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The New York Times & Log In
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Apr 25, 10:38am
1 review
•http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/15/mov...
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From the page: "The Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek has been the star of three documentaries in recent years -- which is three more than your average Marxist-Lacanian psychoanalytic theorist -- but he claims not to have seen more than a snippet of any of them. ... "It is just too traumatic," he said in a recent phone interview from Warsaw, where he was attending a conference. The problem has much to do with the larger-than-life image that he has cultivated and seems now to both relish and resent. A disheveled, bearlike presence, Mr. Zizek, 58, is part mad professor, part bumbling clown dispensing ideas at breakneck speed and in a loud sibilant staccato.
"I am too emphatic," he said emphatically. "Too expressive. I don't think this works on screen. Even if I state something totally obvious, I say it with this intensity, as if I am saying the last truth."
While he has no plans to sit through it, Mr. Zizek's latest documentary, "The Pervert's Guide to Cinema," ... is his favorite of the bunch. "At least it is not about me," he said. (The two earlier movies, "Zizek!" and "The Reality of the Virtual," were, respectively, a tour documentary and a filmed lecture.) ... The project came about when the British filmmaker Sophie Fiennes (sister of the actors Ralph and Joseph) proposed a documentary structured around film clips, one that would allow Mr. Zizek to riff on a pet topic: the workings of cinematic fantasy. He eagerly agreed to conduct what is in essence an illustrated film-studies lecture. The title springs from his assertion that cinema is "the ultimate pervert art." As he puts it: "It doesn't give you what you desire. It tells you how to desire." ...
In the course of this two-and-a-half-hour film Mr. Zizek appears in famous locations like Isabella Rossellini's shadowy apartment in "Blue Velvet," the neon-lighted hotel room of "Vertigo" and the dank basement in "Psycho." Ms. Fiennes also used a few actual sites, sending her garrulous collaborator on a motorboat ride on Bodega Bay (site of an avian attack in "The Birds") and for a drive through the hilly streets of San Francisco (to induce "Vertigo").
In keeping with the psychosexual theme, many of Mr. Zizek's sacred texts are by Alfred Hitchcock and David Lynch. The documentary effectively casts its subject as a lurking "pervert" hovering at the edge of the action, and he fills the role with good-natured aplomb.
In one sequence that redefines bathroom humor, Mr. Zizek connects the shower drain in "Psycho" with the backed-up toilet in "The Conversation" and compares the experience of looking up at a blank screen before a movie to that of staring into a toilet bowl. (Toilets are something of a Zizek fixation. One of his most notorious arguments traces geopolitical differences to variations in toilet design.) Through April 28 MoMA is also showing a selection of films featured in the documentary. Mr. Zizek will introduce "Pervert's Guide" on Wednesday and the Marx Brothers satire "Duck Soup" on Thursday. (In Mr. Zizek's Freudian formulation Groucho is superego, Chico ego and Harpo id.
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