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Sophie Fiennes, Director of The Pervert's Guide to Cinema, admits that the title of the film is a McGuffin, for anyone coming to the ICA in search of an A to Z of straightforward cinematic titillation would be disappointed.  I say "straightforward", because the theme of this three-part journey through some of the finest films ever made is desire, and so the trenchcoated viewer would not be cheated of the erotic, as there is much satisfying scopophilia to be indulged in here, particularly at the reliable hands of Alfred Hitchcock and David Lynch.  Yet the aspiring pervert is destined to be confused as much as aroused when confronted by the middle-aged man on screen, the brilliant Slovenian philosopher and psychoanalyst Slavoj Zizek, who expertly takes us through over two hours of erudite and personal meditations upon the nature of desire: how it is constituted and how it constitutes us.  Thus the film turns its first trick even before it is out of its ambiguously-named can. 

For those who can get past this disappointment, and others already familiar with Zizek's work, there are other pleasures to be gleaned from his passion and fascination with film, and his skilful weaving of a skein of arguments about fantasy, materiality, anxieties and unconscious drives around clips from over forty films from all over the world stretching back nearly eight decades.  At the risk of wounding his amour-propre by consigning him to that most un-sexy of family relationships, it is like having your ridiculously brainy uncle take you on a journey through his DVD collection whilst giving you his take on the meaning of life. 

So we begin with an analysis of how the visual language of Hitchcock's The Birds and Psycho, or of Marx Brothers films, illustrates aspects of the Ego, the Superego and the Id, and Zizek shows how cinema works on these strata order to arouse desire, whilst maintaining it at a safe distance, creating a virtual universe where it is safe to fantasise.  This prompts the question, "why is fantasy necessary?" and Zizek's answer to this is that our � particularly the male � libido feeds on and requires illusion.  The implications of the argument that he makes (with the aid of Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris, Hitchcock's Vertigo, Ingmar Bergman's Persona and Lynch's Blue Velvet and Lost Highway among others) are that the essence of desire is a measure of mystery: the less one knows about the object of desire, the stronger the attraction can be.  This is not because one wants to uncover the mystery or decipher the puzzle posed by the Other, the object of one's desire, but precisely because this position of not-knowing provides one with a huge blank screen upon which one can project one's fantasy unencumbered by reality.  For Zizek one of the primary joys and functions of film is that it provides an arena where this safe (victimless?) fantasising can be given full reign, but where there are no consequences, because he argues that a fantasy actually realised would be too much like a nightmare.  In the cinema, as in sleep, we can "escape reality into dream, so that we can escape dream into reality."  Which brings us to the uses of illusion: as he puts it, "there is something more real in the illusion than the reality behind it" � cinema presents for us in visual terms aspects of reality that we may not be ready to accept in daily life.

But don't be put off by the impression that this is all dry theorising: Zizek is an extremely spirited, engaging and playful companion, and by using films that many of us are familiar with already, he has hit upon a way of making the esoteric accessible.  He speaks with his characteristic freewheeling embrace of the paradox, and one of the attractions of his way of arguing is that his is not attempting to provide a single, potted system or world view.  The film provides the viewer with a series of provocations: questions, or theoretical quests to be embarked upon, pretexts for reflection and debate.

Sophie Fiennes resolves the problem of how to dramatise what could easily come across as little more than an illustrated lecture by shooting at original locations and on replica sets, creating visual puns and disjunctions, playing with the seamlessness of cinematic illusion by cutting backwards and forwards from the original film to this one (for example, the Cathedral Hill Hotel in San Francisco, the original location for Francis Ford Coppola's The Conversation, or the sofa in Dorothy's bruised-lilac flat in Blue Velvet � recognition is due to Ben Zuydwijk's production design throughout).  By allowing Zizek to express himself discursively and develop his lines of argumentation freely, Fiennes manages to capture at times the very act of thinking, delivering it to us with the immediacy of light. 

It is an unexpected, and undoubtedly unintended consequence of cinema that, in Zizek's words, "it doesn't give you what you desire, it tells you how to desire."  In his view, this is what makes it "the ultimate pervert art."  What a fine guide he turns out to be. 

THE PERVERTS GUIDE TO CINEMA is opening at the ICA from 6th October, followed by a Q & A with Director Sophie Heinnes and special talks by Presenter Slavoj Zizek on 7th and 8th October. The ICA screenings will be followed by a regional tour through ICA films and released on DVD on 27th November.

For full details please visit www.ica.org.uk or www.thepervertsguide.com