“A Pervert's Guide to the Cinema”

'Cinema is the ultimate pervert art. It doesn't give you what you desire - it tells you how to desire' - Slavoj Zizek.

THE PERVERT'S GUIDE TO CINEMA takes the viewer on an exhilarating ride through some of the greatest movies ever made. Serving as presenter and guide is the charismatic Slavoj Zizek, the Slovenian philosopher and psychoanalyst. With his engaging and passionate approach to thinking, Zizek delves into the hidden language of cinema, uncovering what movies can tell us about ourselves.

THE PERVERT'S GUIDE TO CINEMA offers an introduction into some of Zizek's most exciting ideas on fantasy, reality, sexuality, subjectivity, desire, materiality and cinematic form. Whether he is untangling the famously baffling films of David Lynch, or overturning everything you thought you knew about Hitchcock, Zizek illuminates the screen with his passion, intellect, and unfailing sense of humour. THE PERVERT'S GUIDE TO CINEMA applies Zizek's ideas to the cinematic canon, in what The Times calls 'an extraordinary reassessment of cinema.'The film cuts its cloth from the very world of the movies it discusses; by shooting at original locations and on replica sets, it creates the uncanny illusion that Zizek is speaking from within the films themselves. Described by The Times as 'the woman helming this Freudian inquest,' director Sophie Fiennes' collaboration with Slavoj Zizek illustrates the immediacy with which film and television can communicate genuinely complex ideas. Says Zizek: "My big obsession is to make things clear. I can really explain a line of thought if I can somehow illustrate it in a scene from a film. THE PERVERT'S GUIDE TO CINEMA is really about what psychoanalysis can tell us about cinema.

About Slavoj Zizek:

Slavoj Zizek is a professor at the Institute for Sociology, Ljubljana and at the European Graduate School EGS who uses popular culture to explain the theory of Jacques Lacan and the theory of Jacques Lacan to explain politics and popular culture. He was born in 1949 in Ljubljana, Slovenia where he lives to this day but he has lectured at universities around the world. He was analysed by Jacques Alain Miller, Jacques Lacan's son in law, and is probably the most successful and prolific post-Lacanian having published over fifty books including translations into a dozen languages. He is a leftist and, aside from Lacan he was strongly influenced by Marx, Hegel and Schelling. In temperament, he resembles a revolutionist more than a theoretician. He was politically active in Slovenia during the 80s, a candidate for the presidency of the Republic of Slovenia in 1990; most of his works are moral and political rather than purely theoretical. He has considerable energy and charisma and is a spellbinding lecturer in the tradition of Lacan and Kojeve.Zizek has cast a very long shadow in what can only be termed "cultural studies" (though he would despise the characterization). He is an effective purveyor of Lacanian mischief, and, as a follower of the French "liberator" of Freud, Zizek's Lacan is almost exclusively transcribed in mesmerizing language games or intellectual parables. That he has an encyclopedic grasp of political, philosophical, literary, artistic, cinematic, and pop cultural currents — and that he has no qualms about throwing all of them into the stockpot of his imagination — is the prime reason he has dazzled his peers and confounded his critics for over ten years.Zizek was a visiting professor at the Department of Psychoanalysis, Universite Paris-VIII in 1982-3 and 1985-6, at the Centre for the Study of Psychoanalysis and Art, SUNY Buffalo, 1991-2, at the Department of Comparative Literature, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, 1992, at the Tulane University, New Orleans, 1993, at the Cardozo Law School, New York, 1994, at the Columbia University, New York, 1995, at the Princeton University (1996), at the New School for Social Research, New York, 1997, at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 1998, and at the Georgetown University, Washington, 1999. He is a returning faculty member of the European Graduate School. In the last 20 years Zizek has participated in over 350 international philosophical, psychoanalytical and cultural-criticism symposiums in USA, France, United Kingdom, Ireland, Germany, Belgium, Netherland, Island, Austria, Australia, Switzerland, Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Spain, Brasil, Mexico, Israel, Romania, Hungary and Japan. He is the founder and president of the Society for Theoretical Psychoanalysis, Ljubljana.From the European Graduate School Biography
Category: Film & Animation
Tags:
zizek slavoj film cinema lacan sophie fiennes matrix birds hitchcock pervert guide
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8sFqfbrsZbw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w6sFzWjaFEY

