Pirate Cinema 1
Jan. 4, 2009 - Jan. 5, 2009
Sunday, January 4, 2009!
7 pm - 10 pm
at CAMP rooftop.
7 pm - 10 pm
at CAMP rooftop.
Can Dialectics Break Bricks?
1973, 82 min
Guy Debord
The Society of the Spectacle
1973, 87 min
René Vienet
The Girls of Kamaré
F 1974
87 min, 600 MB
take-away
Guy Debord
In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni
F 1978
95 min, 700 MB
()
To screen the films of the Situationists as "classics" is not intended to imply
that they had been seen much, nor that their politics had been, in any common
meaning of that term, victorious. It's just to acknowledge that their form -
take a given film and change its dialogues to make it tell a different story
(Vienet), take a given book and plunder the archives of cinema to turn it into a
movie (Debord) - has become commonplace. This is exactly the type of material
one would expect to find on YouTube - only that the general populace of YouTube
seems to be slightly less ambitious, or somewhat more invested in forms of
politics they "can believe in", that they don't have to personally invent, test,
correct, apply, improve, or make complicated historical films about, since these
politics are victorious by definition, and no longer subject to dialectics.
In 1973, dialectics could break bricks, and that's only one of the many wonders
of situationist cinema. Since both films promote revolutionary class struggle,
with the blunt (Vienet) or subtle (Debord) irony that is needed for this task,
there is a lot of fighting going on, either martial arts (Vienet) or cavalry
(Debord), and if these fighting sequences, today, appear to be too long, then
one can be assured that they would have been even longer, had there only been
more material, or more actual occurrences of dialectical materialism in action.
In terms of historical accuracy, it's hard to beat situationist cinema's action
sequences, even though some of the historical references are less obvious than
they used to be, and some of the political inside jokes have aged better than
others. While the Situationists, in 1973, had no illusions about the function of
the unions, the same statement can't be made with regards to the function of the
orgasm. In that sense, there is room for improvement, on YouTube or elsewhere.
Further reading:
Guy Debord, The Situationists and the New Forms of Action in Politics and Art,
1963, http://www.piratecinema.org/textz
René Vienet, The Situationists and the New Forms of Action Against Politics and
Art, 1967, http://www.piratecinema.org/textz
that they had been seen much, nor that their politics had been, in any common
meaning of that term, victorious. It's just to acknowledge that their form -
take a given film and change its dialogues to make it tell a different story
(Vienet), take a given book and plunder the archives of cinema to turn it into a
movie (Debord) - has become commonplace. This is exactly the type of material
one would expect to find on YouTube - only that the general populace of YouTube
seems to be slightly less ambitious, or somewhat more invested in forms of
politics they "can believe in", that they don't have to personally invent, test,
correct, apply, improve, or make complicated historical films about, since these
politics are victorious by definition, and no longer subject to dialectics.
In 1973, dialectics could break bricks, and that's only one of the many wonders
of situationist cinema. Since both films promote revolutionary class struggle,
with the blunt (Vienet) or subtle (Debord) irony that is needed for this task,
there is a lot of fighting going on, either martial arts (Vienet) or cavalry
(Debord), and if these fighting sequences, today, appear to be too long, then
one can be assured that they would have been even longer, had there only been
more material, or more actual occurrences of dialectical materialism in action.
In terms of historical accuracy, it's hard to beat situationist cinema's action
sequences, even though some of the historical references are less obvious than
they used to be, and some of the political inside jokes have aged better than
others. While the Situationists, in 1973, had no illusions about the function of
the unions, the same statement can't be made with regards to the function of the
orgasm. In that sense, there is room for improvement, on YouTube or elsewhere.
Further reading:
Guy Debord, The Situationists and the New Forms of Action in Politics and Art,
1963, http://www.piratecinema.org/textz
René Vienet, The Situationists and the New Forms of Action Against Politics and
Art, 1967, http://www.piratecinema.org/textz
