Slavoj Žižek names his five favourite movies
Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek is arguably one of the most well-known cultural theorists of the 21st century. His work includes the fields of expertise of Georg Hegel, Sigmund Freud and Karl Marx, but he is also celebrated for his contributions to wider political theory.
The international director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities at the University of London also appears to be a profound admirer of cinema and has provided much work to the field of film criticism. Žižek once briefly noted his five favourite films, so let’s take a look at the wide-ranging choices now.
Žižek’s first pick is Lars von Trier’s 2011 apocalyptic art drama Melancholia, starring Kirsten Dunst, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Kiefer Sutherland and Alexander Skarsgård, amongst several other high-profile names. It told of two sisters, one of whom gets married just before another planet is about to crash into Earth. Žižek likes the film “because it’s the end of the world, and I’m a pessimist. I think it’s good if the world ends.”
Up next for Žižek is King Vidor’s 1949 adaptation of Ayn Rand’s 1943 novel The Fountainhead. The film focuses on a young architect who decides to live a life of struggle rather than sacrifice his artistic vision for fame and wealth. Žižek said the film is “ultra-capitalist propaganda, but it’s so ridiculous that I cannot but love it.”
Going way back to 1929, Žižek picks out Dziga Vertov’s A Man with a Movie Camera, the experimental Soviet silent documentary. Vertov portrays city life in Moscow, Kyiv and Odesa in the late 1920s, showing citizens at work and enjoying leisure time. “Standard, but I like it,” Žižek simply stated.
The philosopher also pays his respects to one of the most critically admired films of all time, Alfred Hitchcock’s proto-horror film from 1960 Psycho. It told of a mysterious occurrence between a criminal and a motel clerk and an investigator’s search for the clerk after she went missing. Žižek feels that Hitchcock’s 1958 thriller Vertigo is “too romantic”, and after Psycho, much of Hitchcock’s work “goes down”.
There is still room for comedy amongst Žižek’s picks, though, as he chooses the 1942 American film To Be or Not to Be amongst his favourite films. It starred Carole Lombard and Jack Benny, featuring a group of actors in Nazi-occupied Warsaw who used their talent to trick the Nazi soldiers. “Madness, you cannot do a better comedy,” Žižek said.
Slavoj Žižek’s five favourite movies:
- Melancholia (Lars von Trier, 2011)
- The Fountainhead (King Vidor, 1949)
- A Man with a Movie Camera (Dziga Vertov, 1929)
- Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960)
- To Be or Not to Be (Ernst Lubitsch, 1942)
