Chronique d’un été, 1960. Dir. and Edgar Morin. Film still.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2007.1.26.6 by guest on 03 October 2021 Calling from the Inside: Filmic Topologies of the Everyday

TOM MCDONOUGH

We must, however, not forget that language has other functions than that of ensuring mutual understanding. —André Martinet, Éléments de linguistique générale (1960)

A small notice appeared in the arts and theater section of Parisian daily Le Monde on Thursday, October 19, 1961, announcing the opening of a new film, Chronique d’un été (Chronicle of a Summer), at the Agriculteurs cinema on the rue d’Athènes, just behind the Gare Saint-Lazare: “Jean Rouch—author of Moi, un noir and Pyramide humaine—and Edgar Morin have tried an experiment in ‘cinéma-vérité’ with some Parisians who talk without pretense about their pro- fessional and private life. This film won the Critics Award at the last Cannes Festival.”1 Behind this rather laconic notice lay one of the most widely discussed and influential documentary films of the decade. Ethnologist Jean Rouch, who had gained a significant reputation over the previous decade for his ever more ambitious films of African life (including the aforementioned Me, a Black Man of 1957 and Human Pyramid of 1959), joined sociologist Edgar Morin to pro- duce a study of what he called “this strange tribe living in Paris,” turning the ethnographic gaze back upon the métropole at the moment of decolonization. Filmgoers at the Agriculteurs would have seen images shot on the boulevards of Paris, not so different from those in the neighborhood where they now were sitting, images of other Parisians like themselves, stopped on the street and asked a curiously inchoate question: “Tell us, are you happy?” Chronique d’un été was a film, then, whose subject was everyday life itself, that rather unformed, amorphous daily existence and its imbrication with (or disjunction from) the broader world and the forces of history. And as such, it was by no means unique: at the same moment that Chronique was being filmed in Paris, Guy Debord was shooting his short film, Critique de la séparation (Critique of Separation), a pro- ject that he himself described as an “experimental documentary”2 He, too, was concerned with investigating everyday life at the ambiguous opening of this new decade, and his film also at least implicitly revolved around the question insistently posed in Rouch and Morin’s documentary: Are you happy? But the

Grey Room 26, Winter 2007, pp. 6–29. © 2007 Grey Room, Inc. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology 7

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2007.1.26.6 by guest on 03 October 2021 meaning of this question, and how it ultimately might be answered, differed profoundly from one film to the next; here, in close proximity the one with the other, we find two radically differing conceptions of the documentary form, of the possibilities for open dialogue and communication between its subjects, and finally of everyday life itself. This conjunction of concerns was by no means coincidental: Debord’s film was undoubtedly, among other things, a response to Chronique d’un été. We can be sure that he was aware of the project, since Morin had originally hoped to enlist Debord’s Situationist colleague Asger Jorn in the filming early in October 1960. (The majority of the film had been shot that summer, but Morin evidently wished to include a segment of Jorn in his Paris studio.) This was a wildly naive request on Morin’s part, because at that time the Situationists were engaged in a heated campaign of calumny against Arguments, the revisionist journal Morin coedited along with several other colleagues; given that Debord was derisive of the entire milieu, there was no chance of Jorn accepting the offer. The latter’s curt refusal led to a brief but bitter campaign of accusation and counteraccusation between the two groups (revolving, as always, around claims of plagiarism), but what is most significant is the certainty that Debord, at the time he was shoot- ing his Critique, was informed of Rouch and Morin’s ambition to create, as he described it, “a film on the everyday life of the French.”3 And despite his dis- dain for the latter, one imagines that Debord could not help but have been curious about the planned film, not least because of Rouch’s involvement. Although our knowledge of Debord’s filmic interests is at best imprecise, his admiration for the anthropologist-filmmaker is undeniable: next to the films of his Lettrist colleagues, Rouch’s cinematic work was the only one of the 1950s singled out for praise by the Situationists.4 But there is one final intersection between Debord and Chronique that should be mentioned: at least one of the participants in the film (Jacques Mothet, who appeared only very briefly) was a member of the post-Trotskyite group Socialisme ou Barbarie with which Debord was collaborating rather intensely at the time, so here too we find an intriguing intersection at the moment of the production of the two films.5 But these fugitive connections, however interesting, are not at the heart of my subject here. My claim is not merely that Debord knew of Chronique d’un été, but that his own “experimental documentary” can be understood only if we see it as a refutation of this other film and the entire project of which it was a part— as, that is, a radically different vision of docu- mentary and a radically different analysis of

Guy Debord at the shooting of Critique de la separation, 1960.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2007.1.26.6 by guest on 03 October 2021 “the everyday life of the French.” Now the idea of a new documentary form was much in the air at the time, not least thanks to the publication in January 1960 of Morin’s article “For a New Cinéma-Vérité,” a report on the International Festival of Ethnographic Film held in Florence. Both Morin and Rouch had been mem- bers of the jury, and the former’s essay seems to have been a development from conversations held at that time. Here the sociologist called for a documentary cinema that would capture “the authenticity of life as it is lived,” or “the depth of everyday life as it is really lived.”6 In the past, Morin contended, documen- tary had ceded these realms to the more sensitive explorations of fictional film, contenting itself with the examination of the individual’s milieu, his or her external relations within industrial or agricultural labor, the role of modern technology, the experience of the mass. But now he demanded that documen- tary “reinterrogate man [sic] by means of cinema” via the integration of an ethnographic model of participant observation, the filmmaker united in the closest possible contact with his or her subjects. His exemplar of this new cinéma-vérité was Rouch who, “equipped only with a 16mm camera and a tape recorder slung across his shoulders,” had abandoned the heavy appurtenances of the film direc- tor and could immerse himself in a given community like a scuba diver explor- ing some exotic undersea world.7 It only remained for future explorers to turn this ethnographic eye from African society to the contemporary West, to “workers, the petite bourgeoisie, the petty bureaucrats, . . . the men and women of our enormous cities.” What was the aim of this new documentary that wished, as Morin wrote, “to penetrate beyond appearances, beyond defenses, to enter the unknown world of everyday life?” Nothing less than the abolition of separation, “breaking the membrane that isolates each of us from others in the metro, on the street, or on the stairway of the apartment building.” Documentary would become “a ‘cinema of brotherhood.’”8 Chronique d’un été was meant to be the realization of this manifesto, what Morin called a “sociological fresco” of Paris during the summer of 1960, when the Algerian War was believed to be in its final chapter. (The war would, in fact, drag on for two more years.) For its creators the film began as a desire to elucidate the unexplored “depths” of private life of which Morin had spoken in his cinéma-vérité essay; they would inquire after not only the sociological bases of the private sphere (housing, work, leisure), but also its existential profundi- ties, “the style of life, the attitude people have toward themselves and toward others, their means of conceiving their most profound problems and the solu- tions to those problems,” as Morin later described it.9 The echoes between this program and that of Henri Lefebvre, the greatest theorist of everyday life as a philosophical category and Morin’s close colleague at Arguments, are unmis-

