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Editorial
Debord

Auteurs

Immersion/Participation

Douglas

Graham

Deserts of the Political

Marker

Akerman

Mulvey/Wollen

Baldessari

Broodthaers
Wieland

Themes Art and Cinematography Debord

Dismantling the Spectacle: The cinema of Guy Debord

Cin qua non: Guy Debord and Filmic Practice as Theory
Thomas Y. Levin
The only interesting undertaking is the liberation of everyday life, not only within a historical perspective but for us and
right away. This entails the withering away of alienated forms of communication. The cinema, too, has to be destroyed.
[1]
It is society and not technology that has made cinema what it is. The cinema could have been historical examination,
theory, essay, memories. It could have been the film which I am making at this moment. [2]
1. The Society of the Spectacle
Among the various social practices that serve Guy Debord as paradigmatic instances of what he calls the society of
spectacle, the most often cited are without doubt television and cinema. Typical in this regard is the American edition
of Debords paratactic theoretical text Society of the Spectacle (hereafter referred to as SoS), where cinematic
iconography dominates not only the front and back coverswhich incorporate a photograph of spectators at a 3-D movie
[3] but also continues throughout the volume in aseries of illustrations located within the socketed frames of a film strip
[Abb und Kommentar zum Bild! 6.2] [4] . However, although cinema is certainly a privileged figure of the society of the
spectacle, it is a mistake to assume that Debords spectacle is synonymous with the spectacularity of the filmic
medium. On the contrary, as is manifest from the very beginning of Debords text, the theoretical concept of spectacle
is used to designate a historical, socio-economic condition: The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social
relation among people, mediated by images (SoS, Thesis 37). The confusion surrounding the spectacle is to some
extent produced by a slippage in Debords employment of the term. Sometimes it does refer to the realm of
representation, as is evident in the structural analogy of the opening thesis of SoS: In societies where modern
conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was
directly lived has moved away into a representation.
However, in the next thesis, Debord differentiates between images of the world and the spectacle in

general, [which] as the concrete inversion of life, is the autonomous movement of the non-living. Although this
distinction itself merits a close and careful reading, for the present investigation it must suffice to say that the latter use
of the expression is allegorical: The spectacle, as the present social organization of the paralysis of history and memory,
of the abandonment of history built on the foundation of historical time, is the false consciousness of time (SoS, Thesis
158). The conflation in turn stems from Debords rhetorical employment of the notion of spectacles qua images or
representation to concretize his reading of spectacle as the allegory of late capital.
2. Spectacle und Cinema
A characteristic instance of this strategy can be found among the illustrations in the journal Internationale situationniste
(hereafter IS)a rich collection of montage/collage work on pieces of commodity culture, including such dtournements
[5] as recaptioned or reworked advertisements, comic strips, newspaper photographs, problematic depictions of scantily
clad women, illustrations from industrial manuals, graphs,and so forth [6] . In one of the last issues of the journal there is
a reproduction of a magazine advertisement for German Eumig home movie cameras [fig 6.3 und Bildunterschrift] whose
text reads, I LOVE M Y CAM ERA BECAUSE I LOVE TO LIVE: I record the best moments of life and revive them at will in all
their richness. Underneath the image there is a caption entitled The Domination of Life by the Spectacle that reads
as follows: This advertisement for Eumig cameras (Summer 1967) evokes very well the petrification of individual life, which
has reversed itself into a spectacular economy: the present can now be lived immediately as memory. Time is submitted
to the illusory order of a permanently available present and, through this spatialization of time, both time and life have
been lost together. [7]
Here film functions not as the cause but as an illustration, an evocationor figurealbeit a privileged onefor a
socio-political and epistemological shift that has taken place under late capitalism. An attitude toward the production of
spectacle (home movies) is taken as a symptom of a spectacular economy (the temporality of an alienated social
condition). As Debord

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puts it, years later, in a veiled reference to this advertisement: When one loves life, one goes to the movies see the
Situationists at the movies[fig. 6.3a] [8] The resistance to a facile collapsing of cinema and spectacle is imperative if
one is to understand the complex relationship between the Situationist International (SI) and the filmic medium. To the
extent that cinema is synonymous with spectaclea spatialization of time, a staging of separation, a fostering of passivity,
alienation, and so onit is simply unacceptable and must be eliminated. Along with similar forms of spectacle, Debord
insists that the cinema, too, must be destroyed [9]. The question remains, however, to what extent the condemnation
of cinema here is a critique of the politics of the apparatus analogous to arguments put forth by M artin Heidegger an
later by Jean-Louis Baudry and Jean-Louis Comolli regarding the objectification inherent in the very structure of
representation. [10] For it might be that what is at issue here is not the cinema as such, but rather a historically specific
set of cinematic practices, a certain cinemaclassic, commercial, industrialized, narrativized, and so forth.As Debord
notes: It is society and not technology that has made cinema what it is. The cinema could have been historical
examination, theory, essay, memories. [11] This leaves open the possibility of an alternative sort of cinematic activity
incompatible with the economy of spectacle, a nonspectacular, antispectacular, or other-than-spectacular cinema. Such
a realm of possibility is the precondition of what one might call Situationist Cinema.
3. The Situationist International and the artistic Avant-Garde
The interest in film on the part of the SI must be understood in light of the significance in its genealogy of the artistic
avant-garde: an important dimension of what could be called the Situationist Project involved the production of (art)
works. It was essential, however, that such works be critiques of the current historical moment and contain their own
negationthat is, they should be in a sense antiworks. As Raoul Vaneigem phrased it in a statement put forth at the fifth
SI conference in Gteborg, Sweden (August 1961): It is a question not of elaborating the spectacle of refusal, but rather
of refusing the spectacle. In order for their elaboration to be artistic in the new

