Inhalte(1)
Images are fragmented from reality like empty hulls, and become filled with false meaning. It is necessary to destroy memory in art, says Debord's melancholy voiceover. And yet – the photographs of friends' unconscious body language and above all her face repeatedly emerging from the series of public images give the film a melancholy yearning for lost meaning. (Ji.hlava International Documentary Film Festival)
(mehr)Kritiken (1)
Here, the Marxist-oriented Debord anticipates many aspects of his most famous work "The Society of the Spectacle": separation = alienation of the ruling modern society from economy to politics to art, fragmentation of the whole person/society into a powerless passive spectator of their own history or films and an almighty fetishistic image of their own power, opposing it as a foreign demobilizing force, offering the illusion of joy and life in exchange for the inactive hypnotization of the individual by the product of their own forces. Films and images simultaneously take on the role of Feuerbach's God, in which the best of man and his revolution have become alienated, as well as the palliative function of modern opium for the people, enabling a peaceful life instead of a tumultuous life of freedom, revolution, and history, which are also distorted and misrepresented at the same time by the evening news and action films. /// Before becoming one of the main exponents of Situationist International, Debord was a member of Letterist International. Lettrism, already through Isidore Isou and his Venom and Eternity (1951), had a great influence on the new generation of (not only) French filmmakers, and his discontinuous montage and critique of traditional art and film image had an obvious influence on Debord as well (who made his first film as a Lettrist in 1952). Conversely, Debord's work is a link to modern film essays by Chris Marker or Jean-Luc Godard.
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