CINEMATIC SUBVERSION AND THE THEORY OF THE AVANT-GARDE.(1)
Among other possibilities the cinema lends itself particularly well to studying the present as an historical problem, to dismantling the processes of reification.(2)
This essay will discuss the concept of cinematic subversion and review the historical roots of this cultural strategy in the work of the International Situationists c.1957-1969. However, before beginning the discussion of this important concept, we should note briefly the Situationist problematic as it applies to social relations and the production of culture within capitalism(3). From this we should follow with an introductory examination of Situationist film theory(4), in particular the related critical concepts of intervention, detournement and subversion, as these are represented in the writings of Vaneigem, Vienet, Wolman and especially Guy Debord, whose writings and films(5) have provided much of the `critical grounding' for this essay. We will conclude with a brief overview of the successes and failures of the situationist critique as this pertains to the theory and practise of `experimental' or a term I prefer `neo-avant-garde' (Burger 1974,1984) film making and with this, attempt to recuperate(6), some aspects of the I.S.'s "revolutionary" program which may be still tenable today.
The Situationist problematic is based on the Debordian description of late capitalism which he dubbed the "society of the spectacle." From the early 1950's, the spectacle was used metaphorically to designate "a one way transmission of experience; a form of `communication' to which one side, the audience (consumers) can never reply; a culture based on the reduction of almost everyone to a state of abject non-creativity: of receptivity, passivity and isolation"(7) In Guy Debord's famous theses:
The entire life of societies in which modern conditions of production reign appears as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was expressed directly has been distanced in a representation" (Thesis 1 )(8)
and,
Spectacle in general, as the concrete immersion of life is the autonomous movement of the non-living. Spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation between people mediated through images. (Thesis 4)(9)
From Debord (10), the I.S. applied the term spectacle with its various connotations, to all aspects of socio-cultural relations under monopoly capitalism. At its most incisive the term represented the hegemonic tendencies sustained (reproduced) by capitalist ideologies. In other words the society of the spectacle described a system of power relations, one in which alienation is naturally `inscribed' (if you follow Derrida), institutionalised (Burger) and reproduced (if you are a `garden variety' marxist). For the I.S., the antidote, or, in terms less psycho/physiological and more contemporary - the counter-hegemonic agents; and the locii of resistance, became the adventitious `construction of situations', which from the beginning involved the notion of intervention.(11)
The construction of situations can only begin to be effective as the concept of the spectacle begins to disintegrate.(12)
From the very first issue of the I.S. journal, the character of the situation was described in terms which revealed the fundamental importance of intervention as a post-theoretical, post-experimental, and practical aspect of their critique. During the next ten years the political efficacy and indeed, urgency, of this aspect of their project was debated constantly by members of the I.S. In late 1961 and early 1962 the divisions of opinion actually lead to several rifts within and exclusions from the group. The theoretical problems attending this negotiation of practicality were finally subsumed under various and at times conflicting ideologies of cultural practise which relegated direct political action - and the formation of praxis, to the back-burner; that is, until the weeks leading up to the events of May/June 1968 which foregrounded, once again, some of the original political premises of the association.
It is not too grand a claim to suggest that no aspect of cultural production: from advertising, urban planning, fashion to film, was left untouched by the Situationists. This can be demonstrated adequately enough through a quick examination of the semi-official chronology and bibliographical index compiled by Jean-Jacques Raspaud and Jean-Pierre Voyer which summarises in brief the contents of the I.S. journal as well as their "echos" in the popular and specialty press(13). A closer examination of the primary and secondary texts, especially those contained in the the group's central organ the I.S. Journal, reveal that like the dadaists and surrealists before them, theatre (performance) literature, visual art and criticism played vital roles in their political theorising, particularly their "construction of situations". And with respect to its special role in ideological reproduction and the "formation of the spectacular", cinema was also accorded special attention. Many of the I.S.'s key concepts and critical techniques were elaborated, or better, `played out', to use a key I.S. phrase, in relation to film. From the pre-S.I. I.L. (International Lettrist) texts by Chtcheglov (1953), Debord (1955), Debord and Wolman (1956) and Asger Jorn (1957) and later within the I.S. proper, those produced by Vienet and Vaneigem, cinema, if not mentioned directly, is implicitly recognised (often as a negative agent) in the attempts to theorise a way out - to repudiate (negate, in I.S. terms) - the passive reproduction of alienation in daily life.
In the important early text Methods of Detournement (1956) co-authored by Guy Debord and Gil Wolman, there are several references to film as a site for critical intervention. The text contains two key passages which deserve to be mentioned. In the introduction the authors suggest that with respect to political efficacy, "- only extremest (cultural*) innovation is historically justified" (*my addition). The arguments behind this statement do not initially strike one with their radicality; they are similar to other pronouncements made by the historical avant-gardes of the first decades of the C20th and reiterated in various forms ever since. However a closer reading of the entire text soon changes this observation and establishes its avant-gardist credentials and moreover, distinguishes it from the pronouncements of the earlier historical avant-gardes.
" since the (avant-gardist) negation of the bourgeois conception of art and artistic genius has become pretty much old hat, [Duchamp's] drawing of a moustache on the Mona Lisa is no more interesting than the original version of that painting. We must now push this process to the negation of the negation. Bertolt Brecht, revealing in a recent interview in the magazine France Observateur that he made some cuts in the classics of the theatre in order to make the performances more educative is closer than Duchamp to the revolutionary orientation we are calling for. ( emphasis added)(14)
Debord and Wolman then proceed to discuss the principal categories of detournement: minor, deceptive and ultra detournements, the characteristics of which were later to inform the I.S.'s theoretical discussions attending the construction of situations. These primary types of detournement are related conceptually to the re-contextualising and re-constructing methods as well as the collage and montage techniques of futurism, dada and surrealism with however, a few important differences which from our contemporary perspective align them more specifically to the methods of deconstruction as these have been formulated most recently by Jacques Derrida and his circle.(15)
In simple terms, collage, dialectical and additive montage techniques draw their meaning from the new contexts and juxtapositions of the auto-produced or appropriated `ready-made' or `assisted' cultural material - semiotically - the intended result becoming the establishment of new, often highly charged signifier/signified relationships. Debord and Wolman's strategies of detournement differ significantly from these, now, classic techniques of the historical avant-gardes, placing more emphasis upon the context in which a detourned image is read.