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2007.1.26.6 by guest on 03 October 2021 takable. What they both shared was an awareness of the very obscurity of the subject in question; when Lefebvre had returned to write the lengthy foreword to the second edition of his Critique of Everyday Life in 1958, he was compelled to confess “a certain obscurity in the very concept of everyday life. Where is it to be found?” he wrote: In work or in leisure? In family life and in moments “lived” outside of culture? Initially the answer seems obvious. Everyday life involves all three elements, all three aspects. It is their unity and their totality, and it determines the concrete individual. And yet this answer is not entirely satisfactory.10 Indeed, Lefebvre’s recognition that “for the historian of a specific period, for the ethnographer, for the sociologist studying a society or a group, the fundamental question would be to grasp a certain quality, difficult to define and yet essential and concrete,” could well stand as the coda to Chronique, this film which was made precisely through the collaboration of a sociologist and an ethnographer.11 Rouch and Morin would evolve certain procedures in order to penetrate that obscurity and access the difficult-to-define quality of everyday life. Notably they sought “psychoanalytic stimulants” that might enable participants to talk about subjects they would normally be unwilling or unable to discuss. Morin had already broached this question in his 1960 essay, in which he wrote of partici- pants in this new documentary form playing out their lives before the filmmaker in a game that “has the value of psychoanalytic truth, that is to say, precisely that which is hidden or repressed comes to the surface in these roles.”12 In Chronique both he and Rouch were avowed participants, provocateurs really, challenging their subjects with questions, hoping to precipitate a crisis—some- times with startling success. The camera acted as a “catalyst,” an “accelerator,” provoking its subjects to reveal themselves under circumstances that, while entirely artificial, were supposed to have the paradoxical effect of bringing hid- den truths to the surface. Even contemporary viewers recognized the innovative

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2007.1.26.6 by guest on 03 October 2021 quality of this approach; Le Monde’s film critic noted how the central figures in Chronique managed thereby to tackle “some of the key problems of our time”: Disgust with an occupational universe become inhuman, and nostalgia for a job “you could take an interest in”; obsessive fear (in the Jewish woman) of certain memories; difficulty in accepting a complete sexual freedom; temptation of a peace of mind without responsibility or rebellion in the student; a casual “difficulté d’être”; fear of loneliness; a confused wish for love and brotherhood: such are the main themes that can be drawn from this succession of “spontaneous” confessions.13 In the intervening decades, this inscription of the camera into the film text has become banal (if not sinister), but at the time of Chronique’s release in 1961 it was nothing short of astonishing (the same reviewer in Le Monde spoke repeat- edly of the “shamelessness” of the film and its subjects) and appeared to offer an unprecedented window into the otherwise opaque daily lives of those filmed. The camera became a sort of surrogate analyst or father-confessor, coaxing and sometimes forcing a discourse of truth from its subjects, a technology of vision become a technology of self. Defenders of Rouch’s work have often returned to this conception of the cam- era as provocateur, as an assertive presence in the filmic event whose role was stressed and which in fact ceased to be a mere technical obstacle (as it was thought to be in most ethnographic filmmaking, which had attempted to hide the work of the camera and microphone) and became instead the primary pre- text for the subject’s revelation of self.14 But the status of the technological appa- ratus in Rouch’s film is notably unstable. One of the great myths that grew around Chronique d’un été was that of its experimentation with new camera technology: shooting had begun with Raoul Coutard (Godard’s cameraman for À bout de souffle, 1959, and subsequent films) using a standard Arriflex, but when even this relatively portable 16 mm camera proved too bulky, Rouch brought in the Quebecois documentarist , who had extensive experience with handheld camera technology. With the help of a technician at the Eclair camera factory, they were able to use an experimental piece of equipment that was light, silent, highly portable, and outfitted with synch sound (a prototype of the KMT Coutant-Mathot Eclair, originally developed for satellite and military surveil- lance use). This camera allowed the film crew to operate freely on the streets of Paris, to move about while filming and capture its subjects in the midst of their daily activities: it was the technological basis of this new cinéma-vérité. But this technology, this camera-work, had a paradoxical effect: if the visible presence of the camera had a provocative effect on participants in the film, it was also at

Chronique d’un été, 1960. Dir. Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin. Film still.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2007.1.26.6 by guest on 03 October 2021 the same time curiously invisible. Miniaturization, portability, and the like was a means of hiding the work of the camera and microphone, of seeming to restitute the lived in a raw manner and eliminating any intervention of the filmmaker and his technique. Viewers are subject to what has been called a “natural language” of cinema, in which film is figured as a duplicate of a pro-filmic “reality.” This entailed precisely a repression of the work of signification, in favor of “the preservation of the homogeneous nature of reality which can be easily and unproblematically rendered visible.”15 Chronique d’un été occupied an uneasy ground between this conception of film as evidence and a recognition of film as text, as in other words a semiotic activity that produced and not merely reflected meaning. Something of Rouch’s ambivalence can be sensed in his attitude toward Dziga Vertov. The term cinéma-vérité was itself an homage to the Soviet filmmaker, a translation of his term kino-pravda (film-truth), and discussions of Chronique often reference his (1929) and its reflexive docu- mentary practice as a precedent for the later film.16 But the alignment of these practices cannot hold: at the most basic level, Vertov’s practice had depended crucially on experiments with montage, while Rouch’s valorization of the direct transcription of reality could only conceive of montage as a formalist distortion, a dead end. Indeed Rouch’s version of Vertov renaturalized his kino-eye, the mechanized eye of the camera, as a sort of synthesis of the human eye and its technological prosthesis that produced a greater humanity as well as a greater objectivity.17 Rather than a tool in ideological struggle (in which montage was the site of a contestation of meaning), the camera was thought of as an innocent, neutral instrument (“a mirror, and also a window open to the outside,” as Rouch once remarked)18 that was in fact the site of production of the most spontaneous ideology, that of a metaphysics of reality.

