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Frames of Reference: Peter Greenaway, Derrida, and the Restitution of Film-

Making
Thomas Deane Tucker

Enculturation, Vol. 2, No. 1, Fall 1998

About the Author

Table of Contents

Lets say that, to keep to the frame, to the limit, I write here four times
around painting.
Jaques Derrida, The Truth in Painting

As we step into the bargain with The Draughtsman's Contract, a film by Peter
Greenaway, our aesthetic senses slowly begin to grind down into the question of
legacy. The film is a catalog of the differences between drawing and painting within
the legacy of art, and how this lineage is appropriated by the medium of filmmaking.
The lineages of art in drawing, drawing in art, drawing in film-making, art in film-
making, and finally blindness in representation all frame one another throughout the
film. Is it possible, even desirable to restitute each to their proper frame of
reference? What type of contract is framed between an artist and the work, between
the work and proper text to which it is owed, to which it must be restituted? What
happens when a filmmaker appropriates another genre of art? To whom is the debt
paid?

Starting out from this frame of questioning, my aim here is to look at Greenaway's
film through what Derrida calls the "logic of the parergon." Drawing upon both theory
and Greenaway's cinematic work, my analysis will attempt to rewrite the frame of
parergonality into both.

‫ﺑﺒﺒﺒﺒﺒﺒﺒﺒﺒﺒﺒﺒﺒﺒﺒﺒﺒﺒﺒﺐ‬

How many times is a work of art framed? The question of framing is always a question
of borders, limitations, margins, and divisibility. But to pose the question is already to
impose a frame: a theoretical framework of aesthetics over and around the art
object. Aesthetics, because it is always built around questions concerning what is
inside a work of art and what lies outside, is always a discourse about the frame. As
Derrida writes in _The Truth in Painting_:

In order to think art in general, one thus accredits a series of

oppositions.... which precisely structure the traditional interpretation of
works of art. One makes of art in general an object in which one claims to
distinguish an inner meaning, the invariant, and a multiplicity of external
variations through which, as through so many veils, one would try to see
and to restore the full, originary meaning: one, naked. [1]

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Like all frames, a critical theory of art must be forced upon the work. Trapped in the
logocentric project of restituting "original" meaning to the art object, the critical act
becomes an act of violence, a frame-up. In predetermining the art object solely as an
object of theory, of knowledge, critical discourse becomes snared in its own double
bind: it seeks to hegemonically regulate from the outside what can be properly called
art, along with its inner meaning, insistent on defining specific borders and limitations
through binary oppositions. But it can accomplish this task only by folding itself inside
the work, effacing its exteriority, and violating the very limitations it claims to
regulate. It is this structure, this frame if you will, that Derrida claims has determined
all of the stark value oppositions critical theory has historically imposed upon art.
Derrida's project is to rework the framing effects of this structure and displace it
under the name of the parergon. [2]

Of course, theory too has its own internal frames: disciplines and specialties, each
with their own specific objects of inquiry. Film theory is but one in a series of
supplements to the general frame of critical theory. To complicate things even
further, it takes as its object a work of art produced by a mechanical apparatus whose
process itself is one of framing. [3]

Derrida's work has always been one that questions the limitations of theoretical
discourse at the same time that it explodes through the margins of philosophical
(theoretical) writing. His work inhabits the space, the fold, between work and theory
to undo their binary oppositions, multiply their entanglements, and undermine the
borders imposed by traditional philosophy. Playing with the limitations of both
literature and philosophy, his writings themselves are an example of parergonality. I
would like to briefly discuss his notion of parergonality from an essay entitled
"Parergon" in The Truth in Painting. The essay itself is a close reading of Kant's
Critique of Judgement from which he imports the notion of the frame as a parergon.
It is a difficult concept to summarize, but the short detour will serve us well in the
coming analysis.

