British Universities Film & Video Council

moving image and sound, knowledge and access

Pervert’s Guide to Cinema, The

Synopsis
THE PERVERT’S GUIDE TO CINEMA takes the viewer on a ride through some of the greatest movies ever made. Serving as presenter and guide is Slavoj Zizek, the Slovenian philosopher and psychoanalyst, who delves into the hidden language of cinema, uncovering what movies can tell us about ourselves.

The film offers an introduction into some of Zizek’s 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.'
Language
English
Country
Australia; Great Britain; Netherlands
Year of production
2006
Notes
Part 1 shown as a stand-alone documentary on Channel 4 (16/3/2006) as part 4 of ‘Artshock’, then shown in a longer version in 3 hour-long parts on More4 (3/7/2006; 4/7/2006; 5/7/2006).
Subjects
Media studies; Philosophy; Film Studies
Keywords
Chaplin, Charlie (1889-1977); Eisenstein, Sergei (1898-1948); film theory; Hitchcock, Alfred

Credits

Director
Sophie Fiennes
Music
Brian Eno
Contributor
Slavoj Zizek

Distribution Formats

Type
DVD
Format
Region 0 NTSC
Price
£21.99
Availability
Sale
Duration/Size
150 minutes
Year
2007

Sections

Title
Part 1
Synopsis
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!'

Title
Part 2
Synopsis
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.

Title
Part 3
Synopsis
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.

Distributor

Name

Moviemail

Web
https://www.simplyhe.com/3000-moviemail External site opens in new window
Phone
0844 848 2000
Address
Simply Home Entertainment
PO Box 7741
Ringwood
BH24 9FA
UK
Notes
As of December 2016 the Moviemail web presence is incorporated within the Simply Media website

Distributor (Sale)

Name

ICA Bookshop

Web
https://ica-bookstore.myshopify.com/ External site opens in new window
Phone
020 7930 3647
Address
The Mall
London
SW1Y 5AH

Online Retailer

Name

P Guide Ltd

Email
contact@thepervertsguide.com
Web
http://www.thepervertsguide.com/dvd.php External site opens in new window
Phone
0207 659 2353
Address
6th Floor
77 Oxford Street
London
W1D 2ES

Record Stats

This record has been viewed 980 times.