The Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord (1973) dub fr sub eng
La Société du
Spectacle (
Society of the Spectacle) is a black and white
1973 film by the
Situationist Guy Debord based on his 1967 book of the same title. It was
Debord's first feature-length film. It uses found footage and detournement in a radical criticism of mass marketing and its role in the alienation of modern society.
The 88 minute film took a year to make and incorporates footage from feature films, industrial films, news footage, advertisements, and still photographs.[1] The films include
The Battleship Potemkin, October,
Chapaev,
The New Babylon,
The Shanghai Gesture,
For Whom the Bell Tolls,
Rio Grande, They Died with Their
Boots On,
Johnny Guitar, and
Mr. Arkadin, as well as other
Soviet films.
Events such as the murder of
Lee Harvey Oswald (who assassinated
U.S. President John F. Kennedy in
1963), the
Spanish Civil War of 1936-1939, the
1956 Hungarian Revolution and the
Paris riots in
May 1968 are represented, and people such as
Mao Zedong,
Richard Nixon and the
Spanish anarchist Durruti.
Throughout the movie, there is both a voiceover (of Debord) and inter-titles from
The Society of the Spectacle but also texts from the
1968 Occupation Committee of the Sorbonne,
Machiavelli,
Marx,
Tocqueville,
Émile Pouget, and Soloviev.
Without citations, these quotes are hard to decipher, especially with the subtitles (which exist even in the
French version) but that is part of Debord's goal "to problematize reception" (Greil and Sanborn) and force the viewer to be active. In addition, the words of some of the authors are detourned through deliberate misquoting.
In
1984, Debord withdrew his films from circulation because of the negative press and the assassination of his friend and patron
Gerard Lebovici. Since Debord's suicide in
1994, Debord's wife
Alice Becker-Ho has been promoting Debord's film. A
DVD box set titled Guy Debord: Oeuvres cinématographiques complètes came out in
2005 and contains Debord's seven films.
The cover of the film is derived from a photo of
Life magazine photographer
J. R. Eyerman.
On
November 26,
1952, at the
Paramount Theatre (Oakland,
California), took place the premiere screening of film
Bwana Devil, by
Arch Oboler, the first full-length, color 3D (aka '
Natural Vision') motion picture. Eyerman took a series of photo of the audience wearing
3D glasses.
Life magazine used one of the photos as the cover of a brochure about the 1946-1955 decade.
The photo employed by Debord shows the audience in "a virtually trance-like state of absorption, their faces grim, their lips pursed;" however, in the one chosen by
Life, "the spectators are laughing, their expressions of hilarity conveying the pleasure of an uproarious, active spectatorship."Debord version is also flipped left to right, and cropped.
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"The integration of Debord's world with mass media culture became a running motif climaxing with "The Society of the Spectacle". Debord wrote the book The Society of the Spectacle before writing the movie. When asked why he made the book into a movie, Debord said, "I don't understand why this surprised people. The book was already written like a script". Debord's last film, "Son
Art et Son Temps", was not produced during his lifetime. It worked as a final statement where Debord recounted his works and a cultural documentary of "his time"."
wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guy_Debord