In his first critique, the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant defines the proper limits of
what constitute cognitive judgements within his famous table of categories. Cognitive
judgements are purely logical ones. In his third, Critique of Judgement, Kant's
concern is to determine the basis of what constitutes aesthetic judgements, or what
he calls judgements of taste, and, at the same time, to define the boundaries of an
art object. Kant tries to specifically frame what can rightly be called pure aesthetic
judgements, and to detach them from their surrounding cognitive judgements
rendered in the first Critique. The experience of art, Kant believes, is to be without
concepts and free from any affinity with cognitive judgements. But Kant's analysis of
aesthetic experience itself must use the conceptual framework of the logical
categories from the first Critique. In other words, Kant attempts to form a
conceptual, theoretical model of aesthetic judgements that themselves are to remain
pure and uncontaminated by outside conceptual mechanisms.

His inability to theoretically set the specific limits of the art object, however,
necessitates that he import from his first Critique the conceptual categorical
framework that he had earlier claimed does not belong to aesthetic judgement. Since
Kant had insisted on the absolute distinction between cognitive judgements and
aesthetic judgements, this frame of reference from the first Critique begins to look
blurry, like a total frame-up. A logical framework, one that concerns the object solely
as an object of knowledge, has been forced upon a non-logical structure that is
committed to the object itself. He has imposed an analytic of concepts on a process
that supposedly lacks concepts.

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Why does Kant take refuge in such a contradiction? He resorts to this theoretical
frame-up precisely because of the internal lack of concepts within aesthetic
judgements that are necessary for his theoretical, conceptual description of these
judgements. The categorical framework is added as an outside supplement to this
lack. But, as Derrida points out, the lesson of supplementarity teaches that this
internal lack is both the product and the producer of Kant's recourse to the
categorical frame. Producer, because without the categorical frame, there would be
no definite internal structure, no intrinsic content to aesthetic judgements: there
would be no way to separate aesthetic judgements from those lying outside them.
The categorical frame creates the lack because it is what determines, from the
"outside," what can be inside the aesthetic: the outside frame determines the inside
and its meaning.

However, since what are lacking within the aesthetic are concepts, the categorical
framework itself, then the frame is produced by this privation. What the categorical
frame comes to frame is its own lack. In this sense, the categorical frame is internal
("an "internal" determination") to what it comes to frame: it is the inside which has
determined the outside frame. Thus, we finally come to the paradoxical logic of the
frame as the parergon:

. . . neither work (ergon) nor outside the work [hors d'oeurve], neither
inside nor outside the work, neither above nor below, it disconcerts any
opposition but does not remain indeterminate and it gives rise to the work.
[4]

It is precisely this economy of the parergon, the chiasmic figure of the fold, that
works through any deconstructive reading of a work of art. The deconstructive critical
act is neither framed by art nor by theory, yet paradoxically remains within the
borders of each: "Deconstruction must neither reframe nor dream of the pure absence
of the frame." [5] What is at stake is the mobilization of the borders between theory
and art, a task Derrida thinks of as "working the frame." To work the frame, as David
Carrol remarks in Paraesthetics, is

to make work for theory and art, to attempt to force openings in each and
to transform each and the relations each has with the other--without,
however, determining either by the other. [6]

As always, for Derrida, this strategy reveals "a certain repeated dislocation" that
ultimately "makes the frame crack . . . turns its internal limit into an external one."
[7] Disseminating its effects across theory and art, parergonality always detaches in
order to mend. [8] This strategy "borrows" its effects from the cinematic model of
splicing/montage. The act of splicing is the severing of individual shots-signifiers from
their "real" context and displacing them into another; montage is the reassemblage of
these borrowed signifiers along with "the "dissemination" of these borrowings through
the new setting" so that they become signifiers "remotivated within the system of a
new frame". [9]

Working the frame of aesthetics means to detach art from theory and to reinscribe
their difference within the incision; not in order to repolarize their space, but to
displace their relationship in a new critical representation that remotivates each
fragment through a series of "grafts." Mounted in this new critical frame, art and
theory are reproduced by reassembly, grafted one to another in and on a textual field
where their separation amounts to nothing, one that treats the idea of separation as
something other than opposition. This is a field in which the concepts of inside and
outside take on new meanings that escape totalization. Historically, the drive towards
totalization--that is, the totalization of truth, the synthesis of knowledge of which
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Kant dreamed--is rendered as critique, the very process of criticism. In this sense, the
object of any deconstructive project must be criticism itself. This critical stance is,
for Derrida, a matter of writing on the border of the frame (both writing and written
on the frame/of the frame).

