The Society of the Spectacle (film)
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La Société du spectacle (Society of the Spectacle) is a 1973 film by Situationist Guy Debord based on the 1967 book of the same title. It was Debord’s first feature-length film and was financed by Gérard Lebovici's Simar Films.
The 90 minute film took a year to make and incorporates footage from The Battleship Potemkin, October, New Babylon, Shanghai Gesture, For Whom the Bell Tolls, Rio Grande, The Charge of the Light Brigade, Johnny Guitar, and Confidential Report, as well as Soviet and Polish films, industrial films, American Westerns, soft-core porn films, news footage, advertisements, and many still photographs. Events such as the murder of Lee Harvey Oswald (who assassinated U.S. President John F. Kennedy in 1963), the revolutions in Spain in 1936, Hungary in 1956 and in Paris in 1968, and people such as Mao Tse Tung, Richard Nixon, and the Spanish Anarchist Durruti are represented. Throughout the movie, there is both a voiceover (of Debord) and inter-titles from "Society of the Spectacle" but also texts from the Committee of Occupation of the Sorbonne, Machiavelli, Marx, Tocqueville, Emile Pouget, and Soloviev. Without citations, these quotes are hard to decipher, especially with the subtitles (which exist even in the French version) but that is part of Debord’s goal “to problematize reception” (Greil and Sanborn) and force the viewer to be active.
In 1984, Debord withdrew his films from circulation because of the negative press and the assassination of his friend and patron Gérard Lebovici. Since Debord’s suicide in 1994, Debord’s wife Alice Becker-Ho has been promoting Debord’s film. A DVD box set titled Guy Debord: Oeuvres cinématographiques complètes came out in 2005 and contains Debord’s seven films.
Sources
- Marcus, Greil and Sanborn, “On the films of Guy Debord”, Keith; Feature; Artforum; February 2006
- Bracken, Len; Guy Debord: Revolutionary; Feral House; 1997; California
- Knabb, Ken; Guy Debord’s Complete Cinematic Works; AK Press; 1978; Canada
- Marshall, Peter; Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism; Fontana Press; 1992; London
- Lasn, Kalle; Culture Jam: How to Reverse America’s Suicidal Consumer Binge- And Why We Must; Quill; 1999; New York
External links
Google video says: "The 1973 film by French Situationist Guy Debord, based on the 1967 book of the same title, shows the dominating oppression of modernization ... all » of both the private and public spheres of everyday life by economic forces. The hegemonic mass media operates as a propaganda machine in both communist and capitalist nations and creates commodity fetishism in the minds of the masses."
Détournement of existing films
Incomplete list