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But just what was this reality that Rouch and Morin set out to “explore” with the help of their novel documentary techniques, their noiseless mobile cameras and convivial interview style? Perhaps the question is best answered by saying that they conceived reality in essentially Freudian terms. We will recall that Freud had presupposed the existence of two real and unknown worlds—one exterior, the other psychic, interior—and, relying upon Kant, had rejoiced at the conclusion that, of the two, only interior reality stood a chance of being under- stood.19 Even if Freud, at the end of his life, would arrive at a rather different conception of this partition of interior-exterior (whereby the psychic apparatus

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2007.1.26.6 by guest on 03 October 2021 extended into space, and space in its turn was the projection of this appara- tus),20 his work and that of his followers remained encumbered by this ineradi- cable intuition that psychic life was an inside delimited by a surface (the skin) turned toward exterior reality. Rouch and Morin would adopt an identical perspective, in that Chronique d’un été superimposed the topography of the Freudian unconscious on that of the Lefebvrian everyday. Like analysts before their patient, they hoped to coax out the mysteries of this peculiarly social unconscious—the lived experience of Parisians circa 1960. And in fact the dif- ficulties encountered in this project seem to stem from the fact that in order to grasp this fundamentally elusive unconscious, one needed a device that, while external to it, was simultaneously dependent upon and responsive to the conditions of that very internal realm. For Freud this had of course been the psy- choanalytic experience itself; for the filmmakers it was the technique of cinéma vérité, with its various “stimulants” to revelation. Here, in their interviewing methods as in the analytic relation, the two apparently separate worlds inter- penetrated in the crossed form of a chiasma joining the subject’s desire to that of Rouch and Morin themselves: “the border is so large that it absorbs the two worlds that it separates.”21 The filmstrip marked the frontier of those two worlds: that, on the one hand, of the supposedly neutral scientific researchers behind the camera; and that, on the other hand, of their subjects, loci of everydayness, who are filmed. But as in the analytic experience, that clear topography of interior/exterior was continually troubled by Rouch and Morin’s filmic dispositif, by their need to precisely break down the boundaries separating investigator from object. Indeed the techniques they pioneered in Chronique d’un été unavoidably constructed a filmstrip/ border broad enough to encompass both the worlds that the camera had of neces- sity to separate. But cinéma vérité both summoned forth that confusion, that mutual desire of analyst and analysand, and simultaneously disavowed it: Chronique, symptomatically, concluded with a scene of the two filmmakers walking through the Musée de l’Homme and discussing the outcome of the pro- ject, reinscribing its authors’ status as dispassionate observers and a stable topography of the division of worlds. But to this duality of Freudian realities we might counterpose a Lacanian topology that brings into play rather more precise relations. As J.-D. Nasio has written, “in place of two realities, it is a question of one alone, uniform, without partition,” and it is this psychoanalytic reality that topology tries to take into account.22 So Freud’s conception of a clash and interference between two worlds and their respective languages is abandoned. That which replaces it is suggested in Lacan’s extension and alteration of Plato’s allegory of the cave:

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2007.1.26.6 by guest on 03 October 2021 The place in question is the entrance to the cave, towards the exit of which Plato guides us, while one imagines seeing the psychoanalyst entering there. But things are not that easy, as it is an entrance one can only reach just as it closes (the place will never be popular with tourists), and the only way for it to open up a bit is by calling from the inside.23

In other words, it is always closing time at the cave of the unconscious, and the only way of gaining access is to be inside already. In contrast to the clear border- line dividing interior from exterior in Freudian topography, Lacanian topology proposes a cave mouth that more closely resembles a Möbius strip, which has only one side and one surface. Interior and exterior no longer evoke heteroge- neous surfaces; rather the opposition between these two “worlds” has become internal to the circular structure of the topological object itself. Any analysis of the unconscious/everyday must position itself both within and outside this cave, eschewing the simplifying fictions of inclusion/exclusion that govern an earlier Freudian topography. To pursue Lacan’s analogy, the representation of the everyday occurs precisely at the mouth of the cave, at which the philoso- pher/revolutionary attempting to escape meets the psychoanalyst entreating entry: the mouth of the cave, characterized by its rapid opening and shutting (“what we have to account for is a gap, beat, or alternating suction . . .”),24 becomes the projector and screen onto which the everyday, the “unconscious” of official histories, enters into visibility even as it continually resists formalization. This would be a cinematic topology of the everyday, one that insisted on its own imbrication within the social and psychic structures it set out to represent, as against cinéma vérité’s metaphysical claim of a disinterested observation, premised on a belief in the evidential power of film.

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Debord’s Critique de la séparation opened with a trailer for itself that can only be characterized as a parody of this cinematic language. After images of a still photograph of a girl wearing a bikini (an image that had appeared earlier in the Internationale situationniste journal),25 a text frame (“Coming soon to this screen”), and a very brief glimpse of newsreel footage of a riot in the Belgian Congo, we are given a rather long traveling shot—apparently filmed out the window of an automobile—down the Boulevard Saint-Michel, past the Musée de Cluny and the intersection with the Boulevard Saint-Germain. Debord’s cinematographer, André Mrugalski, here made use of camera work that directly recalled that of Raoul Coutard in À bout de souffle (as well as, of course,