With minor detournement, which depending upon the circumstances, may be described as a fairly standard mode of detournement, an element (image or text) which has little importance in itself, is placed in a new context from which it draws its meaning - to use Debord's examples here, "a press clipping, a neutral phrase, a commonplace photograph". It can be argued that the potentially subversive and negative character of the strategy of detournement is relatively clear here. For, depending upon the circumstances and if we consider the Brechtexample, the context, this could become a radical strategy for meaning deformation and reformation - deconstruction. The radical altering of the context and moreover, the investiture of primary meanings in the new context is different in character to most of the conventional techniques of the collage/montagist. The intention in the conventional collage or montage work is the reconstitution of the base elements or fragments in some way as to creatively produce a whole; the result - here I paraphrase Peter Burger's "Theory of the Avant-Garde" (1984) - is an "organic work" which in all senses of the term represents a "false sublation" of a quintessential avant-garde intention - the erasure of the separation between art and life; the formation of praxis. In Burger's terms the organic work serves only to reproduce the bourgeois category of the autonomous work (of art), thereby sustaining the institutionality of artistic practise. One of the key phrases in Burger's text here is "the neo avant-garde institutionalises the avant-garde as art and thus negates genuinely avant-gardist intentions"(16) In the conventional collage or montage work the substrate of the given material may be detourned, subverted, reconstituted yet there is usually some attempt by the author to retain some identity for the original elements and meaning of the work, including its context. Alternatively the new `aesthetic' or institutional (art) context is reinforced. The obvious historical examples here are Duchamp's readymades, although these retain an essential ambiguity within Burger's theory as they do for the Situationists. Asger Jorn's detourned paintings of 1957 -9 may be closer to the models of minor detournement discussed by Debord and Wolman. His interventionist mediations consisted of unknown paintings which he had purchased cheaply at second hand stores and flea markets which he then proceded to re-paint and later re-invest into the (institutional) art world contexts. Debord and Jorn's book "Memoires", composed entirely from prefabricated (appropriated) elements" which could be read in any direction, is also a useful example of the strategy of minor detournement which the I.S. described in somewhat recondite yet clearly from today's perspective, deconstructionist terms, of "negation and prelude"(17)
Deceptive detournement which Debord and Wolman also called premonitory proposition detournement is more politically efficacious than minor detournement. Here a significant element from the original work is detourned and because of the relative importance of the original i.e. again to use their examples: "A slogan of Saint Juste" or "a sequence from Eisenstein" the act of detourning or deconstruction grows in significance. A comparison is invited here between Burger's examples of the politically efficacious work of John Heartfield, specifically his A.I.Z. montages. However, with respect to the overt agitational and propagandistic function of Heartfield's montages there are some important differences to be considered. For the I.S. detournement "as rational reply" or "reversal" - techniques of agit-prop - was considered to be less effective, ostensibly (this was contradictorily argued within I.S. texts) because it precipitated extreme rejective and prohibitive responses from those at whom it was aimed, thus negating its didactic function and thereby allowing the power differential to be maintained or worse, reinforced. This is clearly not in the interests of the deconstructive methodology which as Derrida has insisted must be in the final analysis "affirmative".(18)
Wolman and Debord elaborated upon the so-called "laws"- what can be called more usefully, the conditions of detournement, which sustain in a relatively comprehensive (and less pseudo-scientific) fashion, the various meanings subsumed by their definitions:
Detournement: short for: detournement of pre-existing aesthetic elements. The integration of present or past artistic production into a superior construction of a milieu. In this sense there can be no situationist painting or music, but only a situationist use of these means. In a more primitive sense, detournement within the old cultural spheres is a method of propaganda, a method which testifies to the wearing out and loss of importance of these spheres.(19)
The "laws" were reduced to a group of quasi-formulae. In the first Debord and Wolman insisted that:
It is the most distant detourned element which contributes most sharply to the overall impression, and not the elements that directly determine the nature of this impression.
Their second:
The distortions introduced in the detourned elements must be as simplified as possible, since the main force of a detournement is directly related to the conscious or vague recollection (memory*) of the original contexts of the elements. * addition
"Law" 3
Detournement is less effective the more it approaches a rational reply. ( i.e. forms of agitational propaganda)
and finally,
Detournement by simple reversal is always the most direct and the least effective. (Agit-prop)
The authors suggested that the first was "universal" and "essential" while the other three only were applicable to deceptive detournements.(20) The last two laws introduce the related problems of parody and propaganda which was discussed at length if at times incoherently, in subsequent I.S. `theses'. From the perspective of contemporary strategies of deconstruction the first two are interesting because they focus on memory and sets of relational meanings - they invoke a hermeneutic - one in which meanings politically mediated by context and time remain negotiable.
