treywillwest For Zizek we are all perverts in that human consciousness is the attempt to postpone the confrontation with real experience- the horror of death and the misery of our toil, as well as the terror of achieved orgasmic bliss- through the construction of a less frightening fantasy life. Cinema is the ultimate means by which we project our fantasies of a more tolerable world. Zizek argues that the acute suffering of the oppressed of the current social order is tolerable only through the construction of a particular type of fantasy- that of the class struggle. It is an added dimension of fantasy for those who suffer the most in society. The difficulty with the progressive project is that it too is a form of postponement. The class struggle often finds itself drawn to the Utopian project- to the impossible-task as such. It imagines its own failure and this is its success as fantasy. Both the USSR, in the post-revolutionary period, and the USA, after the Cold War, imagined themselves the End of History. But this pronouncement of the End was actually a fantastic postponement of the real end- the fall of a given social order, or the death of the individual (or species). If we live in the End the present will never pass. The USSR had to face the end of its present. Zizek thinks capitalism is about to face a similar confrontation with the Terrifying Real.

Stefan Magometschnigg (stefanmago) An old intellectual talks about what he considers art in movies. You get your Hitchcock, your Chaplin, your Bergman and some other stuff prior to the 80ies. To disguise that he has no clue what is going on in cinemas these days, he throws in The Matrix.But it's not only the same lame film-as-art speech all over again. This speech is reduced to outdated psychological platitudes: it-ego-super ego, anal phase, sexual insufficiency. It is garnished with the cheesy effect of having Zizte edited into the movies he is taking about. For someone who is supposed to know much about movies, his own is, cinematographicly speaking: yeiks.To put it in Zizek's own words - I saw 5\-\!7 on the screen, last night, or in the words of a great movie maker:Mr. (Zizek), what you've just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it. I award you (two) points (only), and may God have mercy on your soul.

rasecz 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.

rysiek_kinoman He's stocky, sweaty, slightly cross-eyed and restless. He stands in front of us and calls himself a pervert. He claims that we – the film viewers – perceive the screen as a toilet bowl, and are all secretly wishing for all the s**t to explode from the inside. He's unpredictable and scary. Well…? Come on, you could have guessed by now: he's one of the leading philosophers of our age.Slavoj Žižek is both a narrator and a subject of Sophie Fiennes' extraordinary new film, A Pervert's Guide to the Cinema. Fiennes illustrates a feature-long lecture by Žižek, and does so in two ways: by providing exemplary film clips and putting Žižek on real (or reconstructed) locations from the movies he speaks about. It's always nice to watch neatly captioned scenes from great movies (although Revenge of the Sith got here as well), but the main attraction of A Pervert's Guide… is Žižek himself. What makes the movie such fun to watch is the unanswerable question one cannot help but ask over and over again: what is more outrageous, Žižek's views or Žižek's screen presence? In a documentary by Astra Taylor (Žižek!, 05), Slovenian philosopher at one point confessed his fear of being silent. Because, he claimed, he feels like he doesn't exist in the first place, the only way to make all other people believe he does is to talk constantly and feverishly. And talk he did, and how. Also A Pervert's Guide… is dominated by his voice – delivering perfect English in most crazy way, and making some astonishing points about the cinema.What are those? Well, for example he sees Chaplin's reluctance towards talking picture as a sign of an universal fear of voice itself (kind of alien force taking over the human being – think the ventriloquist segment of Dead of Night [45]). He says that the perverse nature of cinema is to teach us to desire certain objects, not to provide us with them. He identifies Groucho Marx as super ego, Chico as ego and Harpo as id. He says a million other interesting things, and all the time we cannot take our eyes off him, so persuasive (and captivating) are his looks. At some point I couldn't help but stare at his thick, scruffy hair and wonder what kind of a brain lays stored underneath. Craving, of course, for more insights.Most notable are Žižek's readings of Lynch and Hitchcock (which comes as no surprise since he has written about both of them). The cumulative effect of many brilliantly edited clips from their respective work made those parts of Žižek's lecture memorable and – unlike others – difficult to argue with, since he seems to really have gotten things right on these two directors. This doesn't go for his reading of Tarkovsky for example, upon whom he relentlessly imposes his own utterly materialistic view of reality, dismissing precisely what's so remarkable in all Tarkovsky (namely strong religious intuitions and images).The question isn't whether Žižek is inspiring and brilliant, because he is; or whether Fiennes film is worth watching, because it is likewise. The real question is rather: are Žižek views coherent? One smart observation after another make for an overwhelming intellectual ride, but after the whole thing is over, some doubts remain. For example: while considering Vertigo (58) Žižek states that what's hidden behind human face is a perfect void, which makes face itself only a facade: something of a deception in its own means. However, when in the final sequence we hear about the ever-shattering finale of City Lights (31) as being a portrait of one human being fully exposed to another, it's hard not to ask: what happened to the whole facade-thing…? Why should we grant Chaplin's face intrinsic value of the real thing and deprive Kim Novak's of this same privilege in two bold strokes…? Or maybe that incoherence might also be read in Lacan's terms? (The name of the notoriously "unreadable" French psychoanalyst is fundamental to Žižek's thought.) The film has all the virtues of a splendid two-and-a-half hours lecture: lots of ground are covered, many perspectives employed, even some first-rate wisecracks made (when Žižek travels on a Melanie Daniels' boat from The Birds [63] and tries to think as she did, he comes up with: "I want to f**k Mitch!"). But it has also one shortcoming that isn't inherent to two-and-a-half hours lecture as such: it's almost obsessively digressive. Žižek's yarn about how far are we from the Real is as good as any other psychoanalytic yarn, but after some 80 minutes it becomes quite clear that one of Žižek's perverse pleasures is to ramble on and on, changing subjects constantly. Overall effect is this of being swept away by a giant, cool, fizzing wave: you're simultaneously taken by surprise, refreshed, in mortal danger and confused no end. As you finish watching, your head is brimming with ideas not of your own and you're already planning on re-watching some films – but you also share a sense of having survived a calamity.The ultimate question is: did Žižek lost it? Or haven't we even came close to the real thing? Once cinephilia becomes punishable by imprisonment, we shall all meet in a one big cell and finally talk to each other (not having any movies around to turn our faces to). I dare you all: who will have enough guts to approach Žižek and defy him? My guess is that once you look into those eyes in real life, you become a believer.