and authentic sense defined by the SI, the elements of the destruction of the spectacle must precisely cease to be
works of art. There is no such thing as situationism or a situationist work of art nor for that matter a spectacular
situationist. [12] Indeed, the conference members subsequently approved a suggestion by Attila Kotnyi to call the
products of such aesthetic activity on the part of the SI anti-Situationist given that truly Situationist conditions had yet
to be realized. Similarly, Debord insistsin a formulation astonishingly reminiscent of Adornos Aesthetic Theorythat
only the real negation of culture can preserve its meaning. It can no longer be cultural. Thus it is what in some way
remains at the level of culture, but with a completely different meaning [13] . The contradictions and dangers of a
radically negative cultural critique that nevertheless insists on the production of (anti)art objects were a topic of
continuing polemical debate within the ranks of the SI. Yet they were very aware of what they themselves described as
the [] ambiguous and dangerous policy whose risks the SI had to run by consenting to act in culture while being
against theentire present organization of this culture and even against all culture as a separate sphere. Nor is this most
intransigent oppositional attitude and program any less ambiguous and dangerous because it nevertheless has to coexist
with the present order. [14] This strategic concession is perhaps nowhere more evident than in the SIs relationship to
that most compromised medium, the cinema.
4. The Situationistist International and the Cinema
The first official articulation of the SI position on cinema occurs in a subsection of one of the first articles in the first
issue of IS in 1958 entitled, indicatively, For and Against the Cinema [15] Cinema is the central art of our society, the
editorial begins, and the formal and anecdotal expression in the cinema as well as it material infrastructure are the best
representation of an epoch of anarchically juxtaposed inventions (not articulated but simply combined). [16] But rather
than making use of the extraordinary capacities opened up by its technical innovations, so the argument continues, the
cinema offers a passive substitute to unitary artistic activity, an exponential

increase in the reactionary power of nonparticipatory spectacle. The text makes it clear, however, that this could be
otherwise: [] those that want to construct this [new] world must simultaneously fight the tendency of cinema to
constitute the anti-construction of situations (the construction of a slave atmosphere, the succession of the cathedrals)
while recognizing the significance of the new technological developments (stereo sound, odorama) which are valuable in
and of themselves. [17]
The opposite of a knee-jerk rejection of cinematic technology as such, the editorial attributes the reactionary state
of the medium (the absence of avant-garde developments manifest in the plastic arts and in literaturesee The Two
Avant Gardes by Peter Wollen) to economic and ideological constraints, but also to the social importance of the
medium. It is this importance, in turn, that makes it necessary that the medium remain in the control of the hegemonic
class. Instead of abandoning film as hopelessly contaminated, the article closes instead with a call for its appropriation.
Cinema is likened to architecture (another major SI concern) in terms of its significancewithin daily life, the difficulties
facing any attempt at its renovation, and the imperative for just such a transformation. This leads to the following
conclusion: One must therefore struggle to appropriate a truly experimental sector within the cinema. We can envisage
two distinct ways of using cinema: first, its employment as a form of propaganda in the pre-Situationist transition period;
then its direct employment as a constitutive element of an actual situation. [18] One could read this as the first, rough
outline of a manifesto for an (anti) Situationist film practice.
To gain a more detailed understanding of the motivations behind the SI espousal of film as a revolutionary weapon,
one must examine remarks scattered throughout their publications. In one of the more programmatic of these
statements, the concluding section of the article The Situationists and the New Forms of Action against Politics and
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Art, Ren Vinet argues that the SI must make use of the cinemathe newest and without doubt most useful means of
expression of our epochas a didactic, analytic, and critical tool: Among other possibilities,

the cinema lends itself particularly well to studying the present as an historical problem, to dismantling processes of
reification. Historical reality can, of course, be apprehended, known and filmed only in the course of a complicated
process of mediations [] This mediation would be difficult if the empirical existence of facts themselves was not already
a mediated existence, which only takes on an appearance of immediateness because of and to the extent that, on the
one hand, consciousness of the mediation is lacking and, on the other hand, the facts have been uprooted from the
network of their determinations, placed in an artificial isolation and poorly linked together again by the montage of
classical cinema. It is precisely this mediation, which has been lacking, and inevitably so, in pre- Situationist cinema,
which has limited itself to so called objective forms or representation of politico-moral concepts, whenever it has not
been a merely academic type of narrative with all its hypocrisies. [19]
5. The Visual-acoustic dtournement
Vinets conception of an SI film practice enlists thespecific capacities of the medium (above all, photographic
documentation, voice-over, and analytic montage) to expose the always already mediated status of the seemingly
immediate and natural world constructed in classical, or pre-Situationist, cinema. The present is studied as a historical
problem, history is recast as a problem of representation, and, above all, the practice of representation itself is
continuously subjected to critical interrogation. This staging of mediation takes the form of a work on other mediations,
primarily by means of cinemas elective affinity to the important strategy of citation and reinscription referred to as
dtournement. Indeed, in a programmatic essay, the editorial collective of IS goes so far as to say that the signature of
the movement, the trace of its presence and its contestation in contemporary cultural realityis first and foremost the
employment of dtournement. [20]
It is in this capacity for visual-acoustic dtournement that cinema finds its single most important justification as an
instrument of SI activity. As Debord and Gil J Wolman confirm in their users guide to this hallmark SI activity, among the
various

