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Aside from the simple curiosity of watching Lacan in action, my primary interest in this documentary video was to evaluate its pedagogical value. Would it inspire my undergraduate students to read Lacan? Would it illuminate key aspects of the psychoanalytic theory that we had been reading? Would it spark their interest or bore them? Is it a better introduction to Lacan than the previously released film, Jacques Lacan: Psychoanalysis Revisited (Kaprist and Roudinesco, 2001)? And if the answer to these questions was no, would it contribute anything to the knowledge of Lacanian scholars or clinicians, and if so what?
Jacques Lacan Speaks is comprised of two almost equal parts: the first is an edited version of a lecture Lacan delivered at the University of Louvain in 1971, and the second is edited footage of an interview he granted to the film's director, Françoise Wolff, following the lecture. The lecture was filmed during the period that Dany Nobus and Malcolm Quinn characterize as “massive intellectual performance with little or no audience participation” (2005, p 94). Arriving with crooked cigar in hand, and announcing that he has not prepared a formal lecture, Lacan proceeds to discuss some of the well-known themes: the concept of discourse, knowledge and the unconscious, and transference as love. His slightly longer discussion of death as a matter of faith is one of the highlights here, where Lacan asserts that life would be insupportable if we could not rely on the certainty of death. The problem with the lecture material is that we only get little bits of his thinking on any one theme, and many of the most interesting bits are included in the earlier film for better effect. The lecture does serve to demonstrate some of the peculiarities of Lacan's style, which Wolff later describes as “slow motion punctuated by sighs, tortuous passion, oratory, anecdotes, slang, mockery, insults, intermittent thunder, endless quibbling, massive boredom, witticisms, puns and joke