THE PERVERT’S GUIDE TO CINEMA written and presented by Slavok Žižek (Directed by Sophie Fiennes, 2006)
The title of this enlightening three-part documentary is eye-catching but likely to be misleading.
A pervert is someone whose sexual behaviour is considered abnormal or unacceptable but this film is not a guide for those seeking gratification from soft or hardcore porn in modern movies.
The unconventional Slovenian philosopher & psychoanalyst examines how the function of cinema is to mediate between our ‘illicit’ drives and our socially conditioned actions.
In Freudian terms, this is the internal struggle between the id and the super-ego. Žižek states provocatively that “we need the truth of a fiction to express what we really are” or, more ambiguously, “desire is a wound of reality”.
Watching movies, he argues, is not merely an escapist pastime but an essential means by which to show how reality is constructed. Continue reading
This absorbing and uncompromising movie is the kind of a psychological thriller Alfred Hitchcock might have made if he’d been gay.
