Le Guide pervers du cinéma

In this two hours and a half documentary, Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek uses psychoanalytic theory to analyze clips of many classic films. As a theory of human behavior, psychoanalysis is quite outdated, surpassed by more biologically centered theories of the brain. However, psychoanalysis has undeniably influenced many famous directors in the past (for instance, Alfred Hitchcock or David Lynch, and Zizek analyzes here clips of their films), so in this sense this movie is interesting to have a hint of what these directors might be getting at. This film is very entertaining (Zizek is quite a character in his own right, with his thick accent, gesticulating body and wildly hypothetical theories) even if the ideas put forward here are probably wrong and outdated. The films Zizek spent more time analyzing here are Vertigo, Blue Velvet, Psycho, The Birds and Lost Highway, but aside from Hitchcock and Lynch, there are clips from other directors, such as Kubrick, Chaplin, Tarkovsky and others. And in a one of the more interesting parts, he shows us a Disney cartoon from 1935 called Pluto's Last Judgment, and we see how it surprisingly mirrors the Stalinist show trials of a few years later. Sophie Fiennes (sister of Ralph and Joseph) directs. She wisely makes Zizek talk from sets that mimics some of the movies he is analyzing.

I saw this film at the Toronto International Film Festival. Not as salacious as it sounds, this is a three-part documentary (each episode is 50 minutes) featuring Slovenian superstar philosopher/psychoanalyst Slavoj Zizek. Zizek takes us on a journey through many classic films, exploring themes of sexuality, fantasy, morality and mortality. It was directed by Sophie Fiennes, of the multi-talented Fiennes clan (she's sister to actors Ralph and Joseph).

I enjoyed this quite a bit, although I think it will be even more enjoyable on DVD, since there is such a stew of ideas to be digested. Freudian and Lacanian analysis can be pretty heavy going and seeing the whole series all at once became a bit disorienting by the end of two and a half hours. It didn't help that an ill-advised coffee and possession of a bladder led me to some discomfort for the last hour or so.

My only real issue with this is that Zizek picked films that were quite obviously filled with Freudian themes. He spends quite a bit of time on the films of Hitchcock and David Lynch, not exactly masters of subtlety. I would have liked to see him try to support his theories by using a wider range of films, although that's really just me saying I'd like to see part four and five and six.

Zizek is very funny, and part of the humour was watching him present what amounted to a lecture while inserting himself into the actual scenes from some of the films he's discussing. So, for instance, we see him in a motorboat on his way to Bodega Bay (from Hitchcock's The Birds) or sitting in the basement of the Bates Motel (from Psycho). Which is not to say that his theories are not provocative. Even when I found myself disagreeing with him, it definitely made me think a little more deeply about the films. Which is exactly what he's trying to accomplish.

Bear in mind, any film (let alone documentary) which asserts any kind of truth, will generate an adverse and proportional amount of cynicism, from those to whom any suggestion of and or search for truths is already meaningless, those of you who are already Masters of psychology, film, and captains of the soul, will no doubt find this movie redundant, after all, you already know everything there is to know. Congrats.

For those of us in the minority like myself, I found "The Perverts Guide To Cinmea"....mostly brilliant, and worth watching for those interested in movies, psychology, and modern philosophy.

A little like Scott Mclouds' "Understanding Comics", director Sophie Fiennes, inter-grates Slovene philosopher, psychologist, and social critic Slavoj Zizek right into many of the films and specif scenes he discusses. The cover is an image from "The Birds"(Zizek takes a boat out to re-create the shot).

Lacanian Psycho-analysis, does not necessarily scream, an evening of great fun...but it is! If you like movies that is.... Having some knowledge of Lacanian psycho-analysis helps (Symbolic, Real, and Imaginary) are terms which get thrown around a little loosely at first, but the scenes which Zizek selects and analyze make remarkably clear what was always for me, a very abstract subject. In fact, it's probably better to have a familiarity with the films he's discussing than with the terminology he uses, which becomes clearer as the film goes on.

Why I love, this film isn't because it picks great films to analyze or reveals great truths about Lacan, but shows in a very practical and clever manner, where film and psychology (and by default philosophy) meet.

Why is "The Sound Of Music" kinda fascistic, why is "Short Cuts" about more than just class and alienation, why do the birds attack in "The Birds", what is there to learn about the mind from "Alien Resurrection", what does the planet of "Solaris" want, what does "Psycho" and "The Marx Brothers" have to do with each other, and what the hell is David Lynch getting across in movie after movie...well Zizek has some ideas.

The role of the voice in both "The Excorcist" and "Star Wars: Revenge Of The Sith", is maybe the movies strongest and most lucid moment, when he gets into feminine sexual subjectivity I begin to wonder...at one point Zizek admits his feeling that flowers are a kind of decorative vagina dentatta, that they are disgusting and should be hidden from children (jokingly, it seems but...).

Anyway, it's a fascinating documentary, which anyone who has ever seen a movie, and thought it meant something more than was literally stated, should make an attempt to see.

And anyone interested in Slavoj Zizek, this is a must as well, much less dry than "Reality Of The Virtual", and more direct than "Zizek!", two other pseudo-docs, about "the Elvis of contemporary cultural criticism", as he is being dubbed, in the English speaking world.

"The Perverts Guide To Cinema" is NOT about the role of sex in cinema. Zizek claims cinema is the ultimate pervert art, because it teaches "how to desire, and not what to desire", and that it is the only contemporary art form that can allow for these desires to be articulated. This is not a film about finding the reality in cinema, it's about finding the cinema in reality, and how important and exciting that can be. Hard to find, and a bit long, but well worth the trouble, one of the most "stimulating" movie watching experiences I've ever had.