It is possible that the various forms of detournement may be also conceptually allied to Walter Benjamin's concept of the allegorical, closer perhaps than is montage, the process/technique and forms of which Peter Burger uses in his arguments for sustaining the legitimate and authentic work of the avant-garde; work which he argues resolves the contradictory features of avant-gardiste and bourgeois intentions. It can be argued that the emphasis on meaning `substitution' or `sublimation' as a prelude to critical consciousness in Debord and Wolman's conception of premonitory detournement may be a form of "redemption" similar to the `historical distantiation' and quest for `transcendence' elaborated in Benjamin's theory of allegory. The situationist notion of distantiation - of decomposition (the destruction of conventional cultural forms) may parallel also the `surrealist inspired' tropes which Benjamin uses to discuss allegory. Debord and Wolman's conception of cultural exhaustion and the oppositional use of the strategies of detournement to resist and overcome this symptom of monopoly capitalism finds its homoletic in Benjamin's "...profound fascination of the sick man with the isolated and insignificant [is] succeeded by that disappointed abandonment of the exhausted emblem." (21) For in both strategies, the symptoms or better `syndrome' of alienation is seen as responsible and responsive to both `the sickness and the cure'. For Benjamin, Debord and Wolman critical consciousness only comes to those who have realised their own alienation as a part of the political (collective) present. For Benjamin redemptive criticism and for the I.S. the construction and deconstruction of situations represent a possible alternative to the passivity and isolation - the political `death' of those who acknowledge the central paradoxes inherent in our time.
In Wolman and Debord's terms, it becomes
(therefore) necessary to conceive of a parodical serious stage where the accumulation of detourned elements, far from aiming at arousing indignation or laughter by alluding to some original work, will express our indifference toward a meaningless and forgotten original, and concern itself with rendering a certain sublimity. ( emphasis added)(22)
In the final sections of their important essay, Debord and Wolman outline the detournement strategies with respect to film, which in view of its importance deserves to be quoted in full.
It is obviously in the realm of cinema that detournement can attain its greatest (political) efficacy, and undoubtedly, for those concerned with this aspect, its greatest beauty.
The powers of film are so extensive, and the absence of co-ordination of those powers is so glaring, that almost any film that is above the miserable average can provide innumerable polemics among spectators or professional critics. Only the conformism of those people prevents them from discovering features just as appealing and faults just as glaring in the worst films. To cut through this absurd confusion of values, we can observe that Griffiths ' Birth of a Nation is one of the most important films in the history of cinema because of its wealth of new contributions. On the other hand it is a racist film and therefore does not merit being shown in its present form. But its total prohibition could be seen as regrettable from the point of view of the secondary, but potentially worthier, domain of cinema.
With this minor concession to the institution of cinema
which was subsequently reiterated in other theses by Vienet and Debord the authors continued with a remarkably subversive strategy worthy of the strategies of deconstruction today:
It would be better to detourne it (Birth of a Nation) as a whole, without necessarily altering the montage, by adding a sound track that made a powerful denunciation of the horrors of imperialist war and of the activities of the Ku Klux Klan, which are continuing in the United States even now. (1956 )(23)
The authors insisted, with some irony, that this `work' on Griffiths ' film would be a`moderate' detournement, "in the final analysis...the moral equivalent of the restoration of old paintings in museums". Those with an investment in the maintenance of a "pantheon of masters" would view their strategies differently.
How is this radically subversive activity sustained in Debord's other writings and particularly in his own films? This is an interesting question, one which we should now examine briefly and discuss with respect to the propositions of so-called `experimental', `new wave'- or neo-avant-garde cinema and the formation of an adequate post-modern critical strategy worthy of operative cultural producers in the late C20th.(24)
Debord produced a total of six films , three near feature length (80'- 90') and three shorter films of some 20 minutes duration. They are all 35mm, b&w film stock; the full scripts and `shot descriptions' (or appropriated image synopses) are available in his Oeuvres Cinematographiques Complete 1952-1978 (the listing of his films is appended to this essay) It can be argued that it is in Debord's films that we obtain the clearest explication and summation of his deconstructive strategies of cinematic detournement and subversion. It is significant in understanding the degree of importance he placed in cinema as a means of communication (and political action) that Debord attempted to film "in its entirety" his book The Society of the Spectacle" (La Societe du Spectacle 1973) and when this film met with critical resistance in 1975 he filmed a critical response to his detractors under the title "Refutation de Tousjugements, tant elogiuex qu'hostiles, qui ont ete jusqu'ici porte sur le film `La Societe du Spectacle'".
There are several important modal characteristics of Debord's films which establish their absolute political character and from the perspective of today, their inviolable condition as exemplary avant-garde projects. In each of the films text/language is primary; image is secondary and frequently absent. The result of this revision (minor detournement) of conventional filmic language, is that the film resists becoming an ensemble of representations and subsequently for Debord, a commodity. His withdrawal of the films from circulation in 1985 has taken this act of decommoditisation to its ultimate and natural consummation as `un action exemplaire'(25). It is fortunate, ironically that this withdrawal has not disturbed or violated the `traffic' in his ideas.
Debord's films neither activate the spectator/viewer's scopic drive, nor do they initiate or facillitate the formation of the spectacular or to use, a useful term borrowed from contemporary film discourse - "the phantasmagoric experience". However with its primary emphasis on text, the visual and especially the audiophonic transmission of language, the Debordiansituationist film may invoke what Lacan called the pulsion invocante, the pleasure of listening.
In a fundamental sense, the film's presence as political agent is assisted by its absense of conventional cinematic cues for looking or, more precisely (here I paraphrase the early work of Roland Barthes, Christian Metz, Julia Kristeva and that of the Screen critics, Wollen, Mulvey et. al.), the viewers are restricted from obtaining pleasure and moreover, of consumating this (jouissance) through the act of looking. The absence of such cues and the subsequent "subordination of desire" allows an emphasis on others, such as the meeting of a certain group of people at a prescribed place and time for the purpose of `viewing'. For Debord the occasion for (passive) viewing itself can be detourned into a situation or [performance] for (active) discussion. This becomes a means toward the fulfillment of the goal - critical education, or in its inverted, deconstructed and more politically efficacious form, education for criticism. In this post-Brechtian act of institutional subversion we should recognise another famous inversion, the graffiti slogan strategically applied to the walls of Paris in May/June 1968 - "Culture is the inversion of life".
