American Honey | Official Trailer HD | A24
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Explaining Movies by Jumping Right Inside Them
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,” which will be shown at the Museum of Modern Art from Wednesday through April 23, 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.”
Whether discussing the metaphysics of cyberspace or the “perverse core” of Christian theology, Mr. Zizek frequently references movies and pop culture. “When you write about films, it’s so frustrating,” he said. “Even if you spend two pages describing a scene, it doesn’t quite work. So this is a unique opportunity: You talk about something, and the spectator can see it. It’s a little bit risky. I think many cinema theorists, not only me, subconsciously distort their descriptions so that it fits their theory. But here I am objectively tested.”
Still, he said, most of the hard work fell on the director: “Out of the mess of me talking, talking, talking — you know, my friends call me Fidel — Sophie somehow had to introduce order in the total chaos.”
To add visual interest Ms. Fiennes splices Mr. Zizek into the scenes that he’s dissecting with the help of re-created sets and inventive editing. “I wondered what would happen if Slavoj met Morpheus,” she said, referring to Laurence Fishburne’s mind-expanding guru from “The Matrix.” “That was the starting point.”
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.)
Attracting hipsterish crowds at speaking engagements around the world — one of the trendiest new night spots in Buenos Aires is named for him — Mr. Zizek is a bona fide intellectual celebrity. But the reaction he elicits within academia tends to be more mixed. In the world of cinema studies it can get downright chilly.
A skirmish broke out a few years ago when, in a book on the filmmaker Krzysztof Kieslowski (whose 1993 film “Blue,” part of his “Three Colors” trilogy, is showing in the MoMA series), Mr. Zizek attacked several academics who have been critical of the psychoanalytic approach to film theory. One who responded was the respected author David Bordwell, a professor of film at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.In an essay titled “Slavoj Zizek: Say Anything,” posted on his Web site, Mr. Bordwell wrote that “when Zizek tries to be serious and dismantle an argument critically, the results are vague, digressive, equivocal, contradictory, and either obviously inaccurate or merely banal.” But, he added, “Vagueness, digressions, equivocations, etc. are less apparent if you’re playful.”
As even his critics tend to concede, Mr. Zizek knows how to entertain. He’s also an engaging, if exhausting, conversationalist. During a 45-minute phone call, topics ranged from Darwin to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to his defiant admiration for “300” to the “incredible Stalinist classical musicals” he had just discovered on a Moscow trip.
Mr. Zizek once ran for the top political office in Slovenia — he finished fifth in the 1990 contest for a four-member presidency — and continues to maintain a high public profile. He has contributed several Op-Ed articles to The New York Times since last year, and he weighs in on new movies occasionally. He’s a featured commentator on the new DVD for “Children of Men,” calling it a reflection of the “ideological despair of late capitalism.”
He and Ms. Fiennes are also planning sequels. “The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology” is in the works, to be followed perhaps by “The Pervert’s Guide to Opera.” (He’s a fan.)
Sounds like a brand name in the making. “Oh, yes,” he said. “We will copyright the concept and the name.” Laughing, he added: “Capitalism! And I say this with pleasure as a Marxist.”
