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PIERRE BOURDIEU: SOCIOLOGY IS A MARTIAL ART (2001) (LA SOCIOLOGIE EST UN SPORT DE COMBAT)
Pierre Carles, director
For some strange reason, contemporary documentaries of intellectual figures, whether academic or within the public sphere, share a tendency to bring to the screen literally the writings of their subjects. Two recent documentaries about Jacques Derrida and Slavoj Zizek (both iconic figures in Europe, North and Latin America) endeavor to portray the life and thought of these scholars while ending up reproducing exactly the same thing we find in their books. The major flaw of these kinds of documentaries lies in the fact that they add very little, almost nothing, to what the audience can gather from reading them. To deploy the documentary genre in such fashion becomes a fruitless enterprise at two fundamental levels: as cinematic form and as communicative device. It fails as communicative device because the audience it aspires to reach becomes the same that reads their work. This means that nothing new transpires through the film that one could not get reading their work. The only incentive left to the audience is a voyeuristic one that although intrinsic to the genre, is the less valuable one. And this makes it a failure as a genre.
The first thing...