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The very first act of The Draughtsman's Contract, the act of titling, engages the
parergon. What does it mean to title something like a film? Where is the proper place
of the title? Is it inside or outside a film? Keep in mind that the cinema depends on a
market, an exchange economy, determined by a contractual arrangement with an
audience. In this logic of distribution, a particular film's title, along with its value,
may be said to lie outside the territory of the film to which it is attached. Announcing
the contract, the title anticipates the film, precedes it, and ushers us into the bargain
through its enticing presence. Commenting on this intervention of the title, David
Wills and Peter Brunnette note in Screen/Play that

It exists independently, beyond the film's frame, and is similar in this

regard to certain film clips, previews and so on, which themselves are
never part of the film "proper," nor ever the property of the film. . . . The
title will be cited in newspapers, magazines, film histories, and analysis
like this one. [10]

The written title comes to us first from outside the film frame, a graphic supplement
that escapes the film frame to organize its own meaning-effects beyond the image,
effects outside the control of the film. It is, from the beginning, no longer claimed as
the sole "property" of the film to which it is attached, and begins to take on a "proper"
name of its own as it is grafted onto the other social texts mentioned above. However
(and we accept this as part of the bargain), the title itself becomes reframed as it is
put into "play" with these other texts; it properly functions or functions properly as a
"common" name within these texts.

Yet we as an audience, without any apparent dilemma, know the appropriate place of
the title: its right where we expect it, inside the film, at the beginning, somewhere
along with the credits. Graphically written across the pictorial image, it takes its
place as part of the picture. Furthermore, its function is to set the limits, to
enunciate and exercise control from inside the film over what we the audience expect
to see. Thus, the act of titling, both inside and outside the film-frame but "properly"
located in the space of neither, exemplifies the strange logic of parergonality. [11]

In the case of The Draughtsman's Contract, the title announces the parergon itself. A
contract is a frame, a set of limitations, boundaries to which at least two parties are
bound. In this narrative, the contract is between the artist, his art, and the frame of
reference that surrounds his perspective on the world. Drawn up in the idyllic setting
of an English estate in the year 1694, the contract calls for a draughtsman named Mr.
Neville to produce a series of twelve drawings of an estate for Mrs. Herbert, the lady
of the manor. The occasion for the contract is that the drawings are to be a gift to
Mrs. Talman's husband, who is away on business.

Without contrivance for our discourse on the frame, the contract happens to consist
of four square demands by Mrs. Herbert: Neville is to produce twelve drawings of the
estate, has only twelve days to complete them, must start immediately, and is to
discuss the terms with no one else. Calling these demands "exorbitant" (is the frame
always an excess?), Neville redraws them around the conditions that he choose the

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sites of the drawings, and that Mrs. Herbert give him the "use of her body for his
pleasure." She agrees and the contract is drawn, signed, and witnessed.

Taking out his optical grid upon arrival, Neville peers through his viewfinder to scope
out the twelve vistas for the drawings. Designing a curriculum, he orders that the
sites be kept free from intrusion during the specific hours of each day that he has set
aside for each drawing. We soon come to realize that he demands total control over
the scenes and stages of the drawings. Two demands for purity of presence seem to
be made at once: that nothing escape the frame of reference he imposes upon the
scenes, and that nothing from outside that frame contaminates it.

