By Annette Seifert
"Cinema doesn't give you what you desire. It tells you how to desire." This is the tag line and opening statement to Slovenian philosopher and psychoanalyst Slavoj Žižek's "The Pervert's Guide to Cinema", a wild ride through decades of film history with a heavy focus on Hitchcock and Lynch, directed by Sophie Fiennes ("Hoover Street Revival") and shown at the Arsenal Cinema in Berlin.
The film is a brilliant introduction and execution of Freudian film analysis with some Lacan to boot as well as a best of Žižek. Beginning with basics like "Psycho" or the Marx Brothers standing for the id, ego, and super-ego, the film also encompasses Kubrick's "Dr Strangelove" or Fincher's "Fight Club" as exemplars for the autonomous partial object, or Tarkovsky's "Stalker" and "Solaris" for a meditation on what makes up reality and fantasy (and where one ends and the other begins). Žižek effortlessly manages to convey a love of films, while also tackling Freudian and philosophical concepts in an original, understandable, but never watered-down way.
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| Slavoj Zizek and Sophie Fiennes in Berlin |
Fiennes stages Žižek in recreations of the actual film sets or on the locations they were shot at, which gives the film a fresh feel and cleverly avoids the talking-head type of lecturing from Žižek this could have been. Instead, concepts are explored and exemplified through the use of a multitude of films, ranging from Chaplin's " The Great Dictator" as the prime example of the voice as the autonomous partial object to the Wachowski's "The Matrix" as exemplifying that cinema is not a mirror of our own self, but part of the fictional narrative that constructs our self.
That and the famous toilet scene in Coppola's "The Conversation", which Žižek sees as an example of cinema as the toilet bowl showing us what our base desires are. In his inimitable style and way of putting things - shit, decay, and perverse fantasies.
This style also shone through in the Q&A he attended on March 6th at the Arsenal Cinema in Berlin for the first screening of the film in the city. Greeted by rounds of applause, Žižek, dressed in his customary t-shirt (reading "I love cinema" in French), was joined in front of the audience by director Sophie Fiennes and spent an hour answering questions from the moderator and the audience. Politically and correct definitely aren't words he has in his vocabulary, and this may be unsettling to some, as seen from the uneasy laughter of a portion of the audience throughout the evening. Whether it's him calling David Lynch a brilliant filmmaker but stupid individual or exclaiming his dislike of post-structuralists without mincing words, Mr Žižek may be an acquired taste as a public speaker outside of his numerous books. Some of which, like "Enjoy Your Symptom", were the main basis of this film, though most of it was improvised by just letting Žižek talk and then construct a narrative in editing, as Fiennes explained. This free-style philosophizing definitely comes through in the film, which lends it an honest and immediate quality few similar films possess. Some of the best moments are of Žižek just talking away during filming, such as the recreation of Lynch's "Blue Velvet" opening with Žižek watering tulips and opening up about how he thinks flowers are obscene in general, providing some comic relief during the onslaught of dark Freudian principles.
With a title like "The Pervert's Guide to Cinema", the film does set out to provoke and Mr Žižek is no stranger to providing provocative ideas himself, but the film is a brilliant introduction to Freudian film analysis to the beginner while also providing fresh and new ideas for the veteran by choosing not only classics but pop culture films many serious critics may shy away from. The heavy reliance on Freud, Lacan and psychoanalysis, coupled with Žižek's somewhat brusque manner ("Godard should be publicly lynched.") and jokes in bad taste may turn some away from this film, but it nevertheless provides some unique insights from one of the great thinkers of our time and in the end, is a wonderful celebration of film as a medium and art form that - no matter if arthouse film or Hollywood blockbuster - is always worthy of a closer look.
Photo © Annette Seifert
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Published: 21/11/2009