But within this framing, content and dimensionality are provided by recent history, and in particular by the widespread rioting of 2005 that thrust these under-imagined locales on to TV screens worldwide. The mental picture the non-Parisian has of the city's banlieues is framed by the fictive: gangster movies such as La Haine, or TV cop shows such as Spiral that do battle with similar Danish, Swedish, British and, of course, American vehicles, in a race to see which can sandblast its respective society with the greatest quantity of grit. But this was just outside the Saint-Gratien RER station, north of the rundown riverine port of Gennevilliers, on the outer whorl of the Parisian fingerprint and the tent – which had the limp-wristed bough of an evergreen touching its flysheet in benediction – was quite clearly being lived in. It looked tidily enough done suitable perhaps for a summer rock festival. The Society of the Spectacle from Icarus Films on Vimeo.A small green tent was pitched on the small daisy-spotted patch of greenish grass. Albertine Cinémathèque is a program of Villa Albertine and FACE Foundation with the support of the CNC (Centre National du Cinéma et de l’Image Animée) and the Fonds Culturel Franco-Américain. The Society of the Spectacle can be viewed simply as an artifact of a particular moment in French and Western modern history in the aftermath of May 1968, but it remains a potent and at times exhilarating Marxist critique of contemporary society and of the power of the image untethered from its original context. Debord, with his stream-of-conscious delivery and irreverent, free-associative pacing, seems determined to both undercut viewers’ expectations while simultaneously drawing them in to his totalizing vision, allowing the viewer to extrapolate his theories into the present day.
In the nearly five decades since it was released, the issues raised in The Society of the Spectacle have become even more entrenched, especially here in the United States.
Capitalism, mass-marketing and consumer culture are here critiqued for its creation of an alienation so all-encompassing, even revolution may seem futile. Using the classic Situationist technique of détournement, Debord overlays a dizzying array of still and moving images with text from his book, the result of which is a kind of organized chaos that provides a sharp commentary on a world dominated by image and power. Six years after the publication of his Situationist classic The Society of the Spectacle, Guy Debord released this experimental essay-film adaptation of his own book. Image from the film THE SOCIETY OF THE SPECTACLE
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