“Contre-jour” is the opening section of the coauthored book tourner les mots: au bord d'un film (2000), by the franco-maghrebian philosopher Jacques Derrida and the Franco-Egyptian filmmaker and poet Safaa Fathy. Tourner les mots is about their experience of film generally and, in particular, about their collaboration on Fathy's 1999 film D'Ailleurs, Derrida, released in an English subtitled version as Derrida's Elsewhere. One meaning of the word tourner in the book's title is “to film.” But the word also shares with the English turn a wide range of meanings and associations, including “to turn,” “to revolve,” “to depend on,” “to shape or form,” “to consider,” and “to trope.” Thus Tourner les mots refers to cinematic practice (le tournage ‘filmmaking,’ ‘the shoot’) and to the relation between cinema and language (les mots ‘words’).