Pervert’s Guide to Cinema
http://www.thepervertsguide.com/
Cinema is the ultimate pervert art. It doesn’t give you what you
desire - it tells you how to desire’ - Slavoj Zizek
THE PERVERT’S GUIDE TO CINEMA takes the viewer on an exhilarating
ride through some of the greatest movies ever made. Serving as
presenter and guide is the charismatic Slavoj Zizek, the Slovenian
philosopher and psychoanalyst. With his engaging and passionate
approach to thinking, Zizek delves into the hidden language of
cinema, uncovering what movies can tell us about ourselves.
THE PERVERT’S GUIDE TO CINEMA offers an introduction into some of
Zizek’s most exciting ideas on fantasy, reality, sexuality,
subjectivity, desire, materiality and cinematic form. Whether he is
untangling the famously baffling films of David Lynch, or overturning
everything you thought you knew about Hitchcock, Zizek illuminates
the screen with his passion, intellect, and unfailing sense of
humour. THE PERVERT’S GUIDE TO CINEMA applies Zizek’s ideas to the
cinematic canon, in what The Times calls ‘an extraordinary
reassessment of cinema.’
The film cuts its cloth from the very world of the movies it
discusses; by shooting at original locations and on replica sets, it
creates the uncanny illusion that Zizek is speaking from within the
films themselves. Described by The Times as ‘the woman helming this
Freudian inquest,’ director Sophie Fiennes’ collaboration with Slavoj
Zizek illustrates the immediacy with which film and television can
communicate genuinely complex ideas. Says Zizek: “My big obsession is
to make things clear. I can really explain a line of thought if I can
somehow illustrate it in a scene from a film. THE PERVERT’S GUIDE TO
CINEMA is really about what psychoanalysis can tell us about cinema.”
THE PERVERT’S GUIDE TO CINEMA is constructed in three parts. Says
Fiennes: ‘The form of the Guide is a deliberately open one. There are
three parts, but there could be more. Zizek’s method of thinking is
exciting because it’s always building. Things relate forwards and
backwards and interconnect into a mind-altering network of ideas. The
film’s title is something of a McGuffin - just a way to get you into
this network.’
PART 1
What can the Marx Brothers tell us about the workings of the
unconscious? And why exactly do the birds attack in Hitchcock’s
masterpiece of horror? Part 1 explores the fictional structures that
sustain our experience of reality and the chaotic netherworld of wild
drives and desire that undermine that very experience.
Providing a blueprint for approaching cinema through a
psychoanalytical lens, Part 1 explores key Freudian concepts such as
the psyche’s division between Ego, Superego, Id, death drive and
libido. Zizek shows how the visual language of films returns to us
our deepest anxieties, arousing our desire while simultaneously
‘keeping it at a safe distance, domesticating it, rendering it
palpable!’
PART 2
Playing on cinema’s great tradition for romantic narratives, Part 2
unlocks what these narratives tell us about the critical role that
fantasy plays in sexual relationships. ‘Why does our libido need the
virtual universe of fantasies?’ asks Zizek.
Zizek excavates the nightmarish truth behind Tarkovsky’s dreamy sci-
fi Solaris and its chilling reverberations with Vertigo, Hitchcock’s
great romantic epic. The consequences are alarming. For the male
libidinal economy it appears, ‘the only good woman is a dead woman.’
Zizek argues that it is the very excess of female desire that poses a
fundamental threat to male identity.
Fantasy can be both pacifying and radically destabilizing. From David
Lynch’s Lost Highway and Ingmar Bergman’s Persona to Michael Haneke’s
The Piano Teacher, fantasy is the battleground of the war between the
sexes. Part 2 interrogates the structure of fantasy that makes the
sexual act possible. But it also asks whether this very plague of
fantasies is finally staged - like cinema itself - as a defence
against anxiety.
PART 3
Part 3 plays with appearances. Appearances are not deceiving, but
extremely efficient. When Dorothy & Co discover The Wizard of Oz is
actually an old man behind a curtain, they nonetheless expect him to
work his magic. And so he does: the illusion persists. Says Zizek,
‘There is something more real in the illusion than in the reality
behind it.’
With iconoclastic gusto, Zizek evokes the Gnostic theory of our world
as an ‘unfinished reality’ where ‘God bungled his job of creation’.
If film itself is structured through cuts, edits and missing scenes,
then so too is our own subjective experience. This is perhaps why we
can believe in cinema - as well as other systems of faith, paternal,
religious and ideological.
Zizek shows us that the key to cinema is beyond the narrative, beyond
the ’story’ that we witness. What provides the density of cinematic
enjoyment is material form beyond interpretation.