Guy Debord

Guy Debord, founder of the Situationist International, fomenter of the May 1968 revolt in France, and author of The Society of the Spectacle, was also the creator of six tantalizingly inaccessible films. Technically and aesthetically, these films are among the most brilliantly innovative works in the history of the cinema. But they are not so much “works of art” as carefully calculated subversive provocations.

Following the still-unsolved Mafia-style assassination of the films’ financer and producer in 1984, all the films were withdrawn from circulation for nearly twenty years. One of the films is an adaptation of Debord’s book The Society of the Spectacle. Others evoke his adventures in the bohemian underworld of 1950s Paris, which he contrasts with the increasingly ignorant, ugly, and alienated world that has since been produced by modern capitalism. In each case Debord simultaneously attacks the film medium itself, challenging spectators to create their own adventures instead of passively consuming the pseudo-adventures that are presented to them.

Ken Knabb’s meticulous translation of all the filmscripts (which Debord’s widow Alice asked him to make to accompany the long-awaited rerelease of the films, beginning with a complete retrospective at the Venice Film Festival) is supplemented with numerous illustrations and documents and elucidated by extensive annotations. For this new edition Knabb has revised the translations, updated the filmography, and added the scathing video that Debord made shortly before his death: Guy Debord, His Art and His Time.

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