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2007.1.26.6 by guest on 03 October 2021 Chronique d’un été), and in this sequence one can in fact distinctly make out, on the eastern side of the boulevard, an awning with the name “RAOUL” printed in large letters—surely a coincidence, but still a remarkable index of its intended target!26 Exactly coinciding with this sequence was a voiceover by a woman of the following text, reciting the opening sentence of André Martinet’s foreword to his Éléments de linguistique générale (Elements of General Linguistics, 1960): “If we reflect how natural and advantageous it is for man to identify his language with reality, we shall appreciate how high a degree of sophistication had to be reached before he could dissociate them and make of each a separate object of study.”27 The same voice went on to narrate the credits for the film, which she described as a “documentary,” while a text frame exclaimed “REAL characters! An AUTHENTIC story!,” before the screen returned to another short segment from the Congo newsreel. This brief introductory sequence to Debord’s film was nothing if not a highly condensed critique of the premises of cinéma- vérité (with all its pretensions to spontaneity, rawness, instinctiveness, sincer- ity) and of any assumption of film as a “natural language” with a privileged, indexical relation to reality. The Martinet quote was deployed as an epigraph precisely to indicate the critical relation to be developed here between the film-text and pro-filmic “reality.” Each would become an object of study in this film in which any notion of the “real” or the “authentic” would be thrown into radical doubt through, above all else, the volatilization of the meaning of images and text in its use of montage. If Rouch and Morin had assumed a sort of transparency between their cine- matic language and reality, Chronique d’un été was underpinned to an even greater degree by the status accorded spoken language, which became its guar- antor of truth. Indeed the advances in synch sound technology of which they had taken advantage had allowed the film to be “about” nothing more than people talking. Yet what struck contemporary viewers was less the dialogue so much desired by the film’s two directors—less, that is, the moments in which communication might serve, as Martinet put it, “to establish contact,” to allow people “to enter into relations with one another”28—than those points in which communication broke down and gave way to incomprehension and inexpress- ibility in “certain gestures, certain tics, certain stammerings, and above all cer- tain silences.” This same reviewer remarked that “silences play a large role in Chronique d’un été. That of the two Black men learning the reason for the young Jewish woman’s tattoo, that of the secretary driven to the brink of hysteria, are overwhelming.”29 It was just these moments of confusion, however, the groping formulations, awkwardnesses, and silences of many of the participants in Chronique, that—within the economy of vérité filmmaking—functioned to anchor

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2007.1.26.6 by guest on 03 October 2021 the film all the more tenaciously in an objective reality and that attested to its spontaneous, unmediated relation to this truth. For stammering and uncertainty here always operated as a prelude to enlightenment, to the arrival at knowledge, whether of the external world or of oneself; it was always a spur to further speech on the subject’s part in an ongoing quest for an objective view. Critique de la séparation went further, placing in doubt the authority of its own subject of enunciation, the directorial commentary provided over the image track by the voice of Debord himself. He in fact opened with a confession of his own confu- sion, “we don’t know what to say,” an uncertainty that threatened to leave one mute and that hung, as it were, over the entire film.30 This sentiment would be reiterated, the film compared with “a blurry, drunken vision” (CCW, 36); at another point, Debord admitted on his voiceover that “none of this is very clear. It is a completely typical drunken monologue, with its incomprehensible allusions and its tiresome delivery. With its vain phrases that do not await response and its sententious explanations. And its silences” (CCW, 35). A subtitle in the closing moments seemed to capture the exasperation of the viewer subjected to this drunkard’s rant: “I didn’t understand all of it” (CCW, 39). Drunkenness, physical fatigue, the inability to “find the right word,” all were moments in which the communicative role of language broke down, as Martinet had pointed out in his book on linguistics.31 Yet this incomprehension, and the silences of Critique, differed fundamentally from those of the partici- pants in Chronique. If in the latter they had served as evidence for subjects’ unconscious (and unself-conscious) display of what they felt, of a kind of emo- tional truth that appeared unconcerned with the reactions of the film’s viewers, the structure of Debord’s film seemed to purposely foster this sense of bewil- derment. A simultaneous use of images, voiceover narration, and subtitling throughout the film made it particularly difficult to follow, made any straight- forward understanding elusive. And this was hardly inadvertent on Debord’s part; such a refusal of transparency has been described by Tom Levin as part of a double-edged “mimesis of incoherence,” “the deliberate staging of confusion as both a refusal of a false and reductive pseudo-coherence of (narrative) spec- tacle and as a reflection of the fundamental incoherence of the reality of late

Right and opposite: Critique de la separation, 1961. Dir. Guy Debord. Film still.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2007.1.26.6 by guest on 03 October 2021 capitalism.”32 Or, as Debord stated within the film itself, “the poverty of means is charged with expressing plainly the scandalous poverty of the subject” (CCW, 35, trans. modified). But we can, thanks to our preceding comments, make Levin’s invaluable analy- sis more precise, for Debord’s subject was not so much the incoherent reality of late capitalism as a whole, but rather (like Chronique) that of everyday life under such conditions. Critique was a film structured around “all that clandestinity of private life regarding which we possess nothing but pitiful documents” (CCW, 33, trans. modified). Debord’s language here was significant. If Rouch and Morin, as ethnographers of the contemporary urbanized West, sought to penetrate the depths of everyday life, to bring light to its mysterious abyssal foundations, Debord would insist on the contrary on its very impenetrability, on its resistance to representation. Critique opened precisely on a private note, with a tracking shot of Debord sitting with a group of people at a Left Bank café, the camera zooming in to focus on the director himself, deep in conversation with an attrac- tive young woman (played by Caroline Rittener, in what would appear to be her only cinematic performance) with whom he walks off. Rittener (who provided the voiceover for the trailer sequence) would reappear throughout Critique de la séparation as a representation of the lost object of desire, as an emblem of the failed attempt at “a more intense life that has not really been found” (as Debord remarked while she appeared on screen; CCW, 32, trans. modified), and as such she played a major role in the film’s thematics of loss and exhaustion, of the very impossibility of communication. That impossibility was indelibly linked with a specific experience of libidinal frustration: this incomprehension is ubiquitous in everyday encounters. Something must be stated precisely, but time is lacking, and we are not sure of having been understood. Before we have done, or said, what was necessary, we’ve already gone away. We’ve crossed the street. We’ve gone overseas. We can’t go back (CCW, 30, trans. modified). If the tendency in recent scholarship has been to see Critique as another instance of Debord’s melancholy poetics, as one more nostalgic reflection on his libertine