Palme d'Or to " WHITE RIBBON"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rUUuD0oh81o
Austrian auteur Michael Haneke is the Palme d'Or winner at the Cannes Film Festival.Shot in a luscious black and white (replete with stunningly rigorous composition that visually furthers his themes), and once again in his native German after a series of successful films in French, "The White Ribbon" depicts life in a small Protestant village in northern Germany just before the advent of World War I. Like most of Haneke's previous films, it comes with an uncompromising moral point-of-view attached.
The film is narrated by its central character, a young teacher, decades after the events depicted. Though the many children all have names, the adults, further extending the film's symbolic implications, tend to be known mostly through their generic roles, e.g., the Baron, the Pastor, the Farmer, the Doctor, and so on. Life in the village is strictly hierarchical, and everyone knows his or her place. An inhuman, never questioned moral code holds sway, especially over the children who are constantly punished, both physically and psychologically, for the slightest infraction. The women are similarly brutalized and under the thumb of the village's unabashed patriarchy. The male adults, on the other hand, engage in clandestine acts of evil and cruelty that are kept hushed up.
One day the order of things begins to unravel. First, the doctor, on horseback, is tripped up by an invisible wire and his injuries put him in the hospital for months. Then several children, including the son of the Baron and the retarded child of the doctor's mistress, are severely beaten. Later, the Baron's barn is set on fire. Who are the guilty ones? It is the teacher who finally figures out, to the surprise of no one, that it is the children that are wreaking the havoc, partly out of revenge for their mistreatment, and partly because they have so totally internalized the sick values of their parents.
On a more symbolic level, though Haneke is too much the serious artist to spell it out, it's clear that this portrait of a sick society is meant to explain, at least partially, the horrendous war that breaks out at the very end of the film, and the fascism that quickly followed in its wake.

Hope that such films would come to indian festivals too. if not ASSCHOM may bring it the multiplexes.

India's Kite flying

http://www.tu.tv/videos/kites-movie-hrithik-roshan-rakesh-roshan

Kindly watch India's kite flying high at Cannes

Indian success @ Cannes ...

The big news is that Assocham will promote Cannes Film Festival in India from 2010 onwards.Cannes Film Festival Association (CFFA) and the Assocham signed an agreement to promote the film festival in India .A meeting to chalk out the plans to promote international films in India is expected to take place in next three months, it said adding the agreement also intends to promote French films and entertainment industry in India and vice-a-versa.The 62nd Cannes Film Festival got under way at Cannes, France .Meanwhile, India Pavilion 2009, jointly put up by the chamber and the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting is at Cannes is screening 40 acclaimed films, directed by leading celebrities such as Yash Chopra, Subhash Ghai and Karan Johar!!!But no place for Adoor, Girish Kasaravally or Budhadev in the list of celebrities. While Adoor speeding to get his fight to some festival one of my colleagues commented why these art film makers are getting any Oscar's? I could not give a ready made answer to him. but now i can tell him . It 's a different cup of tea.What 's important for India too is business. Not art or aesthetics.

what 's there in cannes?....opening canes..canes of worms..

Spring Fever"

Lou Ye( Chinese director )

In Cannes it 's business. It 's entertainemet busieness. Now what sells more than anything is politics , with right mix of sex and nudity. Before they open the canes of films the selectors decide the "theme". Some find canes of worms too.China is their one of their hot favourites.China's Lou Ye, tops the list. His “Summer Palace” in 2006, treated Tiananmen Square protests screened at Cannes prominently. which caused embarrassment to Chinese government and it banned Lou Ye from making movies for five years.
But after two years he managed to make “Spring Fever,” at the backdrop of gay sex. There is plenty of sex as there was in “Summer Palace”too. Spring Fever,” screened the in the Festival’s top Competition slot.

The movie is set in present day Nanjing’s spring time, and traces the bitter jealousy provoked by homosexual love. Wang Ping’s wife suspects him of adultery and hires a detective, Lou Haitao, to catch her husband with his pants down. But Luo and his girlfriend, Li Jing, find themselves in a triangular affair with Wang’s male lover, and realise that homosexual obsessiveness is far more difficult to fathom and control than a heterosexual affair.Lou says that his work goes beyond jealousy. It’s a question that has no gender, and deals with the love that can exist between two beings. To treat homosexuality as simply the opposite of heterosexuality would have been a moralising, theoretical and simple-minded approach. This girl already gets it. She understands that it's a love between two beings, it's not important that it happens to be between two boys.

Ininternational cinema circuit art house films now centre around micropolitics and sexual relationships. Korean , Japanese and Chinese arthouse workspredominatly find threads based on these issues. Infact, these films usually give us nothing extra. Any way we can wait watch this film at Some International festivals in India

ഭൂമിമലയാളം (ടി.വി .ചന്ദ്രന്‍ ) കണ്ണാടി (മുരുകന്‍ കാട്ടാക്കട )

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x0Fxo6xo5q0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=COj3YkzdGb4