THE Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek has been the star of three documentaries in recent years — which is three more than your average Marxist-Lacanian psychoanalytic theorist — but he claims not to have seen more than a snippet of any of them.

“It is just too traumatic,” he said in a recent phone interview from Warsaw, where he was attending a conference. The problem has much to do with the larger-than-life image that he has cultivated and seems now to both relish and resent. A disheveled, bearlike presence, Mr. Zizek, 58, is part mad professor, part bumbling clown dispensing ideas at breakneck speed and in a loud sibilant staccato.

“I am too emphatic,” he said emphatically. “Too expressive. I don’t think this works on screen. Even if I state something totally obvious, I say it with this intensity, as if I am saying the last truth.”

While he has no plans to sit through it, Mr. Zizek’s latest documentary, “The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema,” which will be shown at the Museum of Modern Art from Wednesday through April 23, is his favorite of the bunch. “At least it is not about me,” he said. (The two earlier movies, “Zizek!” and “The Reality of the Virtual,” were, respectively, a tour documentary and a filmed lecture.)