vehicles for dtournement such as posters, records, radio broadcasts, and comic strips, none lends itself better than
cinema: It is obviously in the framework of the cinema that dtournement can attain its greatest efficacity, and
undoubtedly, for those concerned with this aspect, its greatest beauty. [21] As will become evident below, such
dtournement can take a number of forms. On the one hand, in he double movement of this powerful cultural weapon
the context and meaning of both insignificant phenomena (newspaper clippings, advertisements, quotidian phrases) and
significant elements (citations from M arx or Saint-Just, a sequence from an Eisenstein film) can be displaced and
estranged before being subsequently reinscribed and transformed through radical juxtaposition.
On the other hand, entire films can be detourned: Debord and Wolman propose Birth of a Nation, for example,
because of its combination of formal innovations unprecedented in the history of cinema with a racist plot that is utterly
intolerable. Rather than censoring it, they suggest, it would be better to detourn it as a whole, without necessarily even
altering the montage, by adding a sound trackthat made a powerful denunciation of the horrors of imperialist war and of
the activities of the Ku Klux Klan than, they point out, continue in the United States to this very day. [22] Dtournement
could also be used, they go on to say, for the filmic rewriting of history and in order to illustrate theoretical claims. [23]
In an early text there is also an amusing suggestion as to how one can recuperate hopelessly commercial films through
the use of dtournement as a mode of spectatorship. At one point during the itinerary of a derive, one should stop into
a movie theatre for slightly less than an hour and interpret the currently playing adventure film as follows: [] let the
heros be some more or less historical people who are close to us, connect the events the inept scenario to the real
reasons which we understand are behind the actions, and connect them also to the events of the current week. Here
you have an acceptable collective distraction[] [24]
6. Filmic Practice
Besides dtournement, however, there are a number of other arguments for the importance of the cinema

within the corpus of SI writings. Vinet insists that the SI must require each of its members to be just as capable of
making a film as writing an article because film is just as powerful and accessible a polemical medium as articles, books,
leaflets, or posters. M oreover, he argues, such cinematic experience would in turn intensify the written articulation of
the same problems. [25] In an untranslated text entitled For the Debate on Orientation, Spring 1970: A Note on the First
Series of Texts, Debord makes a similar argument, convinced that the production of films is important not only for
rhetorical but also for financial reasons. [26] Under the heading Le cinma, the last of a series of M odest
Propositions, he writes: Each film could give one or two Situationists working as assistants the opportunity to master
their own style in this language; and the inevitable success of our works would also provide the economic base for the
future production of these comrades. The expansion of our audience is of decisive importance. [27] For these and
other reasons Debord claims that of the many young filmmakers in various countries attempting to use film as instruments
of revolutionary critique, at present:Only the positions and methods of the Situationists (as formulated in the theses by
Ren Vinet in our previous issue) have direct access to a contemporary revolutionary usage of the cinemaalthough
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political and economic conditions can of course still pose problems. [28] The claim is fleshed out n a series of LI and SI
film reviews of movies by Julien Duvivier, the cinematographic ruin [29] (an indignant critique of M arianne de ma
jeunesse), Federico Fellini (a pan of La Strada), Agns Varda (La pointe courte faulted for its vacuous politics), Alain
Resnais (praised for Hiroshima mon amour then lambasted for Lanne dernire M arienbad), Norman M cLaren
(Blinkity Blank accused of plagiarizing the Lettrist cinema), and Jean-Luc-Godard, the dumbest of the pro-Chinese
Swiss (attacked in a number of articles for his cinematic politics, especially in A bout de souffl and Le gai savoir).
[30] The greatest insight into the contemporary revolutionary usage of the cinema by the SI, however, is to be had
from the films they themselvesthat is, first and foremost Guy Debordmade. Je veux un cin qua non! [31]

7. Guy Debord as a filmmaker

Yes. Guy Debord, theorist and critic of the spectacle par excellence, wasas he himself often pointed outa filmmaker.
[32] It is a most curious and rather ignored fact that besides writing, organizing and editing the IS, adjudicating schisms,
and denouncing traitors and fools, Debord also directed no less than six 35mm black and white sound films over a period
of twenty-six years from 1952 to 1978 and had plans for numerous others as well. [33] If it seems surprising, it is no
accident: these films were attended by only a very few in Paris, have rarely been seen outside France, have never been
screened in the US, and have provoked almost no critical literature whatsoever beside a number of more or less
incidental newspaper reviews. [34] To some extent this is due to the fact that the films are hard to watch (for reasons
that will become clearer below). But until recently, at least, the films could be seen. Indeed, Debords patron and friend
Grard Lebovicia French film producer whom he had met in 1971not only supported Debords work by financing what
was effectively a Situationist press, Editions Champ Libre (now called Editions Grard Lebovici), he also bought acinema
the Studio Cujas in Saint-Germain-des- Prsthat projected Debords complete cinematographic production on a
continuous and exclusive basis. This lasted only through 1984, however, when following the mysterious and still unsolved
murder of Lebovici in a parking garage off the Champs Elyses, Debord suddenly withdrew his films in a gesture of protest
and mourning classically Situationist in its decisiveness. Incensed by the murder of his friend and by the manner in which
the press reported it, he then wrote Considrations sur lassassinat de Grard Lebovici (Reflections on the assassination
of Grard Lebovici) in which he announced that the outrageous manner in which the newspapers have discussed his
assassination has led me to decide that none of my films will ever be shown again in France. This absence will be the most
fitting homage. [35] Today all efforts to view the films in Paris prove futile: the distributor acknowledges that he has the
prints but requires Debords permission to screen them and this permission, for reasons that must be respected, is not
to be had. [36] While Debords films are thus now strictly speaking invisible, they fortunately are not entirely

