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.

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:

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 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).

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

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 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:

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.

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 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?

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.

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

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.

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.

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

"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).