For Debord the audience is subject. An elemental characteristic of his film theory is the didactic form and content of the (often appropriated and detourned) dialogue or debat, which occurs (at least is programmed to occur), between either the voices on the audio track or the author and the audience. In "In Girum Imus Nocte..."(1978), his final film, Debord placed an image of a cinema audience directly facing the live theatre audience. With a deliberate economy of means, his accompanying text incisively identifies the central problem of spectacle consumption and the alienation of both author and audience. He allows no concessions to his public.
Je ne ferai, dans ce film, aucune concession au public. plusiers excellents raisons justifient, a mes yeux, une telle conduite; et je vais les dire.(26)
The announcement of the film screening becomes the reason for the debate, irrespective of what is to be consumed. The objective is "authentic dialogue". With respect to Burger's theory of the avant-garde, this ultra detournement (Debord and Wolman's final category) would represent a legimitate form of sublation; a subordination of the work to the praxiologicalconditions of everyday life - which would allow for, or actively encourage the practical exploration of Lefebvre's "critique". In the typical I.S. film project this is reinforced parodicallywith the narrative /dialogue (often a dialogue des sourds) as, for instance, in Debord's first film Hurlements en faveur de Sade (Screams on Behalf of Sade 1952). While this film (dedicated to his collaboratuer Gil Wolman whose own film L'anti-concept had appeared the year before) is technically within the Lettrist group of films, it advances many ideas which were to become staples of his subsequent I.S. texts and films. Hurlements has a powerful introduction which metophorically establishes the deconstructive `field' of negation.
Voix 1: Quel printemps! Aide-memoire pour une histoire du cinema :1902 -Voyage dans La Lune. 1920 -Le cabinet du docteur Caligari 1924 - Entracte. 1926 -Le Cuirasse Potemkine. 1928 Un Chien andalou. Naissance de Guy-Ernest Debord. 1951 - Trait de bave et d'`eternite. 1952 - Lanti-concept. - Hurlements en faveur de Sade.
Voix 5:"Au moment ou la projetion allait commencer, Guy-Ernest Debord devait monter sur la scene pour prononcer quelques mot's d'introduction. Il aurait dit simplement: Il n'ya a pas de film. Le cinema est mort. Il ne peut plus y avoir de film. Passons, si vous voulez, au debat."(27)
There are no images in this film. Much of the sporadic and at
times disconnected dialogue (much of it detourned) is punctuated with black leader. In fact the balance of black/silence/ to monotonal dialogue throughout the 90 minute running time is almost 50/50 with approximately 57 mins of darkness. The projection screen is white during sections of dialogue and black during silence. The film concludes with a `spectacular' 24 mins of darkness and silence - the silences; the pauses of the historical avant-garde - of Mallarme, Russolo, Duchamp, Becket and Cage, pale in comparison - almost.
Darkness/silence have several meanings for Debord - the obvious symbolic and iconoclastic references to the death of cinema; and silence, which needs little elaboration today, represents the absence of stimulus from the film, which heightens the perception of the activities of the audience who become more cognisant of their own presence as a group; of potential (enraged) actors. This cliche of modernism (epater le bourgeois) has a long and venerable history which stretches from Jarry's Ubu to 1968 and in its institutionalisedstereotypes through to the present.
Hurlements shares some of the characteristics of many of the historical prototypes of avant-garde film: including the few Futurist films, those of Dada and Surrealism and subsequently the experimental Lettrist films of Isou, Lemaitre and Wolman of the early 50's . Beyond the history of avant-garde cinema, the literary tradition invoked and at times consciously usurped by Debord, is represented in the late C19th symbolist and early C20th literary avant-gardes from Lautreamont, to Mallarme, Whitman and subsequently to the Pope of Surrealism himself, Andre Breton.
Debord's insertion of his own production - even his birth - into a canon of master works , may indicate a degree of role aggrandizement. It is difficult to establish whether this is pure parody or a reproduction of a typical strategy of the avant-garde, a nervous twitch - representing a youthful appropriation of history, however fortuitous (or gratuitous) - or naive, in order to ensure his place (with the right pedigree), in history. In this case the ego investment may be the result either of parody or a subconscious adherence to a surrealist habit.
Today we recognise the `formal' innovations of Debord's first two films, in the `unconventional' cinematic strategies of post-lettrist international neo-avant-garde cinema i.e. the structuralist film, aping the strategies of the nouveau roman - the films of the `new wave' and `underground' film makers who were fond of disclosing the cinematic apparatus, real-time-basing, chronometry (to be distinguished from chronotypy); the use of non-illusionistic materialist / and phenomenologically (a la Merleau-Ponty) precise clear, white and black leader. We may recognise the humanising and domesticating of the equipment via manual manipulations the `family' focus or some such metaphorical foils to Hollywoood's corporate and hegemonic intentions. Since 1955 these formal, narrational and relational strategies signal deju vu - exhaustion; visual (cinematic) cliches themselves, a defeat to their intended political character through a reproduction of their decompositive and "iterative scheme" (Eco). However we should not be too quick in our dismissal least we immerse the I.S. itself too deeply in our critique of the neo-avant-garde. It is important to acknowledge that the I.S. recognised the potentially redundant features of their own cinematic inter - and con-ventions. They were also quick to disparage those bourgeois film-makers, Godard among them who attempted to capitalise on their work, not because they necessarily wished to be acknowledged as originators, but because the institutional successes of the neo-avant-garde spelled the death of the debate and the entrenchment of the bourgeois status quo.
