THE PERVERT’S GUIDES TO CINEMA & IDEOLOGY

This december we finally take the opportunity to screen two of our favorite documentaries during our regular Docu Dinsdag program. Cultural theorist superstar Slavoj Žižek and director Sophie Fiennes take you on a wildly entertaining romp through the crossroads of cinema and philosophy with The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema and The Pervert’s Guide To Ideology.

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.’

 

 

With infectious zeal and a voracious appetite for popular culture, Žižek literally goes inside some truly epochal movies, all the better to explore and expose how they reinforce prevailing ideologies. As the ideology that undergirds our cinematic fantasies is revealed, striking associations emerge: What hidden Catholic teachings lurk at the heart of The Sound of Music? What are the fascist political dimensions of Jaws? Taxi Driver, Zabriskie Point, The Searchers, The Dark Knight, John Carpenter’s They Live (“one of the forgotten masterpieces of the Hollywood Left”), Titanic, Kinder Eggs, verité news footage, Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” and propaganda epics from Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia all inform Žižek’s stimulating, provocative and often hilarious psychoanalytic-cinematic rant.