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The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology
Dir: Sophie Fiennes
May 5 at the DOXA Film Festival

Sophie Fiennes’ new film, The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology, follows Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek on a Virgilian tour through the labyrinths of popular culture. As in many of his seventy or so books, Žižek deploys the ideas of Jacques Lacan, Karl Marx, and Walter Benjamin to shed light on the intricate operations of ideology in cinema, TV ad campaigns, and popular music. Here, the emphasis on pop culture serves a two-fold purpose: it exposes the extent to which we denizens of a supposedly “post-ideological society” are entangled in the cobwebs of ideology, and it makes abstruse psychoanalytic and philosophical optics thoroughly palatable to large audiences (a tactic that in large part accounts for Žižek’s veritable intellectual guru status both inside and outside of academia).

For Žižek, following French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan (whose revival in academic circles Žižek has played no small part in instigating), ideology is not merely a false screen that obstructs our perception of the way things really are. Reality, for Lacan, necessarily “takes on the structure of a fiction.” We understand the world around us and our roles within it primarily through fragmentary narratives that permeate the cultural sphere. As such, television, film, advertising, and the social networking sites to which so many of us are addicted teach us not just what to desire, but how to desire in an increasingly virtual world.

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The yellow record label on OK VANCOUVER OK’s new food Shelter water LP reads: “CAPITALISM DOESN’T WORK AND IT MAKES YOU SAD”. That’s an unusual observation, isn’t it? Not exactly a call to arms: CAPITALISM SUCKS AND IT MAKES YOU PISSED OFF! No, in OK Van’s world, it’s sad, it’s tragic. What hope do we have for our children and the planet when our collective fixation with money & property blindsides our motivation to meet even the fundamental needs people have for safe food, affordable shelter and clean water? The marvel is that the folks in OK Vancouver OK meet adversity head-on with optimism, alternative vision, and stubborn resistance through Jeff Johnson’s poetic and heartfelt songs.

haidawood

The struggles against pipelines and tankers, against colonial dispossession, span from Vancouver to Haida Gwaii. The Haida were among the first to take a stand, and have done so in proud, creative and inspiring ways. Here Christine Leclerc speaks with Ken Leslie, an animator who lives in Haida Gwaii. Ken talks about “Haida Raid 2,” an animated film he and fellow community members released through the Haidawood Project. The series addresses the stresses which the colonial economy puts on the community and the earth, while highlighting revitalization of the Haida language as a key to the way forward.


Juan Manuel Sepúlveda’s film, Every Image calls for its Redemption – Matter is not created nor destroyed (it only changes form) (2012) sets off from the Zacatecas community a couple of months after a blockade at Goldcorp’s Peñasquito mine in Mexico. Installed outside the entrance of the SFU Audain Gallery for the MFA exhibition Apparitions (2012), the installation format is peculiar and unconventional. The installation, split in two, begins with an interview with a rural ejidatario (communal land owner) who gestures without sound as he drives his truck through the Mazapil city centre. His body mimes a testimonial address, but the sounds that emit from the installation’s headphones are instead the ambient everyday noises found on any Vancouver side-street: a bus moves along an electric-wire; indiscernible shouts and murmurs ring along the sidewalk; police sirens annoy without end; footsteps advance down a hall with added weight and resonance. Yet from the truck ride, the sequence quickly moves from intimate address to the unending descent down a craggy dirt road towards the Peñasquito mine.