The Pervert's Guide to Cinema

Across three parts Slavoj Žižek reads films: Hitchcock, Lynch, Chaplin, Tarkovsky, Kieślowski and more. The documentary does not sit him at a table to do it. Sophie Fiennes places him inside the spaces of the films he is analysing, so he speaks from a boat in the bay of The Birds, from the ship in Solaris, from the bedroom in The Exorcist. The trick works as an argument. Žižek stands inside the films, which is exactly his claim: cinema teaches us what to desire, it is not something observed from outside. The flaw is in the method too. Two and a half hours of one uninterrupted voice is tiring, and some of the psychoanalytic readings feel arbitrary. Anyone who loves a given film will find a share of them forced. Fiennes and Žižek repeated the same approach years later in a follow up about ideology. Who it is for: viewers interested in film theory and psychoanalysis. Who it is not for: anyone expecting a straightforward history of cinema.