Armando Iannucci Talk, Tate Modern, 17th October 2006

Sorry, your browser doesn't support the embedding of multimedia.Armando Iannucci at Tate Modern
17th October 2006
1 hr 23 mins

Comedian Armando Iannucci talks about the roles and positions that comedy plays in the media today. Insisting that it is not the job of comedians 'to talk about what you can and cannot say and do because, thankfully, by definition [they] are irresponsible', he discusses when it is deemed appropriate to make jokes about serious issues, and the relative failings of our broadcasters to adequately explore them through other means.

There's a few clips he refers to during the lecture - it was a little frustrating not being to see them, so I've done my best to find them for you:

Slavoj Žižek, Maybe We Just Need a Different Chicken

Slavoj Žižek Maybe We Just Need a Different Chicken

2008

My second Žižek post is a talk that was meant to be about his book, Violence, delivered in Portland, Oregon in 2008. Instead Žižek talks, in his usual wandering style, about politeness and censorship and their function in ideology today. In his inimitable style, he extrapolates metaphors from a joke about a psychiatric patient who believes he is a piece of grain, terrified of being eaten by the chicken of the title. Žižek discusses how ideology manifests itself in the media and politics today, while covering cinematic references that span from Batman to Hitchcock's Vertigo to Kung Fu Panda.

Žižek! 2005, Directed By Astra Taylor

Žižek! 2005
Directed by Astra Taylor
1 hr 09 mins

This film, the first of a number of Žižek videos I intend to post over the coming weeks, is a documentary in which filmmaker Astra Taylor joins the Slovenian writer, philosopher, sociologist and theorist on various packed (literally to the rafters) speaking engagements around Europe, the USA and South America, and at his home in Ljubljana. Set to a specially written score by A Hawk And A Hacksaw's Jeremy Barnes, it serves as an excellent introduction to his all-encompassing thought, rigorous approach to analysis and enthralling manner of speaking.

A charsimatic and compelling individual, Slazoj Žižek examines society through discussing the complexities of phenomena including ideology, politics, and Hollywood cinema through the lens of Lacanian analysis. In this film he shares views on amoungst other things, 'the post-ideological era', Utopia, catastrophe, his audience, and vegetarians ('degenerates, they will turn into monkeys').