupts the photograph, waving him over, to stand next to him, and the young woman is cheerily surprised to have another person for the photo, and they are introduced.
That reminds me that we'd like to make the SECOND COLLEAGUE, who is American, to be precisely J. Hillis Miller. Let's assume for now that we can do that.
We could skip over it for now, and use it in nonlinear fashion later. I think it's more powerful to stick to linear storytelling as closely as possible for now, however, especially in Act One, and so I would put this in sequence with Macksey's remarks in the auditorium.
Note: this is why I got stuck where I did before, wth Macksey looking at Derrida across the courtyard while talking to the newspaper reporter. Derrida is approaching SECOND COLLEAGUE and the young woman with the notebook. Macksey is looking at that as he is finishing his line. I was about to have him say Derrida's name there, because he is supposed to say that in the context of the sentence, but it turns out he should already have said it, as we discussed above, in the auditorium.
So what do we have here then? The NEWSPAPER REPORTER has to say the name there, not Macksey, by rule of storytelling. He interrupts Macksey with the name right as we ZOOM over to Derrida being seen by the SECOND COLLEAGUE and the YOUNG WOMAN, out of doors, and the young woman was about to take a picture of the SECOND COLLEAGUE with her box camera, but SECOND COLLEAGUE sees Derrida and interrupts the photograph, waving him over, to stand next to him, and the young woman is cheerily surprised to have another person for the photo, and they are introduced.
That reminds me that we'd like to make the SECOND COLLEAGUE, who is American, to be precisely J. Hillis Miller. Let's assume for now that we can do that.
Wednesday, April 8, 2020
Deconstruction: Follow-Up to Act One
It's been a while since I picked up the thread of this story. Now that my recent day-job assignment is over, I can pick up a few threads.
Firstly, I did some digging and found out the name of the Baltimore Sun reporter who covered the Johns Hopkins conference in 1966. I found his article in the archives of the Baltimore Sun, from Oct. 19. Turns out he is Japanese-American, and was in the internment camps in the war. He wrote a book about it later.
His article is very interesting. It's just a fun article in the B section of the paper. He does indeed speak to Richard Macksey. He tries to understand what Structuralism is a bit. He doesn't mention Derrida, of course, but curiously he doesn't mention Claude Levi-Strauss either.
So in the story either we change the reporter to be him, since we know that historically, or we invent another Baltimore newspaper for our existing reporter to be working at. Or we do some variation of that.
Besides that reporter, I also found out the weather during the conference, and the t.v. schedules. We certainly don't want a mass on Tuesday morning (not that the Catholic Church doesn't do that). Not in the late Sixties. It would have been only on Sunday. Also let's not do the American flag on television. That's too obvious for a story that also involves scenes literally in Baltimore harbor. Always get rid of those obvious things in a story, that anyone could have predicted.
It occurs to me that "Good Morning, Baltimore" as the theme of the opening is also too obvious, given previous movies about that city. Maybe we have Derrida flying in at night---the evening before. His colleague is waiting outside in the twilight on the top of the terminal at Friendship Airport. They can go off to the hotel, which I don't know, but I have a great one to use. A lot of those details, we have to invent them because they weren't recorded, and there is no one left alive to tell us. That gives us latitude in the story to link the things together we want, in a colorful way that will keep people engaged, and allow us to introduce the characters.
As for as the French-accented colleague, of course we want him to be Paul de Man. That's the only choice. We know that he and Derrida both attended the conference, and started a long friendly dialog after that. Did De Man wait at the airport for him like a police detective awaiting a witness arriving on a plane? Of course not. I made that part up. But how do we know otherwise, especially now that Derrida's widow, who is already one of the characters in our story, has passed away, reportedly by the bug that's been going around.
Firstly, I did some digging and found out the name of the Baltimore Sun reporter who covered the Johns Hopkins conference in 1966. I found his article in the archives of the Baltimore Sun, from Oct. 19. Turns out he is Japanese-American, and was in the internment camps in the war. He wrote a book about it later.
His article is very interesting. It's just a fun article in the B section of the paper. He does indeed speak to Richard Macksey. He tries to understand what Structuralism is a bit. He doesn't mention Derrida, of course, but curiously he doesn't mention Claude Levi-Strauss either.
So in the story either we change the reporter to be him, since we know that historically, or we invent another Baltimore newspaper for our existing reporter to be working at. Or we do some variation of that.
Besides that reporter, I also found out the weather during the conference, and the t.v. schedules. We certainly don't want a mass on Tuesday morning (not that the Catholic Church doesn't do that). Not in the late Sixties. It would have been only on Sunday. Also let's not do the American flag on television. That's too obvious for a story that also involves scenes literally in Baltimore harbor. Always get rid of those obvious things in a story, that anyone could have predicted.
It occurs to me that "Good Morning, Baltimore" as the theme of the opening is also too obvious, given previous movies about that city. Maybe we have Derrida flying in at night---the evening before. His colleague is waiting outside in the twilight on the top of the terminal at Friendship Airport. They can go off to the hotel, which I don't know, but I have a great one to use. A lot of those details, we have to invent them because they weren't recorded, and there is no one left alive to tell us. That gives us latitude in the story to link the things together we want, in a colorful way that will keep people engaged, and allow us to introduce the characters.
As for as the French-accented colleague, of course we want him to be Paul de Man. That's the only choice. We know that he and Derrida both attended the conference, and started a long friendly dialog after that. Did De Man wait at the airport for him like a police detective awaiting a witness arriving on a plane? Of course not. I made that part up. But how do we know otherwise, especially now that Derrida's widow, who is already one of the characters in our story, has passed away, reportedly by the bug that's been going around.
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