unavailable since Debord published detailed scenarios of his film works in both journals and books on a number of
occasions. The first three scenarios appeared in a volume entitled (indicatively) Contre le cinema (Against the cinema)
[fig. 6.4] published by the Scandinavian Institute for Comparative Vandalism in 1964, [37] and in 1978 the scenarios of all six
of Debords films were made available in the collection Oeuvres cinmatographiques completes, 19521978 (Complete
cinematographic works). [38] With only one exception, which will be articulated below, the study of Debords antispectacular cinema is forced to take recourse to the only available traces, the appropriately nonspectacular textual
scenarios.
8. Postface: Debord and the Dispositifs of Cinema
Debords 1984 withdrawal of his films of course poses the question as to why his outrage at the murder of Lebovici would
be best served by retracting them, by making them unavailable in France? Perhaps it was just a practical matterDebord
recognizing that without Lebovicis funding, his own private cinema (in fact nothing less than the ultimate cinematic
dispositif,a sort of cin-Bayreuth St. Germain auteur palace) might have to close, leaving him with effectively no place to
show the films anyway, so rather than simply have their unavailability imposed by banal material conditions, he would take
the initiative and make their very public withdrawal from (an already very limited) public circulation an ethical gesture.
Irrespective of intention, it certainly had the effect of generating a substantial aura around the films: no better way to
render films mythical than to ostentatiously withhold them. One could also argue, however, that the elimination of the
possibility of witnessing the films as phenomenal events served effectively to reduce a certain auratic effect that they
undoubtedly had when one could still see them. Since Debord had published the screenplays a few years earlier,
together with a very small number of images, in a 1978 volume entitled Ouevres cinematographiques completes, 19521978,
the removal of their spectacular dimension, of the films as a celluloid record of polymorphous dtournements, was a way
to insist on their fundamentally textual status, by eliminating even the vestigial but undoubtedly powerful acoustic aura
of Debord reading

his own words in the voice-over.

These were some of the questions that concerned me when I started working on Debords films in the late 1980s
and which led me to write to Debord via his publisher to inquire whether as a young American scholar I might be allowed
to see the films. While I respected his ban on their screening in France, surely this would not preclude (so I wrote to
him) an interested party such as myself showing them outside France say, in Germany? Debords responseand to my
astonishment I actually did get a response which was the beginning of a long correspondence and, later, friendshipwas
that his insistence on France had been a function of his particular annoyance with the response of the French press:
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Naturally, he wrote in his letter of M ay 29, 1987, I should have said: never again anywhere. This ban would, of course,
only be in effect as long as he was still alive, since one could hardly reproach him for what transpired after he was no
longer around. That was in the late 1980sand while I did ultimately get to see the films, albeit on video, at Debords
summer residence in Champot in the haute Loire, it was not until years later that I realized justhow prophetic that letter
was.
On November 30, 1994, in that same complex where I had enjoyed the privilege of being Debords guest and where I
had been given full access to the films and had spent many an evening discussing (and above all drinking) till late into the
night, Guy Debord took his life. Not even five weeks after his death, on January 9, 1995 Canal +, the French commercial
television station, broadcast a rather remarkable program: a final made-for-TV work called Guy Debord: Son Art et Son
Temps which Debord had produced together with a young director Brigitte Cornand, and following this, both the 1973
film La Socit du Spectacle and the 1975 follow-up Rfutations. In other words, Debords films were suddenly not
only shown, but shown on television (and then on CANAL +, perhaps the most commercial of French channels) with the
result that they suddenly became widely available as video copies. What was previously radically inaccessible was now
massively available, disseminatable, analyzablewhich is to say, the films suddenly began to operate in a post-cinematic
dispositif.
The fact that Debords final mediatic intervention

was a televisual one raises the important questionthe detailed treatment of which I cannot undertake hereas to how
all his films, and especially the later ones, must be understood at some level in terms of their agonistic relationship to
television, the mourning of the cine-fils at the (first) death of cinema in the age of televisuality, which is to say the end
of what Raymond Bellour has so aptly called the magical parenthesis of a specific classical cinematic dispositif. The
various new instances of televisual dispositifs catalogued in some of the later Debord filmsin the metro, in the police
traffic control centerstand in dramatic tension with the cinephilic catalogue, listed in the opening credits, of films
which are then citedoften at some lengthlater on: John Ford, Nicholas Ray, Josef von Sternberg, Raoul Walsh, Orson
Welles, Sam Woodall of them classics of an economy of the image which, as such, was already then becoming
increasingly anachronistic in the wake of its displacement by the omnipresence of the televisual and its particular
syntactic and semantic logics. In a sense one could say that this anachronism was already implicit in the meta-cinematic
gesture,which was the practice of cin-detournement, the citation of images from the history of cinema. It could also
explain why in his televisual testament Debord chose to present the totality of his cinematic ouevre simply in terms of
the basic formal gesture of Hurlements (see the Hurlements en faveur de Sade)because it is here, in the anti-image
politics of his Lettrist success de scandal that the essentially cinematic character of his fascination (literally, the black
and white of the celluloid strip) is manifest as such.
Given Debords deep suspicion of the televisual, why then would his films suddenly reappear after his death on TV? In
his letter to me in 1987 he had explained that one of the reasons why he felt he could no longer risk having his films in
circulation was due to structural changes in the film industry having to do with the pressures of television. Unwilling to
risk having his films simply inserted into the banalizing continuum of what Raymond Williams called the televisual flow, by
withdrawing his films he effectively guaranteed for himself the ability to control their rigorous refusal of the televisual
dispositif, at least until that time when

