(dave e)

documentary dissonance

Just now, The Sundance Channel worked me over fairly well with a startling juxtaposition. Because my cable carrier provides both Sundance and Sundance West, I was able to move back and forth between Kirby Dick's Derrida and Anne Aghion's In Rwanda We Say... The Family That Does Not Speak Dies. Each is part of the the network's Monday "Docday."

I wish I had transcripts, because I'd love to describe the oddness of watching Derrida lecture a group of South African university students on the nature of forgiveness and tapping the remote to watch a Rwandan Tutsi say, "Sometimes we manage to talk [to Hutu neighbors], and we feel safer." A student called Derrida out, observing that he was talking to white South Africans, more likely to be the object than the purveyors of forgiveness, and wondering whether or not D might be deploying some irony. As D attempted a response (in fairness, I can't imagine the right response to that question.. D said, yes, irony is always in play, and he agreed that his "pure forgiveness" lecture needed to have taken better account of its audience's recent history -- this, dear reader, is why I pined for a transcript)... Right. As D attempted a response, I listened for a few moments, then went back to the other channel to hear a Hutu man explain that he killed a child to whom he was related (by marriage) because the surrounding mob explained that his failure to do so would result in a far worse end, in which the child would be killed and the family would be forced to cannibalize him.

And I wondered about the Derridean insistence that discourse contains its own unlocking. The narrative of the genocide didn't seem to be always already anything.

Maybe unfair to Derrida. I suppose his model could account for the sort of stories being told to achieve a kind of reconcilliation in Rwanda, but the matters under discussion in one of the Sundance documentaries tugged against those addressed in the other.