For instance in an article called "Cinema and Revolution" issue #12 of the I.S. journal, the Situationistes tarred and feathered J.P. Picaper, the reviewer of the 1969 Berlin Film Festival for praising Godard for purportedly pushing "his praiseworthy self-critique to the point of projecting sequences shot in the dark or even of leaving the spectator for an almost unbearable length of time before a blank screen." The affronted situationists were unrelenting in their admonishment both of Picaper and Godard the newly installed hero of the avant-garde. To quote:
Without seeking more precisely what constitutes "an almost unbearable length of time" for this critic, we can see that Godard's work, following the latest fashions as always ,isculminating in a destructive style just as belatedly plagiarised and pointless as all the rest, this negation having been expressed long before Godard had ever begun the long series of pretentious pseudo-innovations that aroused such enthusiasm among students in the previous period.(28)
After trouncing Godard for his "pretensions" - which we can now recognise as preludes to the institutionalisation of avant-garde film (the reviewer refers the reader to previous I.S. issue 10 and another critique of Godard - "The Role of Godard"(29), reflecting on the fact that the Cinema "as a means of revolutionary communication is not intrinsically mendacious just because Godard or Jacoppeti has touched it, any more than all political analysis is doomed to duplicity just because Stalinists have written (it)".(30) This is one of the first instances in the I.S. of their recognition of their own capitulation to what Raoul Vaneigem suggested in 1967 was a simple "renewing of the forms of spectacle participation and the variety of stereotypes"(31)
Godard and rhetoric aside, the Situationists did have an important role for cinema in their critique of political economy in spectacular society. In a sense they were attempting to do what Eisenstein set out to accomplish but failed to fulfil in his plan to film Marx's Capital(32). In fact they wanted to go beyond Capital. But before they could attempt this they had to reconstruct not only the experience of viewing but also the discourse of cinema itself. They wished to repudiate the bourgeois aestheticist approach to film making and to return it to the praxis of life. Hence the radical deconstructive, excisionist and image taxing strategies of intervention, detournenment and subversion and their concern with context over concept and concept over form.
Debord describes the critical process in his films - at times incisively, at times in a laboured, somewhat egocentric and pretentious fashion. For instance : after a Sartrean inspired critique of the limitations of freedom and individual self-emancipation in capitalist society, in his second film, a detourned documentary titled "On the passage of a few Persons Through a rather Brief Period of Time", one of his protagonists or antagonists - we cannot call them characters in the conventional sense - suggests somewhat laconically,
...of course we could make a film of it. But even if such a film succeeds in being fundamentally incoherent and unsatisfying as the reality it deals with, it will never be more than a recreation - poor and false like this botched travelling shot.
This speech is accompanied visually be a travelling shot past a cafe which is cut by a member of the public crossing the camera's field of view thus destroying its satisfactory (again in conventional cinematic terms) resolution. The film's third voice, continues the critique of the cinema by attacking the authority of the auteur and the autonomy of the institution cinema itself.
There are people who flatter themselves that they are authors of films, as others are authors of novels. They are even more backward than the novelists because they are ignorant of the decomposition and exhaustion of individual expression in our times, ignorant of the end of the arts of passivity. They are praised for their sincerity since they dramatise, with more personal depth, the conventions of which their life consists. There is talk of the liberation of the cinema. But what does it matter to us if one more art is liberated through which Pierre or Jacques or Francois can joyously express their slave sentiments. The only interesting venture is the liberation for us of everday life, not only in the perspectives of history but for us and right away. This entails the withering away of alienated forms of communication. The cinema too has to be destroyed. (33) emphasis added.
And yet Debord's primary intention, initially at least, was not simply, to destroy the cinema; he wished to intervene in that institution's passive reproduction of its own conventions; its capitulation to the commodity and hence spectacle form. In committing the institution cinema to deconstruction and not simply destruction, he was allowing for its necessary redemption. Ultimately his task was reconstructive and affirmative. Negation became a means toward developing a critical process which was to be both dynamic and ongoing. The primary purpose of his interruptions and critical interventions was the reconstitution of the cinema's raison d'etre and the roles, to use a key I.S. phrase, of its "players".
We may recognise that Debord's general critique of the cinema carried with it an immediate contradiction for his own film making; his own position as artist/author. The legacy of surrealist thinking in his work, perhaps reveals less the debate between culture and politics, the engaged author and his audience, than the prevarication between the Janus-like author/critic. It is tempting to suggest that Debord, unable to integrate or `rationalise' or deconstruct the two roles to his own satisfaction, was forced into the position of forsaking one engaged project for the other, of privileging the critical project at the expense of the artist/author's. In his third film Critique of Separation (Critique de la Separation (1960-61) the dialogue suggests that it is absolutely necessary to continue the debate even if he, the film-maker has to become a casualty in the struggle for its continuance.
This is a film (read cinema*) that interrupts itself and does not come to an end.
All conclusions remain to be drawn, everything has to be recalculated.
The problem continues to be posed, its expression is becoming more complicated. We have to resort to other measures.
