Guy Debord: Panegyric

Guy Debord (1931-1994) was the leading light in the Situationist International. He and the group were the first to criticize and comment on the role of the consumer in Western society. If Dada was an artistic movement that somehow pushed its artistic values into the political arena, then the Situationists were political and urban theorists who transformed politics into an art form. Debord’s masterpiece "Society of the Spectacle" is a stunning and witty critique on contemporary society where the workweek and consumerism alienate the individual. "Considerations on the Assassination of Gerard Lebovici" is a book-length rant and a confrontational stance against the French media with regards to the murder of his good friend and financial supporter Gerard Lebovici. In 1984 Lebovici was called away from an appointment and three days later the police found his body behind the steering wheel of his Renault with four bullet wounds to the back of his head, in a vacant parking lot in Paris. Lebovici was an inventive businessman, movie producer, publisher, and a major financial supporter of Situationist activity -including ownership of a movie theater that screened the films of Debord and other Situationists. It's suspected that gangsters killed Lebovici, although to this day the murderer(s) have never been found. That didn't stop certain groups in the media connecting Lebovici's death with the Situationists. In this passionate rebuttal, Debord lashes out with great humor and intensity against the media and defends his good friend Gerard Lebovici. This book should not be seen as an account of an isolated, almost forgotten murder case, but as a general call-to-arms with respect to how the media controls and rewrites its ‘facts’.

Guy Debord (1931-1994) was the most influential member of the Situationist International, the avant-garde group that triggered the May 1968 revolt in France. His book The Society of the Spectacle is by some considered the most important theoretical book of the twentieth century. But while Debord's written work is some of the most notorious in the world of political and cultural radicality, deemed "the cornerstone cliché of postmodernism," his films have until now remained tantalizingly inaccessible. After being withdrawn from circulation for nearly two decades (by Debord himself, to call attention to the 1984 assassination of the producer of the films, Gerard Lebovici), all six films were featured in a special "Guy Debord Retrospective" at the 2001 Venice Film Festival and re-released in France in 2002. The most famous of the films is Debord's cinematic adaptation of his own book, The Society of the Spectacle. As passages from the book are read in voiceover the text is illuminated, via direct illustration or various types of ironic contrast, by clips from Russian and Hollywood features (Potemkin, For Whom the Bell Tolls, Johnny Guitar, etc.), TV commercials, softcore porn, newsreels, and documentary footage. Some of the other films evoke Debord's adventures in the bohemian underworld of Paris during the 1950s, and in others Debord attacks the film medium itself, directly challenging the viewer by critiquing the traditional separation of spectacle and spectator. Ken Knabb's translation of Debord's Complete Cinematic Works accompanies the long-awaited English versions of these film.The scripts are illustrated with 62 stills, and Debord's own annotations help elucidate the subtleties of these astonishing works, which are like nothing else in cinema history. Paperback edition. AK Press, ISBN 1-902593-83-9