Situating Cinema: The film work of Guy Debord

An article on Guy Debord and the Situationists' relationship with film, originally published in FILMWAVES in 2005.

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‘The Avant-garde is Undesirable’, proclaimed the Situationist International in 1961. ‘The aesthetic debris of the avant-garde (pictures, film, poetry, etc.) have become both desirable and ineffectual. What is undesirable is the complete reorganization of the condition of life such that the basis of society is altered’. The Situationists reflected the widespread disillusion with Modernism among post-war thinkers; their critique of the avant-garde as ‘desirable and ineffectual’ highlighted the complicity between the avant-garde and the state, and the incorporation of experimental forms into advertising and propaganda during the inter-war period.

While in England and America, many (but by no means all) creative artists turned their back on formal exploration, a number of European intellectuals aimed to rehabilitate the avant-garde, wanting to take the theoretical rigour and revitalising energy of the early movements (such as Futurism and Dadaism) while maintaining an opposition between art and the state, with its attendant ideological culture. The Situationists grew out of the Lettrists, a group concerned with the relationship between culture and society who produced both theory and radical art. Guy Debord became involved in 1951, a year before Charlie Chaplin’s visit to France, and Debord joined in their incendiary attack on one of the few Hollywood directors to have been championed by the inter-war avant-garde. ‘Because you’ve identified yourself with the weak and oppressed, to attack you has been to attack the weak and oppressed … Go to sleep, you fascist insect’.

Gil J. Wolman joined this protest against Chaplin – his L’Anti-concept (1951) reinvigorated Debord’s belief in the potentialities of avant-garde cinema. L’Anti-concept was an imageless film originally projected on to a weather balloon, with a frantic stream of consciousness narration. The next year, Debord made his first film, Howlings in Favour of Sade. Here, Debord consciously (if ironically) wrote himself into a potted canon of avant-garde film, with one of the voices that formed its soundtrack declaring “What a springtime! Crib sheet for the history of film: 1902: A Trip to the Moon. 1920: The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. 1924: Entr’acte. 1926: Potemkin. 1928: Un chien Andalou. 1931: City Lights. Birth of Guy-Ernest Debord. 1951: Treatise on Slime and Eternity. 1952: L’Anti-concept. Howlings in Favour of Sade’.

The French censors banned L’Anti-concept almost immediately; Debord and his collaborators responded by publishing Wolman’s script and the article No More French Cinema. The protests demonstrated the Lettrists’ understanding of the ideological function not just of films in themselves, but also in social context: the film text, not necessarily explicitly ideological, assumed an implicit political role as a cultural product, created by individuals or corporations with specific interests to rouse or placate its audience.

Situationism and the New Left
The Situationists, with Debord as their self-appointed spokesman, found themselves as part of a wider project to rehabilitate Marxism and redefine Leftist thought after Stalinism, the Spanish Civil War and the Hungarian Uprising. Louis Althusser’s radical reinterpretation of Marx differentiated between ideology and theory – ideology was a pervasive, dogmatic set of political concepts used by an established power maintain that power by binding the state together, whereas theory established a basis for revolutionary action, being open to constant redefinition in relation to social praxis. Althusser’s belief that ‘Every ideology must be regarded as a real whole, internally unified by its own problematic’ proved enormously influential.

Althusser’s ‘problematic’ was the set of questions that the theory on which ideology was based set out to answer. Although for the Soviets, Marx’s crucial ‘problematic’ was his investigation into economic class relations, expounded in Das Kapital, Althusser and Debord both shifted their focus on to Marx’s early writings, highlighting his concept of alienation. Marx’s alienation was specific: it related to the separation of the workers from their produce, and their distancing from power through complex class structures. Debord used this concept to create a political analysis of mass media, influenced by Walter Benjamin’s theories on the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction, existentialism and psychoanalysis. His aim was to create a theoretical socialism that would eliminate alienation in everyday life and free the individual from subordination.

This rupture in Marxist thought was the basis for the New Left, a loose alliance of students, intellectuals and artists, and the skilled working class who prioritised action over organisation) and wanted to break with the idea of the dictatorship of the proletariat, which had led to the establishment of oppressive bureaucracies. It was this opposition to bureaucracy, not just in its Stalinist incarnation but in all systems of political organisation, that underpinned their fascination with social structures.

The media was fundamental to ‘the exclusive right to representation by established parties and intermediary groups’, which so antagonised the young revolutionaries. Their aim was to negate traditional structures of authority with opposing power, using both avant-garde theory and avant-garde art to propose a new, experimental system of political organisation led by those marginalized by the existing system.

The New Left were central to the disturbances of 1968, which swept the world but were manifested in France in a bitter struggle for power in Paris. The Situationists were prominent amongst the students and intellectuals who led the revolt, which culminated in the largest general strike in French history and caused a massive rupture between President de Gaulle and his Prime Minister, Georges Pompidou, as Pompidou’s declared belief in collective bargaining and negotiation contrasted markedly with de Gaulle’s maxim “the state will not surrender” . Ultimately, the New Left struggled to define itself amidst the turmoil, and it was defeated by a combination of the more organised Old Left and the Republic’s political infrastructure. The New Left itself, bereft of a plan of action, split into two groups, contributing not just to its defeat but also its failure to sustain the energy necessary to formulate a response to May 1968.

