Director Sophie Fiennes reunites with philosophical provocateur Slavoj Žižek for this follow-up to the engrossing hit The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema. This time Žižek applies his inimitable and penetrating insights to films, deciphering their ideological implications, and postulates on where and how cinema reinforces, and sometimes exposes, the beliefs of prevailing ideologies.
Reprising the technique of the previous film, Fiennes physically inserts Žižek into recreations of famous movie sets, where he relentlessly leaps from one film and one idea to the next – encompassing A Clockwork Orange, Jaws, The Dark Knight, Taxi Driver, Titanic, M*A*S*H, Loves of a Blonde, Brazil, and The Sound of Music.
Interspersed with news footage and excerpts from propaganda films, Žižek pontificates on capitalism, fascism, consumerism, Stalinism, religion and more, resulting in a documentary essay which as resonant as it is wilfully provocative.