I have scarcely begun to make you understand that I don't intend to play the game. ( emphasis added)
With this early indication of withdrawal which became almost totally justified by the events of 1968, Debord's theoretical questions were translated into further practical explorations of methods and techniques by others within the I.S. Rene Vienet's text "The Situationists and the New Forms of action Against Politics and Art" (I.S. #11 1967) in particular, constituted a late cultural manifesto for the I.S.(34) "Up to now", Vienet wrote, "our subversion has mainly drawn on the forms and categories inherited from past revolutionary struggles, mainly those of the last century." He proposed that the I.S. "link up the theoretical critique of modern society with the critique of it in acts. By detourning the very propositions of the spectacle, we can explain on the spot the implications of present and future revolts."(35)
Vienet concluded his broadside with a list with which we are now are familiar, albeit since 1967, through other forms of cultural production. To paraphrase:
1) Experimentation in the detournement of romantic photocomics (and pornographic photos) (the altering of speech balloons etc.
2) The promotion of guerilla tactics in the mass media.
3) The development of situationist comics.
4) The production of situationist films"
And in this last section of his essay, Vienet reiterated some of the strategies of detournement theorised earlier by Jorn, Debord and Wolman and added a few more directives, including the rather idealistic requirement that each situationist be "as capable of making a film as of writing an article". The record in fact reveals that out of the 70 I.S. members only a few of them made films and in the domain of writing less than half contributed to the I.S. journal, the bulk of the contributions issuing from the typrewriters of Constant, Debord, Jorn, Vaneigem and Vienet. However this did not hinder the development of some complex, relatively, coherent, persuasive and politically correct strategies for the criticism of culture.
Vienet's pronouncements on the strategies and role of situationiste cinema are remarkably contemporary. His injunction to his constituencies to appropriate modern examples of the film arts including advertisements, for detournement, is well before its time and still not fully understood as a political strategem. Contemporary experimental artists and film-makers are still scurrying around film archives appropriating the movies that will feed their nostaglia fetish and give them no copyright problems, this or the `no wave' option - simulating it. Vienet and Debord -the I.S. membership generally, understood above all, the need to be - critically cognisant - of one's own place, and one's own time - to quote their minor detournement of Marx's Eighteenth Brumaire - to be capable of both "interpreting and changing the world".
Vienet continued his text with a discussion of the aims of situationist cinema.
The cinema which is the newest and undoubtedly the most utilizable means of expression of our time has marked time for nearly three quarters of a century. To sum it up, we can say that it effectively became the "seventh art" so dear to film buffs, film clubs and parents associations. For our purposes this age is over. (Ince, Stroheim, the one and only L'age d'or, Citizen Kane and My Arkadin, the lettrist films), even if there remain a few traditional masterpieces to be unearthed in the film archives or on the shelves of foreign distributors. We should appropriate the first stammerings of this new language and above all its most consummate and modern examples, those which have escaped artistic ideology even more than American `B' movies: newsreels, previews, and above all filmed advertisments.
Although it has obviously been in the service of the commodity and the spectacle, filmed advertising, in its extreme freedom of technical means has laid the foundations for what Eisenstein had an inkling of when he talked of filming the The Critique of Political Economy or The German Ideology.
He concluded with the statement with which I introduced this
paper:
Among other possibilities, the cinema lends itself particularly well to studying the present as a historical problem, to dismantling the processes of reification. ( emphasis added)
and continued with an unfortunate metaphysical muddling of the
concepts he began with confusing the aims of a `revolutionary' dialectic
To be sure, historical reality can be apprehended, known and filmed only in the course of a complicated process of mediations enabling consciousness to recognise one moment in another, its goal and its action in destiny, its destiny in its goal and action, and its own essence in that necessity.(36)
What were the failures of the I.S.? This is properly the subject of another essay. However, we can recognise these in their language, their work and some of their actions: Debord's`failure' to reconcile the project of the social and cultural critic with the `desires' of the author, (perhaps); the metaphysical Hegelian language into which Vienet departs, after a surprising Lukacsian (via Vaneigem and Debord) inspired statement about reification. This intellectual contrariness marked so many of the I.S. texts - after Marx and Lukacs there will follow Freud, Breton or Sartre, Hegel or Mao - and occasionally - the Marx brothers; too often, now it seems, a surrealist capitulation to the tyranny of the subject or individual ego. This last is so evident in their theory of the derive which is pure bohemianism -or flaneury (vintage 1830 or, 1890) and their practice of exclusion or group scission; the problems they had sustaining intellectual, political and cultural purity, or was it art political `correctness'?
The failures of the I.S. have been noted and discussed extensively by others (Wilner 1970, Gray, 1974, Bandini 1977). They have been extensively debated within the I.S. itself (Debordand Sanguinetti "La veritable scission dans L'internationale Paris 1972"). I will reiterate a few of these briefly as follows, with the knowledge that in some theatres they are still hotly contested:
1) The realisation that the members of the I.S. were forced, like their historical forebears, into the position of adopting or theorizing post-revolutionary utopias, of dreaming, imagining a better life - i.e. after the death of cinema - then what? After the surrealist inspired process of self-realisation, of individuation is complete (Breton's "revolution of the mind") - then what? After the (Lefebvre's) critique of everyday life - then what? The I.S. notion of succession, variously employed, did not fully guarrantee social and cultural change, nor importantly, satisfaction from this process.
2) The events of May 68 lead them into the adoption of the more extreme and heroic direct action, allowing the nascent anarchic positions of their critical ideologies to relegate theory to a minor position in their debates. During 1968 the I.S. `political' program was given a strong test prematurely, before it was beyond its theoretical stage - what we could call loosely its `laboratory period'. The comparison may be difficult to sustain this - but perhaps we have witnessed similar problems recently with the student democracy movement in Beijing .
3) Their methods of succession/ exclusion, a result of an over zealous (Leninist derived) practise of `democracy' or cell purity, lead to the exclusion, the forced resignation or `citing' of `successful' and/or `deviant' I.S. members, which resulted in the alienation of many members and a subsequent watering down of their original programs, thereby restricting the crucial terms and conditions of the debate. And this finally resulted in the disruption and premature (in this writer's view) termination of the movement. If they had been successful in their project(s) the dissolution (withering) of the Internationale would have occurred naturally. Unfortunately this was not to be the case.