The Society of the Spectacle
The protestors owed much of their popular support, as did the American anti-war movement, to the power of mass media. Debord’s most important text, The Society of the Spectacle, had appeared the year before; it was his most sustained attack on the co-option of the media by the state for ideological purposes. Debord made a film based on this text in 1973, as a personal response not just to 1968 but also to changes in the media, and its systems of control, that had taken place since.

From its inception, intellectuals of all political positions had worried about the narcotic effects of cinema, but the defeat of 1968 had both heightened Debord’s sense of the potential of the moving image and exacerbated his despair at its use as state propaganda. The Society of the Spectacle was a montage film, juxtaposing an astonishingly varied selection of images with Debord’s voice-over, reading from his text. Shots of the Vietnam War, Mao and Nixon in negotiation, addresses made by Stalin and the French police destroying the protests of 1968 were combined with clips from Battleship Potemkin, They Died with Their Boots On, Triumph of the Will, Johnny Guitar, Rio Grande and For Whom the Bell Tolls, among others.

Crucial to the construction of the film was Debord’s opposition to cinematography, and the ‘game of praise’ that attended it . Debord felt that the New Wave directors had simply created a cheaper alternative to the ‘star system’ by exploiting their reputations as critics and auteurs: the prestige this lent them added weight to their opinions, meaning they would be heard by the public, consequently ensuring the success of their films. Essentially, the New Wave circle constituted a support network similar to the Hollywood system they ostensibly opposed. Debord inserted a caption into The Society of the Spectacle (immediately preceded by footage from the moon landings, perhaps the ultimate spectacular political act) reading, ‘One might still recognise some cinematic value in this film if its rhythm were to be maintained; it will not be maintained’.

Certainly, Society of the Spectacle is difficult viewing, the audience being bombarded with theory and a dizzying array of images unified only by their implicit ideological purpose, generated by both their content and their pervasion of the systems which Debord felt mediated social relations. The suggestion was that while dictatorships use their unilateral media to propagate directly ideological images of their leaders and state functions (particularly their armies, holding spectacular marches and displays, which appear in Debord’s film), democracies used the media in a similar way: however, in order to perpetuate the myth that individuals were free from political interference, the media in democratic states was instead dominated by mindless ‘entertainment’, the logical conclusion of which was pornography, combining the commodity fetishism that upheld capitalist society with sexual fetishism. The Beatles, Elvis and Marilyn Monroe were criticised as representations of lifestyles that were turned into viable commodities and sold to the proletariat in order to alienate them intellectually from political organisation. The spectacle, claimed Debord, was ‘ideology par excellence’, epitomising the essence of ideological systems.

Consciously didactic, Debord’s aim was to make the implicit function of ‘the spectacle’ explicit, by taking film – which had become the most important medium to state representation – and using it against itself, creating a radical opposition to both form and content of exemplary films from capitalist and anti-capitalist societies. The film was certainly not ‘desirable’ for fans of Hollywood cinema, or those of the New Wave. Eschewing the radical cinematography of Godard’s films, or the lyricism of Truffaut’s, The Society of the Spectacle reduced the philosophical film to its bare essentials. The viewer is alienated by the rapid succession of images, yet engaged by their juxtaposition with Debord’s radical criticism of the mediated society, the interest being sustained by his (mostly) effective combination. The stripped-down simplicity of the montage shifts the focus from form, where it usually lay for critical film viewers, on to the content. The aim was not to unite an audience through either a strong, closed narrative (like the Hollywood films that Debord presents) or through praiseworthy artistic innovation, but to instigate a lively theoretical debate.

After the spectacle
The Situationist International had broken up in 1972, having expended its theoretical energy amidst the collapse of the 1968 insurrection and the wave of expulsions made by their autocratic leader. As for Debord, he followed The Society of the Spectacle with a filmed version of Refutation of All the Judgments on Society of the Spectacle, constructed in a similar manner. His final film was In girum imus nocte et consumimir igni (1978), in which Debord attempted to justify (or at least explain) himself and his ideas. It opened aggressively, with Debord stating, “I will make no concessions to the public in this film. I believe there are several good reasons for this decision, and I am going to state them. In the first place, it is well known that I have never made any concessions to the dominant ideas or ruling powers of my era” . The film is generally acknowledged to have been Debord’s most successful, aesthetically, but it was The Society of the Spectacle (perhaps as a result of its affinity with his book, which had no copyright and so circulated freely) that became the best known and is seen as his most effective use of the medium of film.

Rarely screened, Debord banned any showings of his films during his lifetime after the assassination of their producer Gérard Lebovici in 1984, still unsolved. Debord was implicated tangentially, interrogated by the police and defamed in the media; his libel suits were victorious. He made no more films, writing Considerations on the Assassination of Gérard Lebovici (1985), The Game of War (1987, with second wife Alice Becker-Ho) and Panegyric (1989), his major post-Situationist work.

