Jacques Lacan parle

The film gathers footage from Lacan's lecture of 13 October 1972 at the Catholic University of Louvain, where he speaks on language, the unconscious, life and death before a full hall. It captures the moment a young situationist, Jean-Louis Lippert, breaks in and confronts him at the lectern. Wolff then films a long conversation with Lacan for Belgian television, where he sets out how he reads his work.

Commentators treat the film as one of the few sustained visual documents of Lacan teaching before an audience, holding a room and then meeting a direct challenge without leaving the podium. Catalogue descriptions at the Bibliotheque nationale de France and in French archive references present it as a primary source rather than an interpretation, since it lets him speak at length.

For a clinician, it puts his manner on the record: the provocations, the way he speaks about death and the subject as he faces students and, later, a single interviewer. He calls analysis a practice of language and returns to Freud's reading of the unconscious through speech. It shows how he taught and how he answered when pressed.