There's the danger with the critic/philosopher Slavoj Zizek with his film, directed by Sophie Fiennes, which takes together a wonderful amalgam of silent, horror, sci-fi, surreal and other contemporary thrillers together to make his points ofr Freudian comparisons to overload. But in the Pervert's Guide to Cinema he also makes even the more far-reaching points a point of departure from any other analysis I've seen on a collective section of films. While it doesn't cover the expansive territory Scorsese's movie documentaries cover, the same attachments are there, and Zizek has a definite love for all of these "perverse" examples and films, primarily the work of Hitchcock, Lynch, Chaplin and Tarkovsky. Yet one shouldn't go into seeing this- if you can find it that is, I got to see it almost by luck- thinking Zizek will just try and dissect all of the psycho-sexual parts or parts referring it in an obtuse, deranged manner. If anything he opens up one to points that might never be considered otherwise- would one think of three of the Marx brothers as representations of the Id, Super-Ego and Ego (Harpo's example is most dead-on for me).

He's not just one to take on the classics though, he also considers the food for thought in The Matrix and Fight Club- in representations of the split between fantasy and reality and if the matrix needs the energy as much as the energy needs the matrix for the former, and in the attachment of violence in dealing with one's own self as well as ones double in the latter. He even throws in a piece from the pivotal moment in Revenge of the Sith when Anakin becomes Darth Vader, and the implications of shunning away fatherhood under that back mask at the very moment his children's births happens elsewhere. The ideals of fatherhood, male sexuality, the male point of view in turning fantasy into reality (at which point Zizek rightfully points to as the moment of a nightmare's creation), and female subjectivity, are explored perhaps most dead-on with Vertigo. This too goes for a scene that Zizek deconstructs as if it's the Zapruder film, where he dissects the three colliding points of psycho-sexual stance in the 'don't you look at me' scene in Blue Velvet.

Now it would be one thing if Zizek himself went about making these sincere, excited, and somehow plausible points just face on to the camera or mostly in voice-over as Scorsese does. But he goes a step further to accentuate his points of fantasy and reality, and how they overlap, intersect, become one and the same, or spread off more crucially into some netherworld or primordial feeling for some characters (i.e. Lost Highway) by putting himself IN the locations the films take place in. Funniest is first seeing him in the boat "heading" towards the same dock Tippi Hedren's boat heads to at the beginning of the Birds; equally funny is as he waters the Blue Velvet lawn he goes on to explain the multi-faceted points of Frank Booth; only one, when he's in Solaris-like territory, does it seem a little cheesy. But Zizek seems to be having a lot of fun with this set-up, and after a while one bypasses the potential crux of this gimmick and Zizek's words come through.

There were some films I of course would've expected, chiefly from Hitchcock and Lynch, but a treat for movie buffs come from seeing two things- the movies that one would never think of seeing in a film about films titled the Pervert's Guide of Cinema (top two for me would be the Disney Pluto cartoon and the exposition on Chaplin's films, albeit with a great note about the power and distinction of 'voice'), and the ones that one hasn't seen yet (i.e. the ventriloquist horror film, Dr. Mabuse, Stalker, among a few others) that inspire immediate feelings of 'wow, I have to see that immediately, no questions asked.' Zizek is a powerful writer with his work, and puts it forward with a clarity that reminds one why we watch movies in the first place, to be entertained, sure, but also to have that actual experience of sitting down and having something up there, as he put it, looking into a toilet. It's probably one of the greatest films about cinema, and in such a splendidly narrow analysis of how Freud works its way into films regarding desire, the Id/Super-Ego/Ego, and of the supernatural in fantasy, that you may never see...unless distribution finally kicks in, if only on the smallest levels.

Famous movies are subject to Freudian analysis: Possessed, The Matrix, The Birds, Psycho, Vertigo, Duck Soup, Monkey Business, The Exorcist, The Testament of Dr Mabuse, Alien, Alien Resurrection, The Great Dictator, City Lights, The Tramp, Alice in Wonderland, The Wizard of Oz, Dr Strangelove, The Red Shoes, Fight Club, Dead of Night, The Conversation, Blue Velvet, Solaris, Stalker, Mulholland Drive, Lost Highway, Persona, In The Cut, Eyes Wide Shut, The Piano Teacher, Three Colours: Blue, Dogville, Frankenstein, The Ten Commandments, Saboteur, Rear Window, To Catch a Thief, North by Northwest, Star Wars, Dune, Kubanskie Kazaki, Ivan The Terrible, Pluto's Judgment Day (Walt Disney), Wild at Heart.

You may wonder how the Marx Brothers come into play. According To Slavoj Zizek, the host and analyst of this intellectually tickling tour de force, Groucho is the superego, Chico the ego, and Harpo the id.

Scenes from the above listed films are used to illustrate concepts: the role of fantasy in shaping reality and vice-versa, the father figure, male and female libido, death drive, etc. Here are some of Slavoj utterances (most as paraphrases): "desire is a wound on reality", "fantasy realized is a nightmare", "music is the opium of the people" (borrowing from K. Marx), "of all human emotions, anxiety is the only one that is not deceiving". The whole is bracketed by an intro that declares "you don't look for your desires in movies, instead cinema tells you what you should desire" and concludes with the cineaste view that "cinema is needed today so that we can understand our current reality" -- I say, as long as censorship doesn't derail it.

The three part subdivision is merely mechanical, possibly with TV screening in mind. For the theater goer it is irrelevant.