Punctiliously bound to a monocular perspective, his vision of the landscape always

framed through the viewfinder of his optical grid, he remains blind to everything
outside of it. But the limits of his vision are soon penetrated as unexpected objects--a
shirt, a pair of boots and a ladder--make their way into his frame from the outside.
Claiming "I try very hard never to distort nor to dissemble," Neville must indignantly
include these unwanted objects in his drawings. Everything must be restituted to its
proper frame and rendered in full without remainder.

Greenaway, who did the drawings himself, allows Neville to become the film's director
and cinematographer. Grafting the draughtsman's frame onto the film frame,
Greenaway forces the viewer to constantly compare the drawings of the landscapes to
the photographic representation of these same landscapes, making it impossible to
tell which serves as a copy for the other. We too, along with Neville, begin to wonder
about the "phantom" objects that pop up in the drawings but seem to have no place in
the film. At one point, a character named Sarah asks Neville if he will ever find the
corpse that inhabits the clothes and the drawings. "Four garments and a ladder do not
lead to a corpse," Neville responds. The items are attributed to the phantasmal Mr.
Herbert, who is physically absent from the estate, the drawings, and, except for the
opening scenes, from the film. There are only the ghostly traces of his presence
within the dialogue and the deserted, uninhabited items scattered about in the
drawings. Neville, whose frame of reference limits his perception of things and events
which surround him, remains ignorant as to the meaning of the connection between
the objects. The plot is then reframed around the mystery of the phantasmal Mr.
Herbert's whereabouts. When his murdered body turns up in the moat, the unclaimed
objects in his drawings point to Neville (has he been "framed" by the frame?) and
everyone demands restitution.

These comparisons become more difficult as Greenaway begins to shoot the landscape
through the optical grid and the drawings strictly through the bare camera lens. Like
the phantom objects they contain, the drawings become totally detached from the
space and history of drawing as filmmaking appropriates them. And everyone demands
restitution. The question is where? To what artistic frame do the drawings belong, if
not to the film? What sort of restitution is possible when the draughtsman becomes
the director? Or is it the other way around? We must not forget that the "real"
draughtsman in the film, this draughtsman as director, is a fictional character named
Neville. Everything turns around this parergon. Should we say then that he draws
(drafts) the entire film?

The answer, I think, can be yes, if we follow Derrida in rewriting on the frame that
defines drawing. For Derrida, the whole question of art as reproduction must be
hollowed out from the ductile concept of the outline as it functions in the art of
engraving:

The outline which lends itself to the print or engraving, the line which is
imitated, belongs to all art, to the arts of space as much as to the arts of
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duration, of music no less than to painting. [12]

Derrida is calling attention here to the parergonal logic of the outline, whose
essential operation is drawing, in relation to art in general when it is aligned,
traditionally, with the concept of mimesis. Lets follow this logic for a moment and
then back to the film.

Art as mimesis is based on imitation. Now, mimetic art constructs very strict
boundaries between what is being represented or copied--what it uses as its model--
and the representer, art. So, all models must lie outside the general frame of mimetic
art. Drawing is a technique of imitation, inside art we will say, that conforms to this
procedure of copying a model outside of itself, outside of art. Yet, drawing, as an act
of imitation, and this is Derrida's claim, serves as the privileged model par excellence
of imitation for mimetic art in general: "art being born of imitation, only belongs to
the work proper as far as it can be retained in the engraving, in the reproductive
impression of its outline." [13] This would seem to mean that the presumed origin of
art, of imitation, is to be found outside itself (as all origins supposedly are) in the
possibility of drawing (as the outline) as a primary model of imitation from which all
other mimetic techniques are derived.

