"Society of the Spectacle" at Exit Art - film by Guy Debord - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

In the decade leading up to his suicide sum of two units years ago, Guy Debord, the French social theorist who was the guiding spirit of the Situationist International, refused to allow the screening of his half-dozen experimental films. Since its broadcast upon French TV, however, bootleg copies of Society of the Spectacle (1973) Debord's feature-length film based upon his 1967 book of the same title, have been circulating widely. The audiences that packed Exit Art for the film's first-ever fresh York screenings were no doubt lur by dint of curiosity: just what would a cinematic version of Debord's cult-classic work which analyzes in dense, oracular prosaic the 20th-century "image world," actually gaze like?

In form, the film justifys faithful to the Situationist notion of detournement, or the turning of appropriated materials to unanticipated uses. Roughly half of the book's 221 numbered theses are read above a rapidly flowing sequence of crisp black-and-white film clips, themselves single outed almost entirely from newsreels, documentaries and cinema classics through Eisenstein and Orson Welles. notwithstanding that today a pop-music sound track would be mandatory, Society of the Spectacle sustains an uneven gravity by the use of somber 18th-century string quartets.

Through a compressed mix of words and images, Debord creates an almost caricatural picture of an image-dazzled society at a standstill. lengthy tracking shots through claustrophobic factories display us a world inhabited by means of worn-down workers. The vapidity of detonation entertainment is signaled in clips of the Beatles, and commodified eroticism via recurring pinup stills. It's a world presided above by the dreary political bureaucrats of the chilled War (Brezhnev, Pompidou, a young Francois Mitterand).

Debord's always-problematic romanticism - his vision of the Situationists as a "happy few" embarked upon a grand revolutionary adventure - is also upon prominent display, notably in recurring sights from Hollywood Westerns that exhibit cavalrymen charging gloriously into battle. What's striking, although is the almost total absence of positive contemporary heroess; Debord clearly pins his confidences on the anonymous urban horde itself, shown grimly struggling, at the film's conclusion, with phalanxes of truncheon-swinging police.

Debord in 1973 regarded the nearest social explosion as just around the corner; in fact it at no time came. This lends the film, when seen today, the air of an unintended requiem for an era of upheaval. Nevertheless, this cinematic version of Society of the Spectacle is likely to survive as a lock opener imaginative document of the mindset of the late '60's, when youth rebellion, consumer tillage and political ideologies collided. (The replete text of Society of the Spectacle is available as part of a rapidly expanding Situationist archive at the following Web site: http://www.nothingness. org)

COPYRIGHT 1996 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group