4) The realisation also that they may have become too `successful'. As Christopher Gray, one of the English members excluded (December 1967) by the S.I. later wrote, with some irony.
The I.S... finally received the cultural accolade it had always dreaded; it entered the "heaven of the spectacle" by the scruff of the neck, and that was that.(37)
And yet the Situationist project, their criticisms of monopoly capitalism and society of the spectacle (and state communism) are still current. A close reading of their texts shows them to be cognisant of the issues which still confront the culture producers of today. The I.S. text's are not too far removed from those of Burger, Jameson and others of the late 1970's and 1980's which suggest that the absorption/co-optation dynamic of consumer capitalism quickly renders most forms of autonomous avant-garde activity impotent. The failure of the Situationists to supercede the limitations of their own critique or at least their own organisation, however, should not deter us from the recuperation/redemption of some aspects of their revolutionary program which are still tenable today.
By way of a conclusion: (preliminary notes toward recuperation).
It is important to reflect on the historical relationships between the avant-garde projects of the I.S. and those of the other historical avant-gardes throughout the first decades of the C20th, especially as so many of their formal innovations have been absorbed (often without acknowledgement or due deference) into the strategic formations of the neo-avant-gardes which have become, via a process of institutionalisation, the daily staple of academic courses, to give but one instance, in the theory and practice of so-called experimental film. Today academics are more likely to be discussing Godards' techniques than those of Isou, Lemaitre, and Debord's from which, it can be argued, they derive. Similarly students of the avant-garde are more likely to read Baudrillard for a political economy of the sign (the collapsing of political economy into the sign), than they are to examine the roots of his theoretical critique in Freud, Marx, Lefebvre and Debord. There is a certain expediency - a political unconsciousness - in this denial of intellectual and social/political history.
Today many of the same issues are being hotly debated: the death of the avant-garde, the social and political efficacy of art, the cinema, the roles of the artist/author, the audience/spectator; abstraction versus materialism, experimentalism versus conventionalism; Hollywood's commercialism; the mass media, arts and the artists autonomy etc. etc? - even if today these questions have been invigorated and reformulated with feminism, phenomenology, scrubbed with semiology and pyschoanalysis and polished with alternative post-structuralist theories of the subject. But perhaps the ascendancy of the subject has merely delayed the praxiological necessity of the resolution of these political questions, which in truth, may have already been answered.
It is perhaps appropriate to return to Debord for our
contemporary `end' note. In the final moments of his detourned documentary "On the passage of a few persons through a rather brief period of time" (1959) Voice 2 suggests:
To really describe this era it would no doubt be necessary to show many other things. But what would be the point? Better to grasp the totality of what has been done and what remains to be done than to add more ruins to the old world of spectacle and of memories."(38)
Halifax , May 1990 (revised from original text Toronto , May 1989)
1. A shorter version of this paper was first presented at the International Experimental Film Congress, Toronto , May 1989
2. Vienet, R. "The Situationists and the New Forms of Action Against Politics and Art. in Situationist Anthology (ed) Knabb, Ken. Bureau of Public Secrets, Berkeley (1981) p 215
3. Several key texts detail the history of the Situationiste Internationale. These include: Marios, J-F.Histoire de l'internationale Stituationiste. Paris 1989; Raspaud; J-J and Voyer, J-P L'internationale Situationiste 1958-1969 Paris Editions Champ Libre 1972; Bandini, Mirella L'estetico , il Politico, Rome 1977. The Raspaud/Voyer text is a semi official history of the movement. It contains the full list of the 70 members from 16 countries France (13) Germany (11), Italy (9), Holland (7), England (6), Belgium (5), Denmark (4), Sweden (4), U.S. (3),Algeria (2), Congo , Hungary , Israel , Roumania , Tunisia and Venezuela with 1 member each. It also contains several indexes, bibliographies and a full list of the contents of the I.S. journal.
4. There is no single text on Situationist film theory per se. However several books exist which allow further exploration to be undertaken in this important area of situationist cultural and political theory. These include: Debord, G. Contre le Cinema Paris 1964 and this author's Oeuvres cinematographiques complete 1952-1978 Paris Editions Champ Libre 1978. For a general overview of Lettrist and Situationist films; the influence of Debord, Wolman and Lemaitres place within the recent history of French and international avant-garde cinema see: Noguez, Dominique. Eloge du cinema experimental Paris, Centre Georges Pompidou 1979; Noguez ,D.,Trente Ans de Cinema Experimental En France {1950-1980} Paris ARCEF and Centre Georges Pompidou 1982 as well as this author's Un Renaiassance Du Cinema: le cinema "underground" americain. Paris Klincksieck 1985. See also the texts listed in fn #2 above.
5. Debord withdrew his films from circulation in 1985. This protest action was taken as a result of the murder of his friend and patron Gerard Lebovici the film producer and editor of Editions Champ Libre, the publishing house for the I.S. In their reportage of the event, the Parisian press attempted to link Lebovici's death to the `associations' he and Debordpurportedly had with the French urban terrorist group Action Directe. Debord refuted these allegations in his Considerations sur l'assination de Gerard Lebovici. Paris 1983
Debord's many published statements revealing his antipathy toward the institution of cinema - "I have scarcely begun to make you understand that I don't intend to play the game"("Jecommence a peine a vous faire comprehendre que je ne veux pas jouer ce jeu-la") Critique of Separation 1961) were carried beyond mere rhetoric. Hopefully the renewed interest in the Situationistes both in Europe and North America and the forthcoming exhibit at the Beaubourg will encourage the showing of these and other key Situationiste works even if their unveiling has confirmed one of their worst fears, the total absorption of the movement into the culture of capitalism. I happen to believe that this is a necessary evil; in fact since 1969 it has already been accomplished. The issue now is to review what has occurred and recuperate what may be still valuable.
