Sophie Fiennes' film, 'The Pervert's Guide To Ideology', is essentially just an illustrated lecture, given by Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek. The illustrations come from the movies, but in the main, Zizek isn't interested in the ideologies of the film makers - rather, he uses selections from the films' content as illustrative of the processes of real life, and the ideology he is interested in is not Nazism, or communism, but rather the way we all frame our own lives, and the universal themes linking our need for and use of such frames. Some of this universalist framework comes from psychoanalysis, although Zizek's Freudian perspective only really manifests itself in occasional unproven assertions that the it is the analytic process that has revealed the truth. Finnes shoots this well, and Zivek is intermittently interesting, but overall, the message is both highbrow and yet strangely unrevalatory; I found it hard to understand what I was meant to take away from this film, or in other words, what the film's own ideological case actually was. It's almost better enjoyed as a simple piece of discursive criticism than a coherent (or, for want of a better word, we might say "ideological") discussion of ideology.
Review of The Pervert's Guide to Ideology