he could both provide them with the necessary frame (his first and only work for TV) and, as he had effectively told me
in our correspondence in 1987, when he was no longer alive. In so doing, i.e. in insisting on his own death as a
precondition for the work of the cin-fils to appear in the televisual dispositif that was effectively synonymous with at
least one of the deaths of cinema, Debord revealed the history of his engagement with cinema as a critical performative
reflection on the cultural politics of the cinema across the complex history (before, with and after) of its multiple
dispositifs.

[1] Ken Knabb, ed. and tr ans., Situationist Inter national Anthology, Ber keley: Bur eau of Public Secr ets, 1981, p. 33. (Wher e published
tr anslations ar e employed within the body of the text, the or iginal language citations ar e pr ovided following the tr anslated r efer ence. Wher e no
English-language-sour ce is given, the tr anslation is mine.) Guy Debor d, Sur le passage de quelques per sones tr aver s une assez cour te unite de
temps, in Oeuvr es cinmatogr aphiques compltes, 19521978, Par is: Editions Champ Libr e, 1978, p.31.
[2] Guy Debor d, In Gir um Imus Nocte et Consumimur Igni, in Oeuvr es cinmatogr aphiques compltes, 19521978, Par is: Editions Champ Libr e,
1978, pp. 207208.
[3] This pictur e, taken by J.R. Eyer man, has since become a ver itable clich not only for the alienation of late consumer cultur e but also for the
ten year s following Wor ld War II: it appear s, for example, on T-Shir ts, bags, and buttons as well as on the cover of the br ochur e that
accompanied an exhibition of photogr aphs fr om Life magazine held at the Inter national Center of Photogr aphy (New Yor k) and entitled: The
Second Decade, 1946-1955. Few r ealize, however , that this depiction of the latest stage in the dr ive towar ds cinematic ver isimilitude exists in at
least two ver sions: the one, employed for the cover of the Society of the Spectacle (Detr oit, Black & Red, 1970, r epr . 1977 and 1983), depicts its