6. This is a term which the I.S. had problems with. The Marcusian affirmative gloss which it attained was not one which the I.S. wished to associate with their primary projects of negation. It is used here to acknowledge both the failures and successes of the I.S. project; in an attempt to restore, to recover or redeem those aspects of their project that were lost, not those which have been subsequently exhausted. In a crucial sense this re-establishes the original split within the I.S. membership between the cultural and the political projects which was never resolved.
7. Gray, C. Leaving the Twentieth century: The Incomplete Work of the Situatuationiste Internationale. London , Freefall Press Publications 1974, p 7
8. Guy Debord, La Societe du Spectacle Paris, Editions Champ Libre first published by Buchet-Castel 1967
9. ibid.
10. The influences on Debord's writings of Andre Breton, Jean-Paul Sartre, Georg Lukacs and Henri Lefebvre, particularly the texts of the last two authors mentioned: Lefebvre's Critique de la vie quotidienne Paris 1947 and Lukacs History and Class Consciousness (1922, 1960*, 1971) have been explored usefully by Peter Wollen in his recent essay The Situationist International N.L.R. March/April 1989. Wollen also explores the intellectual relationship between Asger Jorn and Debord.
* French translation by K. Axielos and J. Bois, Paris Les editions de Minuit 1960.
11. I have previously explored this notion with respect to the theory and practice of performance . See Barber, B. Notes Toward an adequate Interventionist [Performance] Practise The ACT Vol 1 No 1 winter/spring 1986 New York pp 14-24
12. op. cit.6 p13 from I.S. NO. 1, 1958 Knabb Anthology, op. cit. 1 The translation of this passage differs quite markedly in places. However, both retain the overall senses of the original. See the full collection of I.S. journals see International Situationiste 1958-1969 Paris 1975
13. op cit. 2 pp139-163
14. op cit 1 pp 8-14 quote p9.
15. For a general overview of deconstruction within post-structuralist theory see Dews, P. "The Logics of Disintegration: Post-Structuralist Thought and the Claims of Critical Theory"London , verso 1987. For a useful text on Derrida, see Norris, C. (ed) "Deconstruction and the interests of Theory" London, pinter and Norman 1988 and this authors "Deconstruction, postmodernism and the Visual Arts" London Academy Editions.
16. Burger ,P. Theory of the Avant-Garde trans. Michael Shaw, Foreward by Jochen Schulte-Sasse. Minneapolis , University of Minnesota Press 1984 p58
17. "Detournement as negation and prelude". This is the title of one of the texts in the I.S. journal see Knabb op cit 1 pp55-56 Prelude alludes to a certain `coming to consciousness', the "sublimnity" of comprehension.
18. See Derrida, J. "Fifty-two Aphorisms for a Foreward" and "Jacques Derrida In Discussion with Christopher Norris" in Benjamin, A., Cooke, C., and Papadakis, A "Deconstruction: Omnibus Volume" New York Rizzoli Academy Editions 1989 pp67-79
19. op.cit 1 pp45-46
20. ibid pp10-11
21. Benjamin, W. The Origin of the German Tragic Drama trans J. Osbourne London N.L.B. 1977 p166, quoted in Burger op cit. 14 p69
22. op cit 1 p 9
23. op cit 1 page 12 first published by Debord and Wolman, Gil. J in Les levres Nues #8 may 1956
24. For a comprehensive discussion of Debord's films and his place within the Situationist International see Thomas Y. Levin's essay Dismantling the Spectacle: The Cinema of Guy Debord in the recent catalogue accompanying the Pompidou Center retrospective exhibition of the I.S. February 21 1989-April 9 1989. The exhibition subsequently shown at the ICA in London and the ICA in Boston . see other essays by Ross D., et al in "on the Passage of a few people through a rather brief period of time: The Situationist International 1957-1972. MIT Press Cambridge Mass and London 1989
25. This act of insubordination to the hegemonic order of the cultural institution could be likened to several competing acts of cultural and political resistance. Politically they may be closer to Gandhi's pacifism than the more direct actions of the French resistance during the W.W. II
26. Debord, G. Oeuvres cinematographiques completes 1952-1978 p189
27. ibid p7
28. op cit 1 p287
29. In their list of individuals insulted by the I.S. (Raspaud and Voyer) Godard is listed 10 times. He is described as "L'enfant de mao et du Coca Cola, le plus con des suisses pro-chinois" op cit 2. p44
30. op cit 1 pp297-8
31. Vanaigem's full statement reads: "What the producers of happenings, pop art and sociodramas are now doing is concealing passivity by renewing the forms of spectacle participation and the variety of stereotypes" quoted in Williner, A. The Action Image of society: On Cultural Politicisation, London, tavistock 1970, p148, originally in Vaneigem, R. traite de savoir-faire a l'usage des jeunes generations, Paris Gallimard 1968
32. as well as Marx and Engel's The German Ideology (1845-6) and Oulines of a Critique of Political Economy (1844)
33. op cit 1 p33
34. This text can be considered an homage/revision of Debord's seminal text "The Situationist and the new forms of action in politics or Art" first published as a pamphlet in June 1963 See "On the passage of a few people through a breif moment of time: The Situationist International 1957-1972" Cambridge, Mass MIT Press catalogue Musee national d'art moderne, Paris , ICA London, ICA Boston. 1989-1990
35. ibid p 213
36. ibid p215
37. op cit 2. p15
38. op cit 1 p33 (1959)