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Original Announcement of
Guy Debord’s Film The Society of the Spectacle
Until now it has generally been assumed that film is a completely unsuitable
medium for presenting revolutionary theory. This view was mistaken. The lack of
any serious attempts in this direction stemmed simply from the historical lack
of a modern revolutionary theory during virtually the entire period of the
cinema’s development; as well as from the fact that the potentials of cinematic
composition, despite so many declarations of intent on the part of filmmakers
and so much feigned satisfaction on the part of a miserable public, have as yet
scarcely been liberated.
Published in 1967, The Society of the Spectacle is a book whose
theoretical insights have profoundly influenced the new current of social
critique that is now more and more openly undermining the established world
order. Its present cinematic adaptation, like the book itself, does not offer a
few partial political critiques, but a total critique of the existing world;
that is, a critique of all aspects of modern capitalism and of its general
system of illusions.
The cinema is itself an integral part of this world, serving as one of the
instruments of the separate representation that opposes and dominates the
actual proletarianized society. As revolutionary critique engages in battle on
the very terrain of the cinematic spectacle, it must thus turn the language
of that medium against itself and give itself a form that is itself
revolutionary.
The text and images of this film form a coherent whole; but the images are
never mere direct illustrations of the text, much less demonstrations of
it (cinematic “demonstrations” are in any case never reliable due to the
unlimited possibilities of manipulation offered by the unilateral editing of the
material). Instead, the film’s use of images (whether photographs, newsclips, or
sequences from preexisting films) is governed by the principle of
détournement, which the situationists have defined as “communication that
includes a critique of itself.” The images through which spectacular society
presents itself to itself are taken and turned against it: the spectacle’s means
should be treated with insolence. As a result, in a certain sense this film,
coming at the end of the cinema’s pseudo-autonomous history, incorporates all
the memories of that history. It can thus be seen simultaneously as a historical
film, a Western, a love story, a war movie, etc. Like the society it examines,
it also presents a number of comical aspects. In talking about the spectacular
order, and about the commodity domination that it serves, one is also talking
about what this order hides: class struggles and strivings toward real
historical life, revolution and its past failures, and the responsibilities for
those failures. Nothing in this film is made to please the fashionable
blockheads of leftist cinema: it has equal contempt for what they respect and
for the style in which they express that respect. One who is capable of
understanding and denouncing an entire socio-economic formation will denounce it
even in a film. Objections to our “extremism” are meaningless, because current
history is already on the verge of going beyond the most extreme possibilities
imagined.
Theses that have never before been presented in the cinema will now appear
there in a never before seen form, simply because for the first time a filmmaker
has undertaken an uncompromising critique.
In the socio-economic context, the total freedom required to create such a
film obviously means that the producer must renounce any claim to exert any
preliminary control over the director, whether by insisting that he present a
synopsis or by seeking to obtain from him any other sort of meaningless
commitment. This has been recognized in the contract between the filmmaker and
the producer, Simar Films: “It is understood that the filmmaker will carry out
his work in complete freedom, without any control or supervision whatsoever, and
without even being obliged to pay the slightest attention to any comment that
the producer might make regarding any aspect of the content or of the cinematic
form that the filmmaker feels appropriate for his film.”
Considering that this film itself expresses its meaning in a sufficiently
comprehensible manner, the producer and the filmmaker believe that it is
unnecessary to provide any further explanations.
1974
From a Simar Films brochure announcing the opening of Guy Debord’s film
The Society of the Spectacle (Paris, April 1974). This translation is from Debord’s Complete Cinematic Works (AK Press, 2003,
translated and edited by Ken Knabb), which includes the scripts of all six of
Debord’s films along with
illustrations, documents and extensive annotations. For further
information, see Guy Debord’s Films.
See also The Society of the Spectacle
(soundtrack of the film) and The Society of
the Spectacle (the book on which it is based).
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