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elegantly attir ed audience in a vir tually tr ance-like state of absor ption, their faces gr im, their lips pur sed, in the other shot of the same
audience, however , the 3-D spectator s ar e laughing, their expr essions of hilar ity conveying the pleasur e of an upr oar ious, active spectator ship.
[4] It is entir ely appr opr iate that these illustr ations appear only in the unauthor ized tr anslation of Society of the Spectacle published in Amer ica,
the countr y in many ways par adigmatic for the cultur e of consumption and alienation that is the focus of the study. In the fir st edition of La
societ du spectacle (Par is: Buchet-Chastel 1967, the pir ate Ger man edition of Die Gesellschaft des Spektakels (Dsseldor f, Pr ojektgr uppe
Gegengesellschaft, 1971), and the author ized [Ger man] tr anslation by Jean-Jacques Raspaud (Hambur g, Edition Nautilus, 1978) ther e ar e no
illustr ations whatsoever . Only the cur r ent Fr ench r epr int (Par is: Editions Champ Libr e, 1971) has an image on its cover , a r epr oduction of a tur nof-thecentur y wor ld map whose color s indicate the cur r ent and pr ojected state of global commer cial development. Debor ds account of the
choice of this map can be found in his small book, Considr ations sur lassassinat de Gr ar d Lebovici, Par is: Editions Gr ar d Lebovici, 1985,
pp.3334.
[5] The fir st 34 theses of La socite du spectacle wer e fir st published under the title La separ ation acheve in the SI jour nal Inter nationale
situationniste 11 (October 1967), pp.4348 (her eafter IS).
[6] The tr anslation of dtour nement, one of the key ter ms of Situationist aesthetic pr actice, poses a number of pr oblems. Its r endition as
diver sion in the Amer ican edition of Society of Spectacle (see, for example, Thesis 208) is unacceptable because it is bur dened with the
connotation of distr action. In Fr ench, dtour nementdeflection, tur ning in a differ ent dir ection- is also employed to signal detour s and to
r efer to embezzlement, swindle, abduction, and hijacking. The cr iminal and violent quality of the latter four connotations ar e closer to the SI
pr actice of illicitly appr opr iating the pr oducts of cultur e and abducting or hijacking them to other destinations. Never theless, these ter ms ar e
also too mar ked to be employed. Instead, I have followed the pr actice adopted by Ken Knabb, ed. and tr ans., Situationist Inter national Anthology,
Ber keley: Bur eau of Public Secr ets, 1981 (cf his footnote on this subject on p. 371) and have simply anglicized the ter m.
[7] This visual mater ial, an impor tant supplement to the ar ticles in the jour nal, is unfor tunately not available to the English r eader since, unlike the
two-volume Ger man edition of the jour nal, Situationistische Inter nationale (Hambur g: Edition Nautilus, 1977), which r etains the images and even
the layout of the or iginal Fr ench ver sion, the selections published in tr anslation in the Knabb anthology have no illustr ations
[8] IS 11 (October 1967), p.57; fir st emphasis in tr anslation is mine.
[9] Guy Debor d, In Gir um Imus Nocte et Consumimur Igni, in Oeuvr es cinmatogr aphiques compltes, 19521978, Par is: Editions Champ Libr e,
1978, p.190.
[10] Ken Knabb, ed. and tr ans., Situationist Inter national Anthology, Ber keley: Bur eau of Public Secr ets, 1981, p.33; cf. the epigr aph that opens
this essay.
[11] Mar tin Heidegger , Die Zeit des Weltbildes in Holzwege, ed. Fr iedr ich-Wilhelm von Her r mann (Fr ankfur t/M., 1977 [1938]), pp.73110;
tr anslated as The Age of the Wor ld Pictur e,in Heidegger , The Question Concer ning Technology and Other Essays, tr ans. William Lowitt, New
Yor k, 1977, pp.115154, esp. pp.128130; Jean-Louis Baudr y, Leffet cinema, Par is, 1978, and The Appar atus Metaphysical Appr oaches to the
Impr ession of Reality in the Cinema,in Phil Rosen, ed., Nar r ative, Appar atus, Ideology: A Film Theor y Reader , New Yor k, 1986, pp.299318;
Jean-Louis Comolli, Machines of V isible in Ter esa de Laur etis and Stephen Heath, eds., The Cinematic Appar atus, New Yor k, 1980, pp.121142.
[12] Guy Debor d, In Gir um Imus Nocte et Consumimur Igni, in Oeuvr es cinmatogr aphiques compltes, 19521978, Par is: Editions Champ Libr e,
1978, pp.207208; cf. the second epigr aph that opens this essay.
[13] Ken Knabb, ed. and tr ans., Situationist Inter national Anthology, Ber keley: Bur eau of Public Secr ets, 1981, p.88; La cinquime confer ence
de lI.S. Gtebor g,IS 7 (Apr il 1962), pp.2627. Compar e also Le sens du dper issement de lar t,IS 3 (December 1959), pp.4 and 7. 14
Debor d, Society of the Spectacle, Thesis 210.
[14] Guy Debor d, Society of the Spectacle, Thesis 210.
[15] Ken Knabb, ed. and tr ans., Situationist Inter national Anthology, Ber keley: Bur eau of Public Secr ets, 1981, p.111, tr anslation modified; L
opr ation contr esituationniste dans diver s pays,IS 8 (Januar y 1963), p.24.
[16] Avec et contr e le cinema,IS 1 (June 1958), pp.89.
[17] Avec et contr e le cinema,IS 1 (June 1958), p.8.
[18] Avec et contr e le cinema,IS 1 (June 1958), p.9.
[19] Avec et contr e le cinema,IS 1 (June 1958), p.9.
[20] Ken Knabb, ed. and tr ans., Situationist Inter national Anthology, Ber keley: Bur eau of Public Secr ets, 1981, p.215; Ren V inet, Les
situationistes et les nouvelles for mes daction contr e la politique et lar t,IS 11 (October 1967), p.35.
[21] Ken Knabb, ed. and tr ans., Situationist Inter national Anthology, Ber keley: Bur eau of Public Secr ets, 1981, pp.5556, Le dtour nement
comme negation et comme pr elude,IS 3 (December 1959), p.11.
[22] Guy Debor d and Gil J Wolman, Instr uctions for the Use of Detour nement,in Ken Knabb, ed. and tr ans., Situationist Inter national Anthology,
Ber keley: Bur eau of Public Secr ets, 1981, p.12 (tr anslation of title modified); Mode demploi du dtour nement,in Les lvr es nues 8 (May 1956),
6. For the epistemological genealogy of the SI it is impor tant to note that the author s of this theor etically centr al ar ticle wer e listed on the cover
of Les lvr es nues as Ar agon and Andr Br eton! Both the text and the cover ar e r epr inted in the ver y useful collection of r epr ints of r ar e
or iginal mater ials edited by Gr ar d Ber r eby, Documents r elatifs la fondation de lInter nationale situationniste, Par is, 1985, pp.301309.
Another impor tant aesthetic affinity is evident fr om the publication of a Ger man tr anslation of this essayGebr auchs-anweisung fr die
Entwendungin a collection of the poetr y of Lautr amont [Isidor e Ducasse], Posie, Hambur g, 1979.
[23] Ken Knabb, ed. and tr ans., Situationist Inter national Anthology, Ber keley: Bur eau of Public Secr ets, 1981, p.12; Gr ar d Ber r eby, Documents
r elatifs la fondation de lInter nationale situationniste, Par is, 1985, p.306.
[24] La dialectique peut-elle casser des br iques is an amusing example for the use of dtour nement to r e-wr ite or r efunction to use a
r endition of Br echts ter m Umfunktionier ung that is most appr opr iate her ean other wise highly compr omised pr oduct of the cultur e industr y.
This full-length 35 mm color film by Doo Kwang Gee is a tr ansfor mation by Ger ar d Cohen and Ren V inet of a classic Hong Kong Kung-fu film
(or iginally titled The Cr ush) into a didactic suspense nar r ative illustr ating the conflict between the pr oletar iat and the bur eaucr ats! Pr oduced
in 1973 by LOiseau de Miner ve,the moviewhich intr oduces itself as the fir st entir ely detour ned film in the histor y of cinemaeffects this

