Contra el cine. Obras cinematográficas completas (1952-1978)

Guy Debord called himself a filmmaker. In the brief biography published for the premiere of his film “The Society of the Spectacle” (1974), he presents himself in that way but without failing to underline the distance between what that activity meant in his particular case and the expected performances for a director. As is well known, Debord’s life was marked by cinema and by the will to deny it in every possible way, “with and against cinema”, as was the title of one of his articles in the Internationale Situationniste magazine. His first public action was the projection of a film without images, and his last was to deprive the world of the possibility of seeing his films, something that actually happened during the end of his life. Even the work with which he is most associated, “The Society of the Spectacle”, before becoming a book, was a film project “of a new genre”. If today we can paradoxically speak of the subway influence of Debord’s filmic work, which fed both the nouvelle vague and the practices of militant cinema and video activism from the seventies to the present, it is not because he aspired to carve out such a position for himself in the history of artistic forms. Quite the contrary: if anything characterized this reluctant incursion, it was the will to destroy cinema by its own means: that the plundering of reality practiced by the camera be replaced by the plundering of recontextualized images in a new montage.