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2007.1.26.6 by guest on 03 October 2021 youth in Saint-Germain-des-Près,33 we might note that despite such references (and undoubtedly Critique was, at least in part, a mediated autobiographical study) the subject here was not one person’s private life, but the conditions under which that life was collectively experienced at this moment. Underlying the existential anxiety surrounding communication in this film lay a clear set of social determinants—determinants whose presence was already suggested in the passage just quoted, for if crossing the street was a subjective choice, going “overseas” in 1960 inevitably hinted at a less voluntary displacement: that of young conscripts being sent to fight in Algeria. In both Critique and Chronique, private life continually bled into a broader investigation of the sociopolitical conditions within which it was lived. Morin and Rouch’s interview subjects, for example, broached increasingly broad ques- tions regarding the contemporary political situation abroad (in particular, the colonial wars in Algeria and the Congo) and the blocked perspectives for trans- formation within France itself; despair, solitude, and boredom appeared as the dominant themes of many of the discussions recorded by the two directors. The result was a certain confusion, evident not only in the breakdowns of dialogue on camera, but also in the very conception of the project on the part of its makers, who seemed torn between creating a neutral, ethnographic document about “mankind” [sic] and, alternately, outlining a set of social positions from which a new, non-Stalinist Left might be articulated (hence the presence in the film of Socialisme ou Barbarie militants and a very young Régis Debray). But whereas in Chronique those sociopolitical conditions appeared haphazardly as it were, as disruptions of the directors’ original plans for the film that were in fact often the subject of resistance (on the part of Morin in particular), in Critique they were staged with deliberate intent as a means to precisely call into question the typical “coherence” of the documentary form, its didactic certainty, and its search for comprehension. Just after the film’s opening café sequence, Debord’s voice intoned, over a slow, 360-degree panoramic survey of the cityscape surrounding the terrain vague of the Plateau Saint-Merri (present-day site of the Beaubourg):

Right and opposite: Critique de la separation, 1961. Dir. Guy Debord. Film still.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2007.1.26.6 by guest on 03 October 2021 The cinematic spectacle has its rules that allow one to arrive at satisfactory products. However the reality from which one must start is dissatisfaction. The function of cinema is to present an isolated, false coherence, whether dramatic or documentary, as a substitute for an absent communication and activity. To demystify documentary cinema it is necessary to dissolve what is called its subject (CCW, 29–30, trans. modified).

Il faut dissoudre ce que l’on appelle son sujet. Debord played on the double meaning of the term “subject,” suggesting the need to break up both the care- fully circumscribed subject matter of the typical documentary film as well as its existential guarantor, the coherent ego of its author. So on one hand the rhythm of a documentary on “private life” would continually be interrupted by what seemingly lay at its very horizon—the public struggles of those “unknown men” [sic] (and here the screen showed images of rioting Congolese and of the Algerian revolutionary Djamila Bouhired)34 who would try to “live differently” (CCW, 34, trans. modified)—to the point where its ostensible subject was revealed to be just one aspect of a broader condition; namely, the imposition of a spec- tacular distance or separation between individuals and their ability to actively mold the lifeworld, whether on the personal or collective plane. If Chronique d’un été could also be said to have similarly (if inadvertently) exploded the doc- umentary form, Critique would go further and also, as we have seen, call into question the production of the authorial ego itself, to which both Rouch and Morin tenaciously clung as the sole foundation for coherence and unity remain- ing in their film. It is no coincidence that the panoramic view over the Plateau Saint-Merri in Critique was accompanied by subtitles that quoted the opening lines of Dante’s Inferno: “Midway upon the journey of our life / I found myself within a forest dark, / For the straightforward pathway had been lost.” The mean- ings are undoubtedly multiple (and once again overdetermined by a set of opaque autobiographical references), but at least two are worth noting here: first, that the quote functions as a confession of authorial impotence and a refusal of

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2007.1.26.6 by guest on 03 October 2021 any position of mastery and knowledge; and second, in the absence of any Virgilian guide, the subsequent film can lead its viewer only deeper into the obscurities of that forest dark. “At the extreme, unhappy subjectivity is reversed into a certain sort of objec- tivity: a documentary on the conditions of non-communication” (CCW, 36–37, trans. modified). Contrast this description of the project of Critique de la sépa- ration with Rouch and Morin’s project in Chronique d’un été, which depended precisely on fostering free dialogue among the participants as well as between them and the two directors. This was a film founded upon a faith in the possi- bility of open communication and the abolition of separations: “the authors themselves mingle with the characters,” Morin asserted; “there is not a moat on either side of the camera but free circulation and exchanges,” resulting in what he called “a psychodrama carried out collectively among authors and charac- ters.”35 The artificiality of the film studio was abandoned in favor of everyday settings, the rooms and apartments in which the participants lived; the cold interview format was replaced by the shared meal with its “atmosphere of cama- raderie,” all in the hope of making “each person’s reality emerge,” in search of a flash of the truth “which is hidden within us, beneath our petrified relation- ships.”36 The techniques of cinéma-vérité constituted an elaborate means by which representation could be conjured away, replaced by a fantasy of imme- diacy and reciprocity, and the camera become a tool, akin to the psychoanalyst’s couch, for fostering communication. Debord’s Critique sought, in contrast, to use the cinema reflexively as a means of analyzing the limitations of communi- cation both in social relations at large and within the medium itself. The film became, inevitably, an instance of the situation it endeavored to study. His “experimental documentary” held out a goal at the very opposite to that of Rouch and Morin’s search for what they called “commensality.” As one read in a sub- title within the film, it was part of a global attempt “to disturb everywhere the machinery of the existing false dialogue” (CCW, 36, trans. modified). The Debordian strategy of the mimesis of incoherence found an echo in other critical reflections on culture under the conditions of advanced capitalism. Lucien Goldmann, when asked by Raymond Bellour to respond to Chronique

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2007.1.26.6 by guest on 03 October 2021 d’un été for a special issue of the film journal Artsept, commented on the social limits of artistic coherence: Truth, realism, coherence and aesthetic unity are values whose attainment is not, these days, a simple problem of good faith, effort, talent, or even individual genius. It is also, in the first instance, the problem of the diffi- culties and limits which a cultural milieu brings to bear on the products of the mind.37 The question then became not the greater or lesser attainment of such classical values of the artwork, but the degree of reflexivity or self-consciousness with which one dealt with the inevitable failure of artistic communication today, with what Goldmann characterized as “the inherent difficulties of both socio- logical research and aesthetic creation in contemporary industrial society.”38 And here we may insist on the distinction to be drawn between the approach of Debord and that of Rouch and Morin, for the latter only inadvertently, as it were, admitted these difficulties into their film (which strained, as we have seen, to preserve its internal logic against the centrifugal tendencies of its subject matter), while the former situated them at the very heart of his project, to the extent that they became the very subject of this curious antidocumentary. Once again the notion of “separation” was central to this distinction. Rouch and Morin had set out, really rather naively, to abolish the separation between its participants in the name of immediacy and of brotherhood (an undertaking emblematized most forcefully perhaps by the scene in which Angelo, a factory worker, spoke with Landry, a student from West Africa), and deployed a naturalized language of cinematic realism in order to erase the marks of meaning production. Debord, however, operated with an altogether more intractable paradox: that a critique of separation in contemporary society required an analysis that insisted on separation—of viewer from film, of film from pro-filmic reality. This insistence on separation was evident even in the matter of cinematic technique, in the emphasis Debord would place on the “formalist” techniques of editing that Rouch had long spurned.39 “Separation” here implied montage (what the Situationists termed détourne- ment, to underline the acts of cultural theft it entailed), not merely as a kind of physical cutting but also as a method of distanciation, and, by implication, of mediation. Again Goldmann’s comments on Chronique d’un été seem apposite here: in questioning its use of “unguided or barely directed interviews and clinical conversations as means of access to the knowledge of human reality,” he noted:

