It is worth considering the physical environment in which one watches the film and its connection to what is happening on screen and
over the loudspeakers. We are (willing) prisoners captured by flickering images. The soundtrack, however, turns us into colonial subjects. Fixed firmly
in your seat you cannot escape the need to understand, nor the improbability of having mastered eleven languages. This helplessness or, at best, fragmentary
understanding, coupled with possible annoyance or frustration creates an  emotional
counterpoint to the seductive nature of the images and reproduces in a small way the feelings of puzzlement and powerlessness which is the daily fare
of the colonised.
By refusing to use sub-titles, by leaving unsatisfied the compulsive need to understand immediately and completely, déjà vu sails
dangerous waters, but that is exactly why it never runs aground on dogmatism. ‘Every focus excludes; there
is no politically innocent methodology for intercultural interpretations’. The current of the images, as well as the images themselves,
cannot be resisted, but the film neither pretends innocence nor allows itself to be categorised. It simultaneously negates and confirms categories -
narrative, experimental and documentary. Its centre of gravity is an issue - the way we structure what we see as knowledge in relation to other cultures
and conversely the way the structures determine what we see. |
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