After my screening of NICE PEOPLE at the EVERSON MUSEUM in Syracuse New York yesterday afternoon, I was approached by someone who worked at the museum and caught the last 5 minutes of my new film. He had the most interesting feedback that i have gotten thus far on this work. He told me first that my film made him feel immediately "JOYOUS" rather than depressed at the aftermath of the prinicipal character's finality. He then said to me that he felt this film was in the vein of true "deconstructionism'. He explained that the subliminal messages in the film served, for him, a complete opposite meaning than the text being delivered to the audience onscreen as truth's "perception". He told me to look up the writings of Jacques Derrida to learn more about what my film unconciously delivered. I did. And after a mere GOOGLE, here you go:
Deconstruction is the name given by French philosopher Jacques Derrida to an approach (whether in philosophy, literary analysis, or in other fields) which rigorously pursues the meaning of a text to the point of undoing the oppositions on which it is apparently founded, and to the point of showing that those foundations are irreducibly complex, unstable or, indeed, impossible.
Deconstruction generally operates by conducting close textual readings with a view to demonstrating that the text is not a discrete whole, and that it on the contrary contains several irreconcilable, contradictory meanings. What is shown through this process, therefore, is that there is more than one interpretation of a text, that these interpretations are inextricably linked in and by the text itself, that the incompatibility of these interpretations is irreducible, and thus that there is a point beyond which the particular line of interpretative reading cannot go: Derrida refers to this point as an aporia in the text, and hence he refers to deconstructive reading as "aporetic." J. Hillis Miller has described deconstruction in the following terms: “Deconstruction is not a dismantling of the structure of a text, but a demonstration that it has already dismantled itself. Its apparently-solid ground is no rock, but thin air."
Deconstruction generally operates by conducting close textual readings with a view to demonstrating that the text is not a discrete whole, and that it on the contrary contains several irreconcilable, contradictory meanings. What is shown through this process, therefore, is that there is more than one interpretation of a text, that these interpretations are inextricably linked in and by the text itself, that the incompatibility of these interpretations is irreducible, and thus that there is a point beyond which the particular line of interpretative reading cannot go: Derrida refers to this point as an aporia in the text, and hence he refers to deconstructive reading as "aporetic." J. Hillis Miller has described deconstruction in the following terms: “Deconstruction is not a dismantling of the structure of a text, but a demonstration that it has already dismantled itself. Its apparently-solid ground is no rock, but thin air."
