CFF screening - short review - THE PERVERT'S GUIDE TO IDEOLOGY by Sophie Fiennes

Philosopher Slavoj Zizek gives us the ultimate lesson in psychoanalysis of ideology by extensively referring to popular culture and cinema.

This documentary, the second feature film collaboration between director Sophie Fiennes and Zizek after the previously released The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema, works on a myriad of different levels. Not only does Zizek support his analysis in an exciting, accessible, funny and often invigorating way, but he also comes across as being perfectly able to support his thesis by using familiar examples.

However, the film’s most intriguing aspect is the subject of perversion – which once again refers to the cinema viewer whose scope in the screening room is always essentially to spy on the lives of the characters on screen. This perversion also refers to the figure of the cinephile directly, who will find a particularly rewarding stimulation in the familiarity of the explicit examples that Zizek offers to portray his points.

There is a drawback. Fundamentally, The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology is a man with a slightly annoying voice and garbled Eastern European accent rant for over two hours, and these rants sometimes become borderline indecipherable gibberish – in fact it’s virtually impossible to follow all of his arguments especially for that length of time. Yet, the imaginative style in which Fiennes utilises the documentary’s format and mixes the archive material with Zizek’s talks by transporting him to specific scenes of the films he references remains a treat and even conveys the philosopher’s peculiar magnetism and natural sense of humour perfectly.