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metamor phosis simply by supplying a new synchr onized sound tr ack. As it is (cur iously) par t of the per manent collection of the ultr a-hightech
V idothque de Par is, it can be scr eened upon demand. Another Chinese film detour ned by Inez Tan and Ren V inet thr ough the use of Fr ench
subtitles, Du sang chez les Taoists (1971; color , 80 min.), seems to be cur r ently unavailable. V er y little infor mation is available concer ning the
thr ee fur ther films that V inet ad his collabor ator s ar e supposed to have detour ned: Une petite culotte pour let, Une soutanne na pas de
br aguette, and Lauber gine est far cie.
[25] Panor ama intelligent de lavant-gar de la fin de 1955, Potlatch 24 (November 1955); all issues of the jour nal have been r epr inted in a
single volume with an intr oduction by Guy Debor d, Potlatch, 19541957, Par is: Editions Gr ar d Lebovici, 1985, p.186; the jour nal can also be
found in Gr ar d Ber r eby, Documents r elatifs la fondation de lInter nationale situationniste, Par is, 1985, pp.161261, p.231.
[26] Ren V inet, The Situationists and the New For ms of Action Against Politics and Ar t,in Ken Knabb, ed. and tr ans., Situationist Inter national
Anthology, Ber keley: Bur eau of Public Secr ets, 1981, pp.215216; Les situationistes et les nouvelles for mes daction contr e la politique et l
ar t,IS 11 (October 1967), 35.
[27] Guy Debor d, Pour le debat dor ientation du pr intemps 1970: Note sur la pr emir e ser ie de textes,in his Textes r ar es: 1957-1970, Par is:
n., 1981, pp.3436.
[28] Chaque film pour r ait donner un ou deux situs tr availlant comme assistants loccasion the matr iser leur pr opr e style dans ce language; et l
immanquable succs de nos uvr es appor ter ait aussi la base conomique de la pr oduction futur e de ces camar ades. Llar gissement de notr e
audience ser ait dcisif (Textes r ar es: 1957-1970, Par is: n., 1981, p.36).
[29] Guy Debor d Cinema and Revolution,in Ken Knabb, ed. and tr ans., Situationist Inter national Anthology, Ber keley: Bur eau of Public Secr ets,
1981, pp.297298 (tr anslation modified); Le cinema et la r evolution,IS 12 (September 1969), 105.
[30] This descr iption as well as the label for Godar d fur ther on stem fr om the List of Insulted Names included in the ver y useful index volume by
Jean-Jacques Raspaud and Jean-Pier r e V oyer , LInter nationale situationniste: Chr onologie/Bibliogr aphie/Pr otagonistes (Par is: Editions Champ
Libr e, 1972), 25-65.
[31] The following chr onological list offer s a pr eliminar y bibliogr aphy of the film r eviews and/or texts on film published in the jour nals of the
Lettr ist and Situationist Inter nationals. [Zu Bibliogr afie: Wher e no author is listed the texts appear ed unsigned; lead ar ticles ar e indicated as
such; data r egar ding r epr ints and shor t summar ies of content follow the main entr y: Le gr an ge du cinema: Le 8e festival de Cannes ser a
mauvais,Potlach 19 (lead ar ticle; Apr il 1955); Potlach, 1954-1957, 124-25; also in Gr ar d Ber r eby, Documents r elatifs la fondation de l
Inter nationale situationniste, Par is, 1985, p.205 Encor e la jeunnesse pour r ie,Potlach 19 (Apr il 1955); Potlach, 1954-1957, 126-27 also in Gr ar d
Ber r eby, Documents r elatifs la fondation de lInter nationale situationniste, Par is, 1985, pp.205206. Review of Mar ianne de ma jeunesse (Julien
Duvivier , 1955) Le gr and chemin qui mne a Rome,Potlach 21 (lead ar ticle; June 1955); Potlach, 1954-1957, 142-42; also in Gr ar d Ber r eby,
Documents r elatifs la fondation de lInter nationale situationniste, Par is, 1985, p.213. Review of La Str ada (Feder ico Fellini, 1954) La Bible est
le seul scnar iste qui ne doive pas Cecil B. de Mille, Potlach 21 (June 1955); Potlach, 1954- 1957, 147; Gr ar d Ber r eby, Documents r elatifs la
fondation de lInter nationale situationniste, Par is, 1985, p.215. Review of Blinkity Black [sic] (Nor man McLar en, 1955) [Cor r ect title is Blinkity
Blank] Au vestair e,Potlach 25 (lead ar ticle; Januar y 1956); Potlach, 1954-1957, 191-95; also in Gr ar d Ber r eby, Documents r elatifs la
fondation de lInter nationale situationniste, Par is, 1985, pp.233234. Review of La pointe cour te (Agns V ar da, 1956). Le cinma apr s Alain
Resnais,IS 3 (December 1959), 8-10. Review of Hir oshima mon amour (Alain Resnais, 1959) Michle Ber nstein, Sunset Boulevar d,IS 7 (Apr il
1962), 42-46. Review of Lanne der nir e Mar ienbad (Alain Resnais, 1961) G.E. Debor d, Pour un jugement r volutionnair e de lar t,Notes
cr itiques: Bulletin de r echer ch et dor ientation r volutionnair e 3 (Bor deaux) (2 tr imestr e 1962); r epr inted in Debor d, Textes r ar es, 13-17; for
a tr anslation, see Ken Knabb, ed. and tr ans., Situationist Inter national Anthology, Ber keley: Bur eau of Public Secr ets, 1981, pp.31014. Debor ds
text was a position paper intended as the basis for a discussion between the SI and the gr opu Pouvoir Ouvr ier that ultimately did not take place.