The French media had always refuted the importance of Situationism, but their position changed radically after Debord’s suicide in 1994, aged 62. There was renewed interest in his writings, which Jean-Jacques Pauvert persuaded Gallimard to reprint, but his films were not seen again until 2001, when his widow began the process of re-releasing them, starting with a complete retrospective at the Venice Film Festival. There was another complete screening in Paris in 2002.

Understanding film: Viewing and acting
Throughout his life, Debord asked for people ‘not just to engage in some sort of revolutionary art-criticism, but to make a revolutionary critique of all art’ . It may be, still, that echoes of Debord’s philosophy appear more in documentary than in narrative works, even in the adaptation of Young Adam, from the novel by Alexander Trocchi, a former Situationist International member, or the most radical works of the post-1968 New Wave directors. One imagines that two documentaries made by Mark Achbar and collaborators, The Corporation (2004) and particularly Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media (1992) would have satisfied Debord. Chomsky’s theories about the use of the media in the US had much in common with Debord’s; in this film, Chomsky detailed the shared interests of the media and the government, and the structures which they create to reinforce each other’s power, with wealthy newspaper barons standing to benefit from American foreign policy, and deliberately misrepresenting both motives and events to win the support of a public whose routines did not allow them time to challenge the barrage of received ideas, encapsulated by sound-bites strengthened by constant repetition. The film consciously used its own medium against itself, conversations with Chomsky being constantly interrupted by found footage of archive Chomsky interviews, news reports and graphic sequences (subverted those popular with mainstream news sources) to remind the viewer that Chomsky’s theories are a point of view, which should be subjected to the same criticism as the monolithic media infrastructures that Chomsky attacks.

The theories that Debord expounded in his books and films have the potential to revolutionise the way audiences, and their individual members, criticise cinema. Every nation has films, constructed with discernable artistic virtuosity, which reinforce either aspects of the official ideology, or that ideology in its entirety (or essence); some, such as Eisenstein’s films from Strike to Ivan the Terrible, Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will or Humphrey Jennings’ Listen to Britain were commissioned by branches of the state, while others such as D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation, were not. The radical, self-reinvigorating theories about aesthetics and politics developed by the Situationists, demanding an art linked with oppositional power, are useful in assessing the impact of counter-political films like Godard’s Week-End or Costa-Gavras’ Z, with its climactic unravelling of layers of state corruption that occur after the assassination of Yves Montand’s leader figure. They are just as useful, however, in developing a highly critical attitude towards the label of ‘entertainment’, a label carefully weighted by Hollywood producers, as they encourage viewers to view everything they see in ideological context.

The second part of Eisenstein’s aforementioned Ivan the Terrible is of particular interest, beginning life with a commission from Stalin, who wanted parallels drawn between the founder of modern Russia and himself. Although Part I had largely satisfied the Communist Party leader, Part II deliberately incurred the wrath of the dictator. Eisenstein, incensed by the censorship which had destroyed a number of cherished projects and the bureaucratic terror of the Stalinist regime, famously emphasised Ivan’s increasingly paranoid despotism aggravated by the perceived ‘Boyar’s Plot’, and his brutal purges: thus the officially sanctioned film became a searing denunciation of state barbarism, and was banned. Typically, the Situationists were unimpressed, attacking Eisenstein’s ‘formal conceptions and political submissiveness’ in their article ‘Cinema and Revolution’, but Ivan the Terrible still provides a striking example of how an individual can confront overwhelming state power through radical art in even the most poisonous of political atmospheres.

Situationist theory, with its uncompromising attitude towards state ideology and the purveyors of banal culture, is a potential source of inspiration for any filmmakers bored with a cultural landscape in which cynically erected structures allow anodyne, apolitical (or deliberately misrepresentative) works to dominate the media and public consciousness. The energy of their texts and films and their militant division between the avant-garde and the state have inspired films such as Alice in Wonderland or Who is Guy Debord? – an animated spoof in which Alice travels from Victorian England to present-day society in which she is drowned in spectacles, her only hope of escape being to locate the Situationist provocateur – as well as the Exploding Cinema movement and other fiercely experimental groups across Europe. Now more than ever, when the (predominantly Anglo-American) attempt to move away from the idea of ‘avant-garde’ and aggressively dialectical culture has led most art into a dead end where outmoded, deadened forms once again dominate the visible culture, and the transparently consensual politics of the 1990s (which were, of course, never consensual; dissident voices were merely diffused and marginalised) have been shattered by a global conflict between two groups of religious fundamentalists, it is necessary to overturn the integrated spectacle which makes the dominance of conservative culture and politics possible. With the surreal, farcical election of Arnold Schwarzenegger as Republican senator of California, in a campaign where political issues were subsumed by rhetoric infused not by ideology but by Arnie’s spectacular movies, it has become necessary to counter the domination of the political by the spectacular and infuse the spectacular with the political, and create undesirable works of art which unflinchingly question all formal expectations and received ideological rhetoric.