Chronique d’un été, 1960. Dir. Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin. Film still.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2007.1.26.6 by guest on 03 October 2021 [T]he major methodological difficulty which was long since pointed out in the methodological works of Hegel and Marx: when it’s a question of human realities, the truth is never immediate, and anything which is immediate remains abstract and, for that very reason, stained by inexacti- tude as long as it is not inserted into the whole by a number of more or less large and complex mediations.40

At least some of the “incoherence” of Critique de la séparation owed to Debord’s attempts to incorporate just such “large and complex mediations” into any experiment in the representation of everyday life. Those mediations were in part visual—the appropriated images from which much of the picture-track was composed (comics, identity photos, newspaper clippings, excerpts and stills from other films)—and in part textual. Several of the subtitles that appeared during the course of the film referred back to the works of Marx, or to the Marxist analyses of SI, in distinct counterpoint to much of the audio track and filmed sequences.41 One in fact should remain cautious when discussing Debord’s deliberate incomprehensibility, because he himself insisted on a greater logic governing the arrangement of all the film’s components: “The relation between the images, the spoken commentary and the subtitles is neither com- plementary nor indifferent, but is intended to itself be critical” (CCW, 213). Nevertheless the experience of the viewer was undoubtedly one of confusion, faced with a film that consistently refused the normative redundancy of sound and image typically found in Hollywood cinema in favor of radical hetero- geneity—“written texts interrupt or are superimposed on images, subtitles are often accompanied by other texts read on the voice-over, and so on,” in what Tom Levin has aptly described as “a frontal attack on the conflation of the iconico-indexical signifiers of the cinema with reality.”42 And we might add that for every subtitle that referenced a philosophico-critical analysis, we find another that frankly expressed Debord’s own sentiments of incoherence, distance, and loss: Dante, as we have seen, but also Pascal (“Who would care to have as friend a man who talked like that? Who would choose him to be his confidant? Who would have recourse to him in affliction? And finally to what purpose in life could he be put?” CCW, 36, trans. modified),43 and Baudelaire (“already further away than India and than China,” CCW, 36, trans. modified).44 In these selections we should see neither one more instance of the Debordian canon of “classics,” nor an assertion of some essential private melancholy, as has become fashion- able in the last decade of exegesis, but rather a particular and deliberate image of everyday life that was being constructed in this film—an image that can stand in only the sharpest contrast to that of Chronique d’un été.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2007.1.26.6 by guest on 03 October 2021 To put the matter in the simplest of terms: if we can align Rouch and Morin’s project with the positions adumbrated by Lefebvre in his Critique of Everyday Life, as I have attempted here to do,45 we can also align Debord’s project with that of Georg Lukács—not, however, the work of the mature Lukács, the Lukács of History and Class Consciousness (which had just been translated into French and was being eagerly read by Debord at this time),46 but the work of the early Lukács, the Lukács of Soul and Form, and in particular of its famous last essay, “The Metaphysics of Tragedy.” It was here that he developed the contrast between absolute life, what he called “authentic life,” and relative life, “the concrete life of society” as lived in an empirical, corrupt, and corrupting world. At its heart, the tragedy stemmed precisely from the conflict between these two modes of living, between “the desire for personal fulfillment” and “reified objective real- ity.”47 This was the conflict that underlay Debord’s analysis of everyday life circa 1960 in Critique de la séparation, between “all the empty time, all the lost moments” (CCW, 30) of a meaningless daily existence and an ever elusive “more intense life” (CCW, 32), whether it be found in amorous adventure or radical sociopolitical transformation. The confusion of the film was a perfect mirror of what Lukács had termed the chiaroscuro of the everyday: Life is an anarchy of light and dark: nothing is ever completely fulfilled in life, nothing ever quite ends; new, confusing voices always mingle with the chorus of those that have been heard before. Everything flows, everything merges into another thing, and the mixture is uncontrolled and impure; everything is destroyed, everything is smashed, nothing ever flowers into real life [zum wirklichen Leben]. To live is to live something through to the end; but life means that nothing is ever fully and completely lived through to the end. Life is the most unreal and unliving of all conceivable existences.48 The sentiment, even the tone, are recognizably Debordian, and find expression throughout the film. But against this formless, unreal existence both Lukács and Debord hold out the possibility of a different life, glimpsed in fleeting moments of pure negation. “Suddenly there is a gleam, a lightning that illumines the banal paths of empirical life,” we read in Soul and Form: “something disturb- ing and seductive, dangerous and surprising; the accident, the great moment, the miracle; an enrichment and a confusion.”49 Debord spoke of something analogous, dreams in which the repressed of our social unconscious returned, dreams that he described as “flashes from the unresolved past, flashes that illu- minate moments previously lived in confusion and doubt. They provide a blunt revelation of our unfulfilled needs” (CCW, 33). So we see that the incommuni- cable in Debord’s film is even more complex than we first suspected: not only