It was a r esponse to a r eview of Godar ds A bout de souffl by S. Chatel published in Socialisme ou bar bar ie 6 (December 1960-Febr uar y 1961),
104-7. LI.S. vous lavait bien dit! IS 9 (August 1964), 23. A ser ies of citations about Alain Resnais. Le r le de Godar d,IS 10 (Mar ch 1966), 5859; for a tr anslation, see Ken Knabb, ed. and tr ans., Situationist Inter national Anthology, Ber keley: Bur eau of Public Secr ets, 1981, pp.17576.
On the films of Jean-Luc Godar d. Le cinma et la r evolution,IS 12 (September 1969), 104-5; for a tr anslation, see Ken Knabb, ed. and tr ans.,
Situationist Inter national Anthology, Ber keley: Bur eau of Public Secr ets, 1981, pp.29798. Review of Le gai savoir (Jean-Luc Godar d, 1968)
[32] Fr anois Dufr ne, Tambour s du jugement pr emier , Ion 1 (Apr il 1952), Numr o spcial sur le cinma, Mar c-Gilber t Guillaumin [Mar c, O],
Gener al Editor , p.195 (footnote 1).
[33] Beneath a full page photogr aph of Debor d on the second page of the catalogue Destr uktion af RSG-6: En kollektvi manifestation af
Situationistisk Inter nationale (Odense, Denmar k; Galer ie EXI, 1963), for example, one r eads the following caption: GUY DEBORD: filmstr uktr og
r edaktr film dir ector and editor cinaste et dir ecteur de r evue, c/o Inter nationale Situationniste, B.P. 75-06 Par is. Similar ly, the
descr iption of the author of La societ du spectacle on the back cover of the Editions Champ Libr e r epr int (Par is, 1971) begins: Se disant
cinaste (Calls himself a filmmaker ).
[34] Debor d at var ious times announced films that he was planning or hoping to make. These include the following four titles of films pr vus that
ar e listed on the back cover of Contr e le cinma (see note 38 below), fr amed by the two lines Pr ochainement sur les cr ans Des films cr its et
r aliss par Guy Debor d (Coming soon to the scr een Films wr itten and dir ected by Guy Debor d): Por tr ait dIvan Chtcheglov, Les aspects
ludiques manifestes et latents dans la fr onde, Eloge de ce que nous avons aim dans les images dune poque, and Pr face une nouvelle thor ie
du mouvement r volutionnair e. Elsewher e Debor d states that he wanted to make a film of Raoul V aneigems Tr ait de savoir -vivr e l usage des
jeunes gener ations. Par is: Gallimar d, 1967, r epr . 1981, tr anslated as The Revolution of Ever yday Life, London: Pr actical Par adise Publications,
1975; see Pour le dbat dor ientation du pr intemps 1970: Note sur la pr emir e ser ie de textes,in Debor d, Textes r ar es: 1957-1970, Par is: n.,
1981, p.36.
[35] One of the few exceptions is an intelligent ar ticle in a r ather obscur e Austr ian ar t jour nal by Rober to Ohr t, Wr e ich nicht Alexander , wr e
ich ger n Diogenes, Dur ch 3/4 (November 1987), pp.2748, tr anslated by Ian Br unskill in the same issue as If I Wasnt Alexander , I Would Like to
Be Diogenes,161-75. Ohr t has also published an inter esting piece on the SPUR gr oup and the Ger man side of the SI stor y: Die Spur von der Kunst
zur Situationistischen Inter nationale,in V eit Loer s, ed., Gr uppe SPUR, 19581965, Regensbur g: Stdtische Galer ie, 1986, pp.3344.
[36] Guy Debor d, Considr ations sur lassassinat, p.48. Debor ds most r ecent book, Commentair es sur la societ du spectacle, Par is: Editions
Gr ar d Lebovici, 1988, is also dedicated to Lebovici: la mmoir e de Gr ar d Lebovici, assassin a Par is, le 5 mar s 1984, dans un guet-apens
r est mystr ieux.
[37] In r esponse to a quer y as to whether the films could ever be seen outside Fr ance, Debor d explained to me in a letter of 29 May 1987 that his
emphasis on Fr ance was in r esponse to the par ticular injustice per petr ated by the Fr ench pr ess. Natur ally I should have said: never again
anywher e. In the r emainder of the missive Debor d goes on to ar ticulate why, in light of the r ecent r estr uctur ation of the film industr y, he was
concer ned about the manner in which his films might be exploited and thus decided to disavow in advance any and all scr eenings of his wor k.

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However , as he notes in conclusion: It goes without saying that I do not disavow a single wor d or even a single image of my entir e cinematogr aphic
wor k.
[38] Guy Debor d, Contr e le cinma (Aar hus, Denmar k: LInstitut scandinave de vandalisme compar /Bibliothque dAlexandr ie, 1964). This
volume, now out of pr int, includes the complete scenar ios and selected images fr om Debor ds fir st thr ee films (Hur lements en faveur de Sade,
Sur le passage de quelques per sonnes tr aver s une assez cour te unite de temps, and Cr itique de la spar ation) along with a pr efator y essay
by Asger Jor n entitled Guy Debor d et le pr oblme du maudit (3-8). The Ger man tr anslation by Pier r e Gallissair es and Hanna Mittelstdt
entitled Gegen den Film: Filmskr ipte, Hambur g: Edition Nautilus, 1978, dr ops thr ee of the four explanator y notes that follow the scenar io of
Hur lements, but pr ovides the full text of Gr ande fte de la nuit under the title Eine gr oe Nachtfete.

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