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| Sophie Fiennes with Anne-Katrin Titze on Slavoj Žižek: “I absolutely love working with him. Just being immersed in those ideas.” |
From her short, Lars From 1 - 10, with Lars von Trier on Dogma 95, to Grace Jones: Bloodlight and Bami with Grace Jones; The Pervert's Guide To Ideology and The Pervert's Guide To Cinema with Slavoj Žižek; Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow with Anselm Kiefer; a short in Hopper Stories (commissioned by Arte France and produced by Didier Jacob), inspired by the Edward Hopper painting First Row Orchestra, and now the remarkable documentary T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets, starring Ralph Fiennes (opening in New York Friday, April 28) - Sophie Fiennes is one of the most discerning and astute filmmakers on the subjects she chooses to document.
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| Slavoj Žižek Cantor Film Center at NYU on October 14, 2015 Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze |
Slavoj Žižek's musings on our enjoyment of ideology, and the fact that stepping out of it hurts, were the great starting point for Sophie Fiennes' farsighted and sharp-witted The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology, the second instalment with the Slovenian Lacanian after The Pervert's Guide To Cinema in 2006.
The 2012 film begins with the philosopher in front of a garbage dumpster, warning, that just when we think we escape it, at that point we are deep within ideology. The receptacle turns out to be a replica of the one from They Live (1988), a film Žižek calls "one of the forgotten masterpieces of the left." It is the story of a homeless worker in Los Angeles, who finds a box of sunglasses in the rubbish, which allow anyone who puts them on to see the real messages behind the billboards, ads, and magazines. Obey! Stop thinking! Conform! The invisible order is revealed.
We buy ideology with Starbucks coffee, by being a consumerist and feeling good about it, too. Žižek refers to Walter Benjamin in the context of history, namely that we experience history only when we see the waste of culture. Movies such as I Am Legend (2007) and other post-apocalyptic films show us the "inertia of the real," and the Titanic wreck at the bottom of the ocean has been elevated into a myth. In Titanic (1997), the true catastrophe lies elsewhere, when rich people revitalise their stale lives.
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| Slavoj Žižek at NYU Deutsches Haus on October 20, 2018 Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze |
The Pervert's Guide To Cinema premiered in New York at MoMA with Slavoj Žižek presenting. We talked about Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s The Lives Of Others in regards to which gender spied more on the other, the AirTrain to JFK Airport, German Romanticism, and the Marx Brothers' Duck Soup (1933). Every conversation I have had with Žižek over the years is like this, beginning at the New School for Social Research in New York, where I was a student in his seminar on The Plague of Fantasies in 1997.
It has been a while since the last Pervert’s Guide, and the world is patiently waiting for a third chapter to enlighten us about the state of international affairs, the possibilities of freedom, AI, and what the future of human interaction without human troubles may look like.
In this first installment with Sophie Fiennes we discuss the influence of Slavoj Žižek, a timely Monty Python joke, and where she is with her forthcoming project The Pervert’s Guide to Utopias on the advent of the US theatrical premiere of T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets.
From London, Sophie Fiennes joined me on Zoom for an in-depth conversation on Slavoj Žižek and TS Eliot's Four Quartets.
Anne-Katrin Titze: The Pervert’s Guide to Utopias - how is that coming along? How is Slavoj?
Sophie Fiennes: Well, we were really excited because Screen Island just came in with some money. It’s hopeless in the UK right now. I can’t get any money in the UK, it’s become very provincial here. Luckily, we’re going to be making an Irish, Slovenian, Norwegian co-production.
Maybe some English money will come in. It’s really hard because I think since Brexit it has become “very British looking.” Slavoj is not British, so it’s really quite sad and I hope it changes because it’s also rather infuriating.
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| Slavoj Žižek covering his eyes the evening of Donald J Trump's early morning victory over Hillary Clinton on November 9, 2016 Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze |
AKT: I haven’t seen Slavoj in a while, so please send my greetings to him!
SF: I will! He’s wonderful, Slavoj, and I absolutely love working with him. Just being immersed in those ideas. We’ve been developing this film now for quite a long time but it’s looking like it’s going to come to fruition. I actually just was printing out today another book that he’s just sent me.
AKT: I’m jealous!
SF: It’s really great, because it’s this question of freedom, what freedom is. With “Utopias”, I came up with that title, and it’s actually great because it does bring together lots of ways of thinking about the world that we’re in right now.
AKT: What is the title of what you just showed me? Is that his new book?
SF: When I make films I work with ideas across many books. With The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema a lot of it was from Enjoy Your Symptom! And The Sublime Object of Ideology was the kind of key book for The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology. But I also take from other sources and he sends me things that he’s developing. So we’ve really been working on it.
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| Sophie Fiennes with Slavoj Žižek shooting The Pervert's Guide To Ideology |
This is just a new book and I don’t know when it will be published. It’s Freedom and its Discontents. He’s been writing quite a lot ever since the one about Living in the End Times, looking at where we are in the world now and end times ideas. So hopefully the film will be a valuable contribution for us to reflect on what kind of a world we are capable of creating for ourselves at this point.
AKT: Did you ever talk with Slavoj about T.S. Eliot?
SF: He always references some funny Monty Python joke on time past and time present. There’s a Monty Python reference he comes up with, but seriously he’s a huge fan of Ralph. He loves Ralph’s work; he particularly loves when Ralph plays difficult, sort of unlikable characters, the bad guys. He’s wonderful, Slavoj, he’s wonderful.
AKT: Thank you so much, Sophie, it’s so lovely to meet you!
SF: And you, I hope I’ll meet you in real life.
AKT: Are you coming to New York?
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| The Pervert's Guide To Ideology at DOC NYC on November 11, 2012 |
SF: I am going to come next Thursday, I just wanted to support the release of the film. I’ve never seen the film projected with an audience.
AKT: Thank you for this conversation. You’re in London now?
SF: I’m in London, yes, we’re waiting for the spring to kick in, it’s been cold for too long. Lovely to meet you! Thank you, Anne-Katrin!
Coming up - Sophie Fiennes on T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets, Ralph Fiennes, Helen Gardner’s The Art of TS Eliot, Grace Jones: Bloodlight and Bami, Samuel Beckett, Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker, François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows, Elizabethan and Metaphysical poetry.
TS Eliot's Four Quartets opens at the IFC Center in New York on Friday, April 28.