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2007.1.26.6 by guest on 03 October 2021 the opacity of a reified everydayness in advanced capitalism, but also the uniqueness, the untranslatability of those moments when the absolute appears in the midst of the empirical world. Lukács, at this early moment of his career, had rejected the romantic vision of a reconciliation of the absolute with life, with the avant-garde project of turning life into poetry, and had insisted on a total rejection of the empirical world in favor of “a different life opposed to and exclusive of ordinary life.”50 And so, too, a half century later, did Debord, who refused Lefebvre’s “revolutionary romanticism” in favor of a more rigorous con- ception of negation that was a legitimate heir to the work of Lukács. But to call Critique de la séparation a “Lukácsian” film may at first seem anachronistic, given that his Seele und die Formen would not be translated into French for more than a decade.51 But all the relevant passages discussed above were in fact easily available to Debord, in a book we may be certain that he read at this time: in the 1950s Lukács’s early work had been rescued from oblivion by Lucien Goldmann, who wrote of the former’s tragic worldview in an essay of 1950 that was reprinted in his Recherches dialectiques of 1959.52 The work was celebrated, and obviously current in the beginning of the in Paris, because Lefebvre himself could cite “Lukács’s well-known statements (about ‘the anarchy and the chiaroscuro of everyday life’)” in the conclusion of the second volume of his Critique of Everyday Life (1961).53 So Debord had the means to draw upon this critical strain of thought, and could put this pre-Marxist Lukács to effective, and poetic, use in his film, which we might understand then to be an analysis of everyday life from within that life’s own parameters—a film that refused to adopt a purely external model of critique. Rouch and Morin’s film had, to some extent, done the same, but only so long as the two filmmakers could be seen at its conclusion, pacing the hallways of the Musée de l’Homme and providing the viewer with some conclusions. Even here, however, incom- prehension troubled their desire for closure, as Morin’s voice brought the film to a close, remarking “that’s the difficulty of communicating something. We are in the know . . . ,” or, more accurately, “we too are implicated.”54 Somehow the very model they had established in order to create dialogue and “brotherhood” had turned out to thwart that end, and the blind fatality of ordinary life had not

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2007.1.26.6 by guest on 03 October 2021 been dispelled. Debord had accepted that failure from the start, had acknowl- edged the impossibility of filming absolute life (the living that, paradoxically, life in the present had rendered impossible). Finally, the point would not be to signify such a life through art, but to produce it, to achieve what no film could, the abolition of separation.

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Rouch himself would somewhat reluctantly reach a similar conclusion several years later, reflecting in an interview on his experience as a filmmaker of the events of May ’68. He began by imagining the project of Chronique d’un été transformed into a species of revolutionary pedagogy: Instead of having a stupid strike, which they had, in the labs or in the theaters, they should have been able to occupy a movie theater and every day project rushes of what happened the day before. Then you would’ve had a cinematic reflection of reality that could have modified this reality in that it would have broadcast what happened in one place to all of Paris at the moment when this world was in the midst of searching out its way. That’s the example.55 But Rouch immediately recognized the impossibility of this fantasy of the utter transparency of lived experience and filmic representation: That was the example, if you like, that made me understand that it wasn’t possible to do that, because you would have to do it day after day, imme- diately, to take advantage of this information. And you couldn’t do it because you were involved in this game, and you can’t make a film and be an actor at the same time—it’s not possible.56 Within the metaphysics of cinéma vérité, one indeed could not be both director and actor. Within its topography of inclusion and exclusion this particular com- bination was forbidden—or, at least, it had to be overtly disavowed, regardless of the subterranean intertwining of desires between filmmaker and subject. Debord’s practice in Critique de la séparation, however, permitted just this, even as it acknowledged the impossibility of the sort of transcendence of representa- tion dreamed of by Rouch in his revolutionary metafilm. Indeed for Debord, filming at the mouth of Plato’s cave was less a matter of figuring a cinematic escape, of dispelling the shadows, than of listening to the speech that comes from within, of listening to the utterances of everyday life. Calling from within, he outlined a topological practice of cinema that might still prove fruitful for our own obscure era.

Chronique d’un été, 1960. Dir. Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin. Film still.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2007.1.26.6 by guest on 03 October 2021 Notes 1. “Les films nouveaux,” Le Monde, 19 October 1961, 13. 2. “. . . I have been consumed non-stop until yesterday, since my return from England on the 29th of September, with the shooting of a short film (experimental documentary) called Critique of Separation. This obligation to work 14 or 15 hours each day on it has really handicapped me.” Letter of 10 October 1960 to Patrick Straram, Guy Debord, Correspondance, vol. 2 (Paris: Librairie Arthème Fayard, 2001), 24. 3. “. . . Morin has just asked Asger for permission shoot in his (tapestry) studio a sequence of a film on the everyday life of the French, that he is making at the moment as sociologist-scriptwriter, with the film-maker Jean Rouch. Asger absolutely refused to receive Morin, because of his shady maneuvers against us in the past.” Letter of 1 October 1960 to Maurice Wyckaert, Guy Debord, Correspondance, vol. 2, 16. See also the account provided in “Renseignements situationnistes,” Internationale situationniste 5 (December 1960), 13. 4. See the favorable mention of “experiments that have remained on the fringe of cinema, like certain films by Jean Rouch, as regards content.” “Le cinéma après Alain Resnais,” Internationale situationniste 3 (December 1959), 8. Undoubtedly the SI had in mind the same films that Jean- Luc Godard was singling out for praise in these years, and most particularly Rouch’s Moi, un noir; see his comments in “B.B. of the Rhine” (1958), in Godard on Godard, ed. Jean Narboni and Tom Milne (New York: The Viking Press, 1972), 101. 5. For an anecdotal account of Debord’s work with Socialisme ou Barbarie, see Christophe Bourseiller, Vie et mort de Guy Debord (Paris: Plon, 1999), 164–170; and the more scholarly essay by Bernard Quiriny, “Socialisme ou Barbarie et l’Internationale situationniste: notes sur une ‘méprise,’” Archives & Documents situationnistes 3 (Fall 2003), 27–65. For a firsthand account by a member of the group, see Daniel Blanchard, Debord dans le bruit de la cataracte du temps (Paris: Sens & Tonka, 2000). 6. Edgar Morin, “Chronicle of a Film,” in Jean Rouch, Ciné-Ethnography, ed. and trans. Steven Feld (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 229, 230 (trans. modified). Morin’s essay “Pour un nouveau cinéma-vérité” originally appeared in France-Observateur no. 506 (14 January 1960). 7. Morin, “Chronicle of a Film,” 230. 8. Morin, “Chronicle of a Film,” 231 (trans. modified). 9. Morin, “Chronicle of a Film,” 232–233. 10. Henri Lefebvre, “Foreword” (1958), Critique of Everyday Life, vol. 1, trans. John Moore (London and New York: Verso, 1991), 31. 11. Lefebvre, “Foreword,” Critique of Everyday Life, vol. 1, 7. 12. Morin, “Chronicle of a Film,” 232. 13. Jean de Baroncelli, “Le cinéma: ‘Chronique d’un été,’” Le Monde, 27 October 1961, 13. 14. This argument is most concisely and convincingly argued in Jean-André Fieschi, “Slippages of Fiction,” trans. Tom Milne, in Anthropology-Reality-Cinema, ed. Mick Eaton (London: , 1979), 67–77. 15. Mick Eaton, “The Production of Cinematic Reality,” in Anthropology-Reality-Cinema, 42. 16. See Jean Rouch, “Cinq regards sur Vertov,” in Georges Sadoul, Dziga Vertov (Paris: Éditions Champ Libre, 1971), 11–14. (It is perhaps worth noting that this important text on Vertov was

