Culture

Rating: 4/5

It’s hard to think of a film at this year’s Festival that is so perfectly equal parts educational and offbeat as this small Irish production about a Slovenian philosopher deconstructing some of the most influential films of the past 50 years. Slavoj Žižek is our phlegmatic guide to the cinema, using it to explore the deep-seated power of ideologies and how they resurface in seemingly unconnected locations such as Nazi propaganda films, the London riots, and Coke commercials from the 1980s. Žižek’s aim is a basic one: to show how film can (often unknowingly) reinforce the beliefs, desires and ideas deemed acceptable for society at large. While Žižek is largely successful in his aim, drawing a few laughs and making very astute observations, at times the whole process is strenuously convoluted.

As Žižek jumps from film to film he also jumps from location to location. When discussing (what he refers to as) “The Taxi Driver” we find him delivering his lecture (and it is indeed a lecture) from Travis Bickle’s apartment. His message regarding The Sound of Music and its links to Coca-Cola is stoically delivered in a full-blown nun’s costume. It seems that Sophie Fiennes decided not to reel in her heavily accented pedagogue. If there was a script, it seems to have been discarded early on in the piece: Fiennes is perfectly happy to let Žižek stumble over his words, pause for extended periods and discuss at length ideas that make absolutely no sense to anyone bar possibly Žižek himself. In many ways, this is the film’s purpose. Why would a film funded by the British Film Institute be allowed to deliver its message in a way that invites such obvious barriers to clear communication, if not to deconstruct the film’s own ability to reinforce ideologies?

However, while some points may be lost, this is still a great film. Žižek is a brilliant raconteur and theologian who skilfully turns what could be quite a dry subject into a fun-filled romp through the ages. The film is only let down, maybe, by the grandiose scope of his own ideas. The absent-minded professor for the internet age, perhaps?