Recorded in 2012 at TIFF Lightbox, this wide-ranging conversation features philosopher and cultural theorist Slavoj Žižek in dialogue about cinema, ideology, psychoanalysis, and desire. Moving freely between Hitchcock, Hollywood blockbusters, pornography, and political myth-making, Žižek unpacks how film form itself produces ideology – often in contradiction to its explicit message. From Titanic and Vertigo to Spielberg, Nolan, and beyond, this talk captures Žižek at his most provocative, funny, and incisive, arguing that cinema doesn’t just reflect what we believe, but teaches us how to want.
Timestamps
00:00 – 02:45 Why Titanic needs the iceberg
02:45 – 05:27 Perversion vs. hysteria in cinema and politics
05:27 – 10:20 Hollywood as a machine that teaches us how to desire
10:20 – 14:19 Hitchcock, form, and ideology
14:19 – 21:12 Titanic as bourgeois myth and class fantasy
21:12 – 26:27 Spielberg, fathers, and ideological fantasy
26:27 – 30:37 When TV (24) is more honest than liberal cinema
30:37 – 36:22 Vertigo vs. Citizen Kane and formalism
36:22 – 43:54 Why Vertigo allows endless analysis
43:54 – 50:21 Cinema, Anxiety, and authentic emotion
50:21 – 52:11 Audience Q&A begins
52:11 – 58:11 Film as social control and “regulated transgression”
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