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Zizek! (double feature with Chain)

That superstar Slovenian philosopher movie!

Zizek! (double feature with Chain)
If you see only one documentary about a Slovene philosopher this year, it will most likely be Astra Taylor's "Zizek!," a brisk little film whose title character, Slavoj Zizek (SLAH-voy ZHEE-zhek), is surely the most famous Slovene philosopher in the world. This is not a joke, even though it sounds like one, and even though Mr. Zizek is funnier, in person and on the page, than anyone whose mission is to fuse Hegelian dialectics with Lacanian psychoanalysis has any right to be.

He is also an international academic celebrity, a role he embraces with some ambivalence. Filmmaker Astra Taylor follows her subject from Buenos Aires to New York, where he speaks before adoring crowds, and home to Ljubljana, where he lives in a modest, book-crammed apartment. A shambling, unkempt bear of a man, he talks a blue streak of fluent, juicily sibilant English - in lecture halls, in restaurants, in video stores, and even in bed - and while he is often playful and self-mocking, he is never less than completely serious.

"Zizek!," however, is not so much an introduction to his thought as an advertisement for it. His books (including "Enjoy Your Symptom!," "The Sublime Object of Ideology," "Tarrying With the Negative" and many others), while difficult, are notable for the clarity with which they present the central contradictions of life in the post-Communist, late capitalist world, where social and psychic control is exercised not by the repression of desires, but rather by their creation and partial fulfillment. While Karl Marx and the French Freudian Jacques Lacan are his main influences, his intellectual toolkit also includes Alfred Hitchcock and Saint Paul. The bravura with which he mixes them all up - along with Soviet-era jokes and observations on restaurant behavior and bathroom design - has made him an intellectual superstar, a curious mixture of guru and buffoon. (A.O. Scott, NY Times)

Zizek! (double feature with Chain)

Mon April 10, 2006, 9:00, Muenzinger Auditorium

USA, 2005, inEnglish and Slovenian, Color, 71 min

recommend

Tickets

10 films for $60 with punch card
$9 general admission. $7 w/UCB student ID, $7 for senior citizens
$1 discount to anyone with a bike helmet
Free on your birthday! CU Cinema Studies students get in free.

Parking

Pay lot 360 (now only $1/hour!), across from the buffalo statue and next to the Duane Physics tower, is closest to Muenzinger. Free parking can be found after 5pm at the meters along Colorado Ave east of Folsom stadium and along University Ave west of Macky.

RTD Bus

Park elsewhere and catch the HOP to campus

International Film Series

(Originally called The University Film Commission)
Established 1941 by James Sandoe.

First Person Cinema

(Originally called The Experimental Cinema Group)
Established 1955 by Carla Selby, Gladney Oakley, Bruce Conner and Stan Brakhage.

C.U. Film Program

(AKA The Rocky Mountain Film Center)
First offered degrees in filmmaking and critical studies in 1989 under the guidance of Virgil Grillo.

Celebrating Stan

Created by Suranjan Ganguly in 2003.

C.U. Department of Cinema Studies & Moving Image Arts

Established 2017 by Chair Ernesto Acevedo-Muñoz.

Thank you, sponsors!
Boulder International Film Festival
Department of Cinema Studies & Moving Image Arts

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