Guy Debord: Complete Cinematic Works.(book Review)

Guy Debord: Complete Cinematic Works.(Book Review) Date: March 22, 2004 Publication: Cineaste Author: Smith, Jeremy Guy Debord: Complete Cinematic Works Translated and edited by Ken Knabb. San Francisco: AK Press, 2003. 258 pp. illus, Hardcover: $29.00. In one of Franz Kafka's parables, a messenger is dispatched from the emperor's deathbed with a message for you--"you, his solitary wretch of a subject." The messenger sets out through the chambers of the innermost palace knowing that it will take his entire lifetime just to reach the palace gates. "No one can force his way through here, least of all with a message from a dead man," writes Kafka. You will never receive the message "but you sit at your window when evening falls and dream it yourself." From a twenty-first century perspective, Guy Debord--one of many youthful scourges of De Gaulle's Fifth Republic, key strategist of the Situationist International--appears to us as Kafka's messenger, wending his way through the anterooms and atriums of advanced capitalism with a message that never quite reaches you--not an abstract public, but you, the reader of this review. Nonetheless, you dream your own liberation. Debord's message is a hope--farcical in one light, heroic in another--that resembles a collective dream. Debord is not remembered primarily as a filmmaker, but as a philosopher and revolutionary. Rarely seen during his lifetime, Debord withdrew his films from circulation altogether after the violent death of his patron and publisher Gerard Lebovici in 1984. Except for a broadcast on French television in 1995 in the wake of Debord's suicide, Debord's films were almost totally inaccessible, described and explained to an Englishspeaking audience more often than they were seen or read. In 1992, Rebel Press published a collection of script translations in Society of the Spectacle and Other Films that is currently out of print and difficult to acquire. Now Ken Knabb's translations of the scripts in Guy Debord: Complete Cinematic Works supplants that book and makes Debord's film scripts widely available in English, in preparation for the release of the subtitled films planned for this year. Debord's first film, the fragmentary, prescient Howls for Sade appeared in 1952, when Debord was twenty-one-years old. In 1957 he met with avant-garde artists and theorists from around Europe to found a group devoted to creating situations: "moment[s] of life concretely and deliberately constructed by the collective organization of a unitary ambiance and a game of events." In the five elegiac films that Debord made from 1958

onward--which in his worshipful introduction Knabb calls "the most important radical films ever made [with] no real cinematic competition"--the situationist vision emerges as inseparable from the derive of Debord's life. In 1967, Debord published his definitive book, The Society of the Spectacle. In May 1968, all of France shook with a revolt shaped by situationist ideas and slogans. Debord's film The Society of the Spectacle did not appear until 1973, a year after the SI disintegrated. Like all of Debord's cinematic essays--the tone and themes of which will remind many readers of Debord's contemporary and compatriot Chris Marker--The Society of the Spectacle stands as a both requiem and critique. The spectacle was Debord's description of "the very heart of society's unreality." It is not a collection of images but rather, as he says in the film, "a social relation between people that is mediated by images." It is a closed system of social control and personal deferment. "As long as necessity is socially dreamed, dreaming will remain a social necessity," says Debord in a passage that illustrates Knabb's strengths as a translator. "The spectacle is the bad dream of a modern society in chains and ultimately expresses nothing more than its wish for sleep. The spectacle is the guardian of that sleep." In a strategy that has grown familiar and coopted in a postmodern, hip-hop, Napster age, Debord's films diverted Hollywood and news broadcast images into unique and displacing contexts--a strategy that he called detournement, montage developed to its logical conclusion. "Ideas improve," he says in The Society of the Spectacle. "The meaning of words plays a role in that improvement. Plagiarism is necessary. Progress depends on it." (Words that were "verbatim plagiarism," notes Knabb in his helpful emendations, "from Isidore Ducasse's Poesies.") The few but well-selected documents at the back of the book--such as "A User's Guide to Detournement"--do an admirable job explaining Debord's poetics and placing the films in context. Unlike most cut-and-paste today, which is used to provoke laughter or ironic commentary, Debord's use of detournement sought to reveal the hierarchies of power that the spectacle conceals. "The world has already been filmed," he says, echoing Marx. "The point now is to change it." In 1975, Debord made the film Refutation of All the Judgments, Pro or Con, Thus Rendered on the Film The Society of the Spectacle the title of which is self-explanatory. In it Debord attacked critics who separated his cinematic strategy from his political project: "They are attempting to disguise as a mere disagreement between different conceptions of cinema what is actually a conflict between different conceptions of society, and an open war within the existing society." Knabb spends much of his selective bibliography in Complete Cinematic Works defending Debord's films against revisionists and deviationists of all stripes. His

sweepingly opinionated thumbnail evaluations of each book sometimes read like the list of charges in a Stalinist show trial: "totally worthless"; "careless and sloppy"; "Like most other academic studies, it scarcely mentions their revolutionary perspectives." "The situationists may not have always been right," he concludes, "but their critics are almost always wrong. Read the original texts, don't rely on commentaries by cultural and academic spectators. Despite the situationists' reputation for difficulty, they are not really all that hard to understand once you begin to experiment for yourself." This is always sound advice, although it also reveals a crucial point of the sectarian psychology at work in Debord's films and Knabb's book. From the perspective of the revolutionary narcissist, nothing can exist outside of the theory or group that bounds his or her identity--theirs is a perfection for which others can only strive. ("With due credit to all of these translators for their pioneering work," says Knabb of his competitors in the bibliography, "I believe that the above versions are superseded by the present edition.") There is something claustrophobic about the palace the Situationist International--and all such revolutionary grouplets--built for themselves. For the messengers who never leave the courtyards of theory, the world outside the palace will never be enough. Still, there is something beautiful in such palaces, which may serve as inspiration and metaphor to those who wait patiently outside. Knabb will amuse some readers and annoy others with his territorial literalism, but his translations and presentation in Complete Cinematic Works are exemplary, achieving a transparent lyricism that is often absent in other translations of situationist work. He is also right to defend Debord against those who would reduce situationism (a term Debord abhorred--hailing the acts of individual situationists rather than a petrified 'ism') to an artistic movement. In the wake of the defeat (or sublimation) of the political movements of the 1960s, for some it is tempting and even comforting to depoliticize Debord's films by focusing on the melancholy that pervades each one. Like Chris Marker, Debord's best work appears to have been catalyzed by loss the film The Society of the Spectacle closes with images of Debord's SI comrades over the subtitle, "We few, we happy few, we band of brothers," and (perhaps unintentionally) nostalgic images of May 1968. While the scripts in Complete Cinematic Works are of course incomplete without the images (which are summarized in the margins beside the text), they still stand alone as episodic essays in their own right--they are, if anything, more satisfying than Debord's books and broadsides. It is as though the medium gave Debord permission to be moved, to express sadness. "And what has become of me amid this appalling collapse-this shipwreck which I believe was necessary, and which it could even be said that I have worked for?" Debord asks in his final 1978 film, In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni.

He seems to conclude that it does not matter. If Debord cannot reach you alive with his vision of a new world, like Kafka's messenger he knows that his personal fate is mere vanity: "It thus has to be admitted that there has been neither success nor failure for Guy Debord and his extravagant pretensions." He makes of himself an example. You will find the message in yourself, or not at all.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Cineaste Publishers, Inc. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group.