As a writer for the Village Voice once maintained, Slavoj ‚âàŒ©i‚âàÔøΩek is a modern day philosophy rock star. In The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema, the bearish Slovak theorist runs riot in 150-minutes of archival cinema footage. He slams Hitchcock, Lynch, Tarkovsky, Chaplin and the Marx Brothers all against each other in quick-fire succession. Instead of telling us why particular films’Blue Velvet, Solaris, The Birds’are great cinematic works, ‚âàŒ©i‚âàÔøΩek’s aim is to tell us why cinema matters.

As a philosopher in the psychoanalytic tradition, ‚âàŒ©i‚âàÔøΩek understands the cinema as a place where fantasy and reality’desire and fulfilment’are always at battle. Consequently, knowing your Lacanian symbolic order from your Freudian death drive is beneficial in extracting the full depth of this film. While ‚âàŒ©i‚âàÔøΩek doesn’t stop to explain for beginners, his breathless yet humorous stream of premises, hypotheses and declarations can nevertheless be well absorbed by those equipped with a rudimentary knowledge of cinema alone.

Divided into three parts, the ‘film’ presented here was originally devised as 50-minute television episodes. The first of these addresses the link between reality and screen’between our base desires and our ‘nice’ everyday behaviours. The second episode looks at masculine desire, femininity and sexuality. The third draws the first two episodes together, and attempts to state why cinema is an expressive outlet for the modern Western psyche.

For all its gravity, this is nevertheless a playful and highly viewable documentary. It’s abstract and intellectually complex, but ‚âàŒ©i‚âàÔøΩek’s sense of humour and director Sophie Fiennes’ sense of cinematic style make this a high-flying tour of modern civilisation rather than the ride through a postmodern house of horrors that it could well have been.