Sophie Fiennes’ The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema, starring Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek, is basically a three-part introductory lecture to Zizek’s thought on film, filled with clips from contemporary and classic cinema. Zizek is perhaps the world’s most famous contemporary philosopher, widely known for his method of elucidating and making relatively accessible the works of theorists like Hegel, Marx and the obtuse French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan via popular culture references.

Unlike the recent documentary Zizek! (2005), which was a rather light celebration of the ‘wild man of theory’ and succeeded in being interesting primarily because of Zizek’s charisma, The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema abstains from biography and features relatively intense, yet accessible, analyses of popular films. Many of these are taken from Zizek’s books of theory, which are always heavy in film references as he frequently uses Hollywood to illustrate complicated philosophical arguments. Hitchcock and Lynch — Zizek has a book dedicated to each — receive a great deal of attention, but so do directors like Tarkovsky, Kubrick, Fincher, Haneke and many more.

His Lynch analyses, and especially the one of Wild at Heart, are particularly memorable (where William Defoe, as Bobby Peru, goes from having a ‘cunt-face’ to turning his body into a giant exploding phallus), as are his discussions of the Marx Brothers and films like Psycho, The Birds, Fight Club and The Conversation.

Anyone who has had the pleasure of seeing Zizek lecture might initially be disappointed by how reserved and cleaned up he is in the film. His customary sweaty t-shirt is replaced with a smart suit, and his gestures and tics are largely suppressed. One of the endearing aspects of his performance, however, is the way in which his excitement builds throughout each shot. It is obvious that he is trying to restrain his enthusiasm and while he starts each shot calm and composed, his palpable jouissance for theory cannot be contained and his speech and gestures get more and more animated as each shot wears on.

The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema is currently playing until January 20^th at the IFC Center. While I originally saw it on DVD, which in many ways is an advantageous format for a project like this, I’m looking forward to seeing it again in the theater, because the beauty and magnitude of the majority of the films Zizek references can be better appreciated.