It soon becomes obvious from this model of art that all which goes by the name of
drawing--the outline, engraving, and also framing, along with their effects--
paradoxically lies inside and outside of the space of art. This paradigm of drawing
models for us the framing effects of the parergon of drawing appearing as "the
element of formal difference which permits the contents (colored or sonorous) to
appear". [14]

This sharpens the focus now on questions that concern the place of the original within
the domain of art. Art, as we said, is born of imitation and reproduction. The "origin"
of imitation and reproduction is within the space of drawing. Art must breathe from
this space of originary reproduction; but the space it consumes--drawing as a
technique of imitation, that is, what it copies--is already a reproduction. Drawing, the
model for art, is already art. Art copies itself, copies a copy, and leaves no space for
the original. Or rather, motivated by the rhythms of its parergonal structure, art
displaces the original into a space within itself where it no longer resonates, as it
does in mimesis, as the privileged term in an oppositional hierarchy against the so
called copy.

This parergonal crossing of the "outline" with art also means that art is never closed
off, never completely framed. In the outline, "color has not been named" [15],
meaning that the project of art can never be fully reined in, nor filled in or
contained, not even by itself. The work that we call art must be outlined as a
continuous work in progress.

Throughout the film, Greenaway constantly poses for us the dangers surrounding the
artist as he tries to totalize his project, when he struggles to completely fill in his
frame of reference and attempts to seal it off to contain reference. The last turn of
events in the film reveals the consequences of these dangers. Neville originally chose
thirteen sites for his drawings, and, since the contract only calls for twelve, had to
choose which one to reject. The one he rejected happened to be the site where Mr.
Herbert's body was found, and he feels he must go back to draw it in order to
complete his aesthetic venture. Mrs. Herbert makes a "contract" with the estate
manager to trade the drawings, which he calls "mere representations" of the
landscape for the copy of the original contract documenting her "infidelities" with
Neville so that she can frame Neville for her husband's murder. The pretense for the
transfer is that the drawings are to be sold and the money used to build a monument
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to Mr. Herbert which would be "part of the landscape" at the site of the thirteenth
drawing. It is at this site that Neville is framed for Mr. Herbert's death, blinded and
finally murdered himself. The borders of this scene are marked by a ghost, a
monument, blindness, and death--all traces of an absent presence which testify to the
annulment of the possibility of their full restitution. But more importantly, it hinges
on the point at which Neville is in the greatest danger and must risk himself the most
in his attempt at closure. In his spurious drive towards totalization, Neville must
paradoxically step beyond the original contractual frame, outside and in excess of the
twelve drawings; it is precisely within this "beyond" of the thirteenth drawing, in the
act of a final rendering, where Neville is at the most risk and pays the ultimate price.

Are we justified from the above reading in linking Derrida's paradigm to the art of
filmmaking? As an "art of duration," filmmaking threads its way through this labyrinth
of "mimetology" as the movement from cinematography to the cinemagraphic. In this
sense, we can say that the filmmaker is always a draughtsman.

But this turn to the graphic unhinges a whole new set of parergonal questions. Does it
now become a question of finding the "original" series of the series of reproductions
mobilized in the film? Did the film frames provide the models for the series of
drawings? The other way around? Or is it a strange economy of both?

But we cannot be blind to the limitations of such a reading. Such blindness

dissimulates the fact that Greenaway, now the director as draughtsman, is also only a
ghost. He disappears, along with his frame of reference, behind a camera, a
mechanism that with the same gesture conceals what it appropriates. [16] The
director as draughstman inverts the frame; he allows us access to the scene--that is,
the scene of the drawings and the scene of film-making sharing the same objects and
having the same object--only by leveling the steps of tradition that drawing has built
for itself. His purpose, lying flatly outside the outline, is to preserve the "younger,"
living art of film-making from the decay of the old, rotting corpse buried inside the
monumental ruins of the aesthetic of drawing and painting.

Greenaway's camera never gets closer than does Neville to the "real" objects of the
drawings. Instead, when the drawings are filmed, the trajectory of the lens, in a
gesture of dismemberment, closely frames each individual object only as they are
only represented in the drawings. Or, the entire scope of the drawings will fill the film
frame, but only while they remain incomplete works in progress. In this way, he
safeguards the objects by shielding them in a cinematic representation that pushes
against the outline, allowing us access to the objects as they are thrice detached
from "reality": first by the camera, then by the drawings, then again by the camera.

This gesture highlights the difficulties of managing the pictorial composition of

painting and drawing within the film frame; and how much of their discourse can
remain outside of filmmaking. It also underscores the vast difference in the
techniques used by each to mobilize the viewer's gaze, and the problems the
filmmaker draws to himself when he appropriates them from painting and drawing.
This is a problem of blindness and visibility.

As an immobile image, the drawing mobilizes the gaze of the viewer through its sheer
totality in the space of visibility. The film, on the other hand, is overflowing in the
excess of mobility. Its images move, mobilizing the gaze not through the whole of the
image, but through a montage of fragments sheered off from the totality of vision.
Thus, the film apparatus lacks the means by which one takes in the immobile pictorial
composition of a drawing within a single glance. Now, obviously, a director can shoot a
painting in full shot and show all of its contours, but the point goes beyond that. The
cinemagraphic apparatus is inherently fragmentary.
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I emphasize the word "apparatus" rather than simply "camera" because it implies the
totality of the mechanisms, not just the camera, within the cinema. These include
lenses, photochemical processing, projectors, splicers, digital coding, and, among
others, lighting. It would also include all its factors as a commodity; capital,
advertisements, trailers, audience surveys, etc. These are various fragments from
which the cinema articulates itself. The point is that the entire apparatus of the
cinema works against a single, unified frame that would restitute the immobile unity
of a drawing or painting, even when a filmmaker genuinely attempts to remain
faithful to the pictorial composition of a work placed before their lens.

Marie-Claire Ropars-Wuilleumier, in her essay titled "The Dissimulation of Painting,"

describes these attempts as the trajectory

of a blind and silent lens whose attraction draws the figures out of the
painting by effacing the contours of each scene . . . rupturing the unity of
the picture plane and offering to the gaze not the unified vanishing point
where the sight of the subject is projected, but instead the tear produced
in the painting by a machine that doubles the gaze of which it has taken
possession. [17]

Exploding the visible, this gesture divides the frame, ruptures the immobile unity of
the drawings by effacing their outlines, inner and outer, and disconnects our gaze
from the total scene of the drawings. Greenaway's camera must erase the frames of
the drawings, along with their entire pictorial aesthetics and history, in order to
create its own frame. Thus, "the frames fold . . . spacing appears at the very heart of
the image--all such operations that can be imputed to the movie camera become the
emblem of the optical apparatus." [18] Greenaway's camera lens violently
appropriates the drawings and quickly caves in on them, doubly repeating their
dislocation in order to conceal just how much it has stolen and denying us, once
again, reference to the "real" scene of the drawings. In this way, the objects become
just as foreign in the filming of the drawings to us as they were for Neville viewing
them through his optical grid. The real optical grid is the movie camera itself, the
invisible machine that pretends to be the machine of the visible but whose
mechanized frame produces nothing more than the occultation of its image and the
artist standing blindly behind it. Greenaway shows us that the space of visibility is
opened up only through a region of blindness, and, by throwing up a screen, makes
the viewer share in his (Neville/Greenaway) blindness.

But this is nothing new at all. In fact, this is the creative act par excellence. To cut
itself out of the total picture, to frame itself, the creative act has to blind the artist
to all that lies outside it. But it does this only by reappropriating the outside and
making it and the entire process disappear inside the act itself. The marrow of the
creative act is dissimulation, or the ability to "lie." Recall that Neville appropriates
the foreign objects into his drawings and Greenaway the drawings and the
represented objects into the film, "so as not to distort nor to dissemble." But this
statement dissembles the fact that "truth" is relative to the frame of reference which
encompasses it; truth is only a function of the frame. The fact that Neville
appropriates by confiscating all the unwanted items and Greenaway by throwing some
of them away makes no difference; it is one and the same move. All art is an
economy of appropriation and expenditure, and all such exchange is a distortion. Art
creates its vision only by holding back all that is not art while at the same time
ushering it in, erasing borders while fiercely guarding them. It is this blindness, or this
blind spot, and not "bare" vision, that is at the heart of visibility and art itself.

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We have been walking around the fact that blindness is a frame around vision, which
is yet another parergon. As an art object, the film frame must participate in this
blindness, this parergon. But writing on the film frame is never easy, because, as I
have already claimed, framing in the cinema is the process of parergonality itself. Its
frames multiply so many times, they become unmanageable. Even the word "frame" in
the cinema strains under an ambivalence that outstretches by far what can be felt
under the same word in relation to drawing or painting. When we refer to the film
frame, we are usually referring to the individual shots that make up the film; that is,
we do not name a film's borders in the sense of a frame around a painting, we name
the very essence of its inside. But, in another sense, to name the frame is to name its
borders. The inside borders of a film, bordering each individual shot (frame), are
other shots, other frames, which also happen to lie inside. Thus, the parergon again:
the frame comes to frame itself.

And there is another sense in which the film frame must be situated outside the
entire work. As mentioned already, a film, although made up of solitary photographic
stills, must mobilize these fragments to present the illusion of movement: that is, to
present the work. The individual frame is mobilized precisely at the point of its
borders with the other frame only in so far as it erases the borders between them.
The meaning effects of the image contained within each shot are guaranteed only
through the mobilization of that which borders it--which are other frames--along with
the effacement of the entire process of framing from one shot to the next. This
means that the borders between each individual shot remain, because they must
remain, invisible when viewing a film in order for the work to seen. The frames erase
themselves to disappear completely outside (or is it inside?) the film. The individual
film frame itself becomes the absolute border of visibility, "the moment of negation or
lack of sight that permits vision to take place" [19] hiding itself at the same time that
it makes possible for us to see it. We should note here along with Brunnette and Wills
the important technical nature of the entire process. The celluloid border of the film
frame is created in conjunction with the action of the camera shutter and the
projector lamp,

to the extent that it allows for the temporal overlap between the time the
image remains in front of the lamp and the time it remains imprinted on
the retina . . . paradoxically, there has to be that disjunction between
screen time and retinal retention in order for the illusion of movement to
be produced, and due to the opening and closing of the shutter, as Bruce
Kawin points out, "for about half the time we are watching a movie, the
screen is totally dark." [20]

The screen itself becomes another parergon with its own effects to multiply, to many
to calculate here. Let me just mention the word hymen. It is another one of Derrida's
favorite neologisms about the play of the inside and outside, and, like the parergon,
undecidable in meaning. Taken in one of its meanings, it refers to marriage, to the
wedding contract. In another, perhaps more "literal," it refers to a membrane that
separates two things but collapses into both, or into neither, creating an invisible
screen between what can be seen and what remains invisible. "As through so many
veils" we heard Derrida say earlier. But I will not push or recycle this metaphor any
further, except to say that the cinematic screen can be likened to a membrane with
much the same functions as the hymen. [21]

‫ﺑﺒﺒﺒﺒﺒﺒﺒﺒﺒﺒﺒﺒﺒﺐ‬

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Since we have been talking about frames, stolen discourse and restitution, I will pay
my debt to Greenaway by letting him have the final word. Neville's last drawing, the
elusive thirteenth, seems to exemplify his "true" aesthetic strategy. At the site he is
sketching stands a statue of a horse and rider, presumably representing Mr. Herbert.
Neville is compelled, once again, to erase Mr. Herbert from the scene, depicting a
blind, riderless horse abandoned to the landscape. [22] It turns out that Neville, as
the character Mrs. Tallman describes him, is the exemplary artist: "I have grown to
believe that a really intelligent man makes an indifferent painter, for painting
requires a certain blindness--a partial refusal to be aware of all the options." [23]

This refusal is the acceptance of the frame, of an aesthetic lineage that remains
forever estranged, and of the impossibility of restitution.

Endnotes

1. Jaques Derrida, The Truth in Painting, trans. by Geoff Bennington and Ian Mcleod
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), pg. 22. (back)

2. "Philosophical discourse will always have been against the parergon. But what
about this against." Ibid., pg. 54. (back)

3. Heidegger's identification of the essence of technology as a process of enframing,

or Gestell, has obvious implications for the mechanical cinematic apparatus. (back)

4. The Truth in Painting, pg. 9. (back)

5. Ibid., pg. 73. (back)

6. David Carroll, Paraesthetics (New York: Metheun, 1987), pg. 134. (back)

7. Ibid., pg. 74. Derrida offers a good example of the mobilization of borders, as well
as their multiplication, in this comprehensive description of the frame as parergon.
Note particularly how he "frames" it in Gestaltic perceptual terms:

"The parergon stands out both from the ergon (the work) and from the milieu, it
stands out first of all like a figure on ground. But it does not stand out in the same
way as the work. The latter also stands out against a ground. But parergon frame
stands out against two grounds, but with respect to each of those two grounds, it
merges into the other. With respect to the work which can serve as a ground for it, it
merges into the wall, and then, gradually, into the general text. With respect to the
background which the general text is, it merges into the work, which stands out
against the general background. There is always a form on a ground, parergon is a
form which has as its traditional determination not that it stands out but that it
disappears, buries itself, effaces itself, melts away at the moment it deploys its
greatest energy. The frame is in no case a background in the way that the milieu or
the work can be, but neither is its thickness as margin a figure. Or at least it is a
figure which comes away of its own accord." (pg. 61).

Derrida's own writing shows the inescapability of the "importation" of philosophical

discourse and its traditions when arguing about the "importance" of their limitations.
(back)

8. "As soon as the parergon takes place, it dismantles the most reassuring conceptual
oppositions". The Truth in Painting, back of jacket cover. (back)

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9. Gregory Ulmer, "The Object of Post-Criticism" in The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on

Postmodernism, ed. by Hal Foster (Seattle: Bay Press, 1983), pp. 84-85. (back)

10. Peter Brunette and David Wills, Screen/Play (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1989). (back)

11. Ibid. (back)

12. Jaques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

(Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), pg. 209. (back)

13. Ibid., pg. 208. (back)

14. Ibid., pg. 209. (back)

15. The Truth in Painting, pg.169. (back)

16. Marie-Clare Ropars-Wuilleumier, "The Dissimulation of Painting" in Deconstruction

and the Visual Arts: Art, Media, Architecture, edited by Peter Brunette and David
Wills (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pg. 74. (back)

17. Ibid. (back)

18. Ibid. (back)

19. Screen/Play, pg. 104. (back)

20. Ibid., pg.104. The other reference is to Bruce F. Kawin, How Movies Work (New
York: Macmillan, 1987), pg. 48. (back)

21. Screen/Play, pp. 85-86. (back)

22. Mr. Herbert's "real" horse had earlier turned up at the gate in this way, an event in
the film that casts suspicion of foul play on Neville. (back)

23. Jaques Derrida, Memories of the Blind, trans. by Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael
Naas (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1993), translator's introduction, pg.
ix. (back)

Works Cited

Brunette, Peter and David Wills. Screen/Play. Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1989.

Brunette, Peter and David Wills, eds. Deconstruction and the Visual Arts: Art, Media,
Architecture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.

Carroll, David. Paraesthetics. New York: Metheun, 1987.

Derrida, Jaques. The Truth in Painting. Trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian Mcleod.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987.

- - - . Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: The Johns

Hopkins University Press, 1974.

- - - . Memories of the Blind. Trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas. Chicago:
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The University of Chicago Press, 1993.

Foster, Hal, ed. The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture. Seattle: Bay Press,
1983.

Copyright © Enculturation 1998

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