Spectralité - Derrida

As for Sartre, the analysis of cinema by Derrida runs trough psychoanalytical the notions.

Derrida in his book “Echographie de la télévision” suggest that cinema is a spectral form, because it

contents traces which nor dead or alive. He thinks that is related to Freud's concept of “umheilich”,

“strangely familiar”. For example, the close-up, the expansion of detail by cinematic technique is

the equivalent of obsession in psychoanalysis, which was only one element is a separate universe.

Similarly, cinema's screening is a kind of psychoanalysis session where we can let speak all spectra

within us, bring them back to the screen. At the same time, the cinema is "a beautiful mourning."

Bereaved memories cohabit because the ghosts of the past hang on the ghosts that appear in the

image. These ghostly memories have the power to release the artificial “collective of spectators”

who are in the room. During the screening, the collective is nothing more than an aggregate of

individuals, an aggregate of singularities. Thus, totally convinced of the link between cinema and

psychoanalysis, Derrida thinks that "dream preceded the invention of cinema," the cinema is an

external extension to the body of the ability to dream. At the same time, beyond the singular dream,

and fascinating for that, cinema is an absolute simulacrum, it tells tales from where we do not

return, he tells death. The cinema presents more than represents, it give rebirth before

reconstituting.

In front of the screen for the duration of the screening, it is a mourning that takes place

around the ghosts. This mourning counterbalances fascination because it is also an exclusion, a

frustrating selection decided during the making of the film ( Derrida experimented it with the film

of Fathy) . We remember here Lyotard (“A-cinema”). Frustration of the cut, castration is the

traditional cinema motor, Lyotard calls for the contrary, the film " overhang ", the film of excess.

For Derrida, the film spectrality has an ambivalent result because it releases the ghosts of everyone

but at the same time creates a time of mourning, a permanent separation between that which is

neither death nor life.

We understand why Derrida could not write scenarios like Sartre. For Derrida , film is

written in the dream through spectral reminiscences. Modernist deconstruction must work on the

narrative structure of the film and change it into a flexible object, randomize, especially by

deconstructing from the inside all that would aim to freeze representations or naturalized situations.