Deconstruction: The Motion Picture

If I had complete freedom to produce movie, television show, streaming series, etc., I'd certainly make one about the original three-day Baltimore conference in October 1966, where everyone agrees is where it all started. It was, Derrida himself called it, the évènement ("event").

The hero of the story is of course Derrida, the trickster, who comes into the conference as the unknown, a last-minute replacement speaker, and comes out as a rock star.

We would place other notables in the story as well.  Many of course would be French, but also plenty of Americans as well. 

Certain background and plot would be provided in flashbacks, perhaps tracing Derrida, and perhaps other characters, in the time before the conference. The story would need to foreshadow, and to some extent explicate, the importance that the "event" would take on in later years.  At the end we should understand better how we got where we are today, partly because of what happened there.

One of the characters of the story is the city of Baltimore itself, as it was in the fall of 1966, including it airport, where perhaps we see Derrida in the beginning and end of the story. Certainly, given the subject matter, we need to see a hospital maternity ward with newborn infants.

The visuals of the movie would reflect the achingly gorgeous, crisp  technicolor aesthetic of both Hollywood and foreign movies, recognizable to any film buff as characterizing the  years roughly from 1962 to 1966. How could  it be otherwise?  Among other films, Contempt by Jean-Luc Goddard comes to mind. Perhaps one can find a way to make Brigitte Bardot, whose genius is perhaps most evident in that particular movie, a character in this story too.