Perhaps an impossible act to follow, but nevertheless an uncanny preface to our XLTs TOC 2.1 presentation on Friday (see previous post below re: tour). “The Pervert’s Guide To Cinema” , a 3-part document series premiered on More4 (tv) in the UK in August, and opened at the London ICA later in October. And it played here in Zagreb at Mama ( an invaluable public space media lab with an extraordinary grasp on the new media landscape, but more on that later ) on Nov.20 in its “entirety”, though the DVD is reported in a Timeout article to have 10 hours worth of deleted scenes and many more ingenious and obscure film references. Taking archival specimens from some of cinema’s most mindblowing directors ( Tarkovsky, Kubrick, Powell, von Trier, Lynch, Hitchcock, Chaplin, Coppola, Jeunet, Kieslowski, Victor Fleming, etc, etc.) juxtaposed with the collective pop culture (un)conscious we are led to the underbelly of the medium through an odd and lucid Lacanian lens. 3 hours of Zizek’s incessant and inspired psycho(media)anlaysis is nearly enough to cause one’s head on the couch to go into Scanner-like eruptions, but the humor and epiphanies are like a surgically transplanted eye from “the man behind the curtain” which provides you with an oasis of new understanding about what the world of film is doing with your very own operating system.

“The cinema, he says, is a “pervert’s” medium because it tells us not what to desire, but how to desire it; it fetishizes an endlessly reordered and artificialised reality in order to induce [an external] rapture and fascination.” (from The Guardian article) And perhaps more darkly, it is the outside mechanism, an outlet and “production studio” for the Id, which otherwise cannot be realized within society’s constraints. And what if, in all its fakeness, contrivances and conventions, over-the-top hollywoodisms, it offers something more real about ourselves than anything we can extract from our ordinary lives?! Just one of many rabbit holes, that one could dive down from here. We couldn’t help but think Part 4 was not far away, essential even to finding our way out. And in fact Zizek and Fiennes have a next project on deck called ” The Pervert’s Guide To Ideology”. While here they have revelled in the genius of the masters, there is still a lingering and immediate question, like What Is To Be Done about the all the endless manipulative media crap that has the masses either firmly in its grip or simply pushing them off a cliff ?!

In the meantime there’s our humbled approach to Psychomedia analysis, which might be preparing for an INVERSE conclusion: that the silver screen (and the net) has been ripped through, and what lies behind it is a more radical engagement and/or authorship of the real and/or irreal, repossesed from the derelict-empirical exploitations… you know, those repetitive deadbeats and serial murderers who cannot ever be expected to pay up according to the social needs, much less realtime desires. Come to think of it, maybe Corporations and Empire are not a “them” but the very Id incorporated.

This theme will obviously be revisted here in the Podopolog and in our own presentation of “The Transmigration Of Cinema”, but we leave you with a Zizekism sure to make your eastblok and balkan sensibilities percolate! From Timeout article:

For Zizek, the cultural project is indivisible from a wider political involvement, however amusingly delivered. He expresses genuine concern about the fragmentation of shared experience resulting from the rise in home-viewing of films but goes on. ‘I was in New York and there were these signs, “Don’t buy pirated movies, you are supporting terrorism and communism” blah blah blah. So I thought, from now on, I will only buy pirate DVDs. Maybe the spontaneous communism of the medium will finally triumph.’