Žižek!

The documentary follows Slavoj Žižek for a year: lecturing to packed halls in New York, talking in the street in Buenos Aires, sitting in his kitchen at home in Ljubljana. The talking never stops; how ideology works, what films are saying, Lacan and Marx come one after another. The camera takes in the attention forming around the thinker as much as the thinking itself. Astra Taylor's film avoids becoming a tribute. Žižek repeatedly tells the camera his own doubts: how fame is spoiling his work, that people watch him as a performance, that what he says is misunderstood. Those admissions turn the film from a portrait into a record of the tension between thought and celebrity. Seventy-one minutes will not make all of Žižek's ideas clear, but they do show how he operates.