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2007.1.26.6 by guest on 03 October 2021 published by Champ Libre, Gérard Lebovici’s house, with which Debord had a very close rela- tionship as unofficial editorial adviser.) As Morin noted, however, the origin of this film practice was “more Robert Flaherty than Dziga Vertov.” Edgar Morin, “Chronicle of a Film,” 231. 17. As pointed out by Mick Eaton, “The Production of Cinematic Reality,” 51. 18. Jean Rouch, quoted from a 1963 interview in Eaton, “The Production of Cinematic Reality,” 51. 19. “We shall be glad to learn, however, that the correction of internal perception will turn out not to offer such great difficulties as the correction of external perception—that internal objects are less unknowable than the external world.” Sigmund Freud, “The Unconscious” (1915), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 14, ed. and trans. James Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1957), 171. 20. See in particular his remarks in “An Outline of Psycho-Analysis” (1940) (“the hypothesis we have adopted of a psychical apparatus extended into space . . .”) and in “Findings, Ideas, Problems” (1941) (“Space may be the projection of the extension of the psychical apparatus. No other derivation is probable. Instead of Kant’s a priori determinants of our psychical apparatus. Psyche is extended; knows nothing about it.”). Both in The Standard Edition . . . , vol. 23, 196 and 300. 21. To follow the formulation of J.-D. Nasio, Les yeux de Laure (Paris: Aubier, Coll. “La psych- analyse prise au mot,” 1987), 153. 22. Nasio, Les yeux de Laure, 153–154. 23. Jacques Lacan, “Position of the Unconscious” (1960, rewritten 1964), in Écrits, trans. Bruce Fink (London and New York: W.W. Norton, 2005), 711. 24. Lacan, “Position of the Unconscious,” 711. 25. See Internationale situationniste 1 (June 1958), 26. 26. In addition to Critique de la séparation, Mrugalski was Debord’s cinematographer in Sur le passage de quelques personnes à travers une assez courte unité de temps (On the Passage of a Few People Through a Rather Brief Moment in Time, 1959) and In girum imus nocte et con- sumimur igni (1978). He also served as cinematographer for the short films Anna la bonne (1958, dir. Harry Kümel), Un steack trop cuit (1960, dir. Luc Moullet), and Le Scarabée d’or (1961, dir. Robert Lachenay); he served as assistant camera for Paris nous appartient (Paris Is Ours, 1960, dir. ). 27. André Martinet, Elements of General Linguistics (1960), trans. Elisabeth Palmer (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1964), 11. 28. Martinet, Elements of General Linguistics, 18. 29. Jean de Baroncelli, “Le cinéma: ‘Chronique d’un été,’” 13. 30. Guy Debord, “Critique of Separation” (1961), in Complete Cinematographic Works, ed. and trans. Ken Knabb (Oakland, Calif.: AK Press, 2003), 29 (hereafter cited in text as CCW). 31. See Martinet, Elements of General Linguistics, 169. 32. Thomas Y. Levin, “Dismantling the Spectacle: The Cinema of Guy Debord,” in Guy Debord and the Situationist International, ed. Tom McDonough (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002), 358. I need hardly note that this essay, like any that takes Debord’s films as its subject, owes the deepest debt to the foundational work of Levin. 33. See, for example, Vincent Kaufmann, Guy Debord (Paris: Librairie Arthème Fayard, 2001), 85–86; and Jean-Marie Apostolidès, Les Tombeaux de Guy Debord (Paris: Exils, 1999), especially 71–76.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2007.1.26.6 by guest on 03 October 2021 34. In a famous photograph that had also been reproduced in the Internationale situationniste 2 (December 1958), 33, with a caption reading “Algeria’s Independence” and an excerpt from Paul Eluard’s 1933 poem “Violette Nozières.” 35. Morin, “Chronicle of a Film,” 233. 36. Morin, “Chronicle of a Film,” 234, 232. 37. Lucien Goldmann, “Cinema and Sociology” (1963), trans. John Higgins, in Anthropology- Reality-Cinema, 66. 38. Goldmann, “Cinema and Sociology,” 66. 39. Debord’s editor for Critique was Chantal Delattre, who had also served this same function for his Sur le passage . . . ; she would go on to work as assistant editor for, among other films, The Trial (1962, dir. Orson Welles) and Échappement Libre (Backfire, 1964, dir. Jean Becker), before editing 2 ou 3 choses que je sais d’elle (1967, dir. Jean-Luc Godard) and Lettres de Stalingrad (1969). 40. Goldmann, “Cinema and Sociology,” 64, 65. 41. Notably the following: “To give everyone social scope for the essential assertion of his vitality.” (CCW, 31, trans. modified; see Karl Marx, “From The Holy Family” (1844), in Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society, ed. and trans. Loyd D. Easton and Kurt H. Guddat (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1967), 394.) “If man is formed by circumstances, then his circumstances must be made human.” (CCW, 31–32, trans. modified; see Karl Marx, “From The Holy Family,” 394.) “[Comrades,] unitary urbanism is dynamic, i.e., in close touch with styles of behavior.” (CCW, 32, trans. modified; see Guy Debord, “Report on the Construction of Situations” (1957), trans. Tom McDonough, in Guy Debord and the Situationist International, 44) “The passions have been interpreted enough. The point now is to discover others.” (CCW, 32, trans. modified; see Guy Debord, “Report on the Construction of Situations,” 50, a phrase that is itself a détournement of Marx’s eleventh thesis on Feuerbach.) “The new beauty will be a beauty of situations.” (CCW, 32; fragment of a phrase from Debord in Internationale lettriste no. 2 [February 1953], 2.) 42. Levin, “Dismantling the Spectacle: The Cinema of Guy Debord,” 365. 43. Pascal, Pensées, trans. H.F. Stewart (New York: Modