Post project research
Five years after the release of the film in 2019, director Joanna Callaghan has made a video essay exploring the role of pregnancy in Love in the Post and in Derrida’s book.
Project research
During the research phase of this project a number of short films were produced in response to issues arising in the research and as a response to themes and ideas as work in progress.
Deconstructive Film
The possibility of a deconstructive film is discussed with world leading experts on Derrida using a range of clips as counterpoints.
Adaptation
This film plays with adapting a source text through using representations offered by existing feature films. Using French films from 1977-1979 (the period of the lovers correspondence in the “Envois”), the clips are cut together to create certain narrative episodes such as the writing and receiving of letters, clandestine meetings and trips away. The three minute film is set to a Monteverdi track by L’Arpeggiata and Christina Pluhar.
Postal
What is the relation between sending and receiving? Using images from the Little Golden Book “Seven Little Postmen”, this research film juxtaposes simple ideas about the post with Derrida’s complex rendering of postal meaning as outlined in The Post Card.
The extract has been adapted by Martin McQuillan and read by Robert Rowland Smith (Derrida, 1980). Images courtesy of Margaret Wise & Edith Thatcher Hurd, “Seven Little Postmen” 1952, Golden Book Publishing / Random House Kids.
Letters
This film cuts together a series of readings of letters from The Post Card by academics attending Derrida Today in 2010. The act of reading aloud the letters publicly, became a feature of the final film, in which Sophie, recounts the letters as a performance to a public audience.
Love
Why love Derrida? A collection of responses from attendees at the 2010 Derrida Today Conference at the Goodenough Club, London.
The following clips are extracts from the interviews conducted for the feature film.
Ellen Burt on material support.
Geoffrey Bennington on the postal principal.
Catherine Malabou on cinema.
J. Hillis Miller on literature.
Sam Weber on genre.