Žižek on Films vs Books, Tarkovsky and Kieślowski

Excerpt from an interview with Slavoj Žižek on Czech television channel ČT art.

The philosopher states that books are more accessible than films, and argues that totalitarian regimes are more conducive to making great cinema than democracies, giving examples with Tarkovsky's and Kieślowski's later work.

Full video:

#zizek #tarkovsky #kieslowski

[atlas]

"An artist never works under ideal conditions. If they existed, his work wouldn't exist, for the artist doesn't live in a vacuum. Some sort of pressure must exist. The artist exists because the world is not perfect. Art would be useless if the world were perfect, as man wouldn't look for harmony but would simply live in it." - Andrei Tarkovsky

[HansonZhang-rilj]

Lol, every second of this video is GOLD, so I'm going to just list several good ones that really cracked me up:
1. 1:07 when this beautiful lady is interrupted by Žižek, she's trying so hard not to laugh
2. "NO! Books are for idiots."
3. "Nostalgia and Sacrifice. They are bad; they goes down."
4. "When he [Tarkovsky] got freedom, it was over."
5. "Even if my book I say another thing, but I think I was wrong."
6. "He [Kieślowski] was realizing his dream of shooting half naked beautiful actresses and so on."
7. "He [Kieślowski] slept with all of them, by means, Juliette Binoche, Julie Delpy, and so on."

[chelucupar]

When I was young, people used to wear top hats at cinemas. Because that's what cinema is all about. What kind of hats people wear in the movie theatre.

[magicapricot]

Classic Zizek to not clarify if by “and so on” he meant Irene Jacob

[sebastianshnsk]

"Nostalghia and Sacrifice are bad"

I really like listening to Žižek, until I remember he is in no way an "art critic" but a cultural one (and so on)

[szczesciejestkoloruczarneg]

Slavoj may be left but this time he's so right

[zaroffhound]

Freedom to express very personal art, freedom to rein it in or tighten control. Never permit a genius to be relaxed for any length of time. That being said late Tarkovsky is personal poetry, not about the prosaic world of the surface. Criticism with the intellect not fully suited to deranging ones lyrical memoir.

[NoName-zle]

wtf did he just say kieslowski slept with delpy and binoche? wtf that's a wild thing to say publicly

[clearsxiba]

Trivia: Kieslowski and Tarkovsky both died at age 54.

[Nidzadrugar]

Even if you accept Zizek's opinion on these movies, you can't conclude that worse movies were worse because of more freedom, and not because of anything else that could have happened in the authors' lives. I like the old guy, but he missed on this one. Especially when he has cases of Yugoslavian directors of the "black waive" that were beaten brutally after making their movies and prevented from making more.

[jamesoakes]

Tarkovsky was actually far more critical of the money obsessed Hollywood studio than he was of the Soviet system. For all of the discourse around Tarkovsky's so called "repression", there's no way he would have ever made it as a Hollywood director making those types of films. Even in the New Hollywood films of the 60s and 70s, there was still generally a much bigger emphasis placed on entertainment value as opposed to the pure artistry.

[AndresGomez-ctqb]

Yeah, pretty much. Whenever I hear people tell others to read a book, or just equate reading with intelligence, it's a dead giveaway they don't read themselves.
In the past 10 years, there have been so much useless McLiterature published... And plenty people that just read silly bestsellers and call it a day.

[Thruuuth]

“In North Korea you cannot make a good film.”
Kim Jung Il was actually a HUGE fan of cinema and wrote (or had ghost written) multiple film theory and history books. He tried to stimulate North Korean filmmaking based on Soviet cinema. At one point, he even had his men kidnap a South Korean film director he liked and forced him to make the movies he wanted to see.
It didn’t work out that well, but hey that’s North Korea.

[nicolaszgura]

What did he mean by saying that nostalgia and sacrifice are bad? not making enough money? is he saying that he started regretting leaving the soviet union after he made those 2 movies? and that they couldve been better if he made them in the soviet union? its definitely more complex what is he trying to say with the word "bad"

[brunoserra]

I wonder if this Zizek fellow has any affinity to authoritarian politics, you know, with a bit of oppression and not too much freedom...

[erinvickroy]

Does anyone know where this entire discussion can be watched?

[cheungch]

90% of Chinese directors are in shambles right now

[phpn]

Žižek is the mascot of young North American philosophy students but he's a non-event. No one has been over-hyped as much as he is, since Derrida in the 1980s. The guy's assertions might as well come out of a random bag of words.

[scallamander]

This argument is absurd, far more great cinema has come out of democracies than out of dictatorships. It's absolutely absurd that he would be so non-empirical.

[drog.ndtrax]

There isn't more freedom in a capitalist film production system than in the production systems of eastern bloc and Soviet countries - we know very well that actually the opposite is true (Tarkovsky himself said this, as did many other directors in the west who knew Soviet filmmakers). I wouldn't be surprised if Zizek just made that anecdote up, but it's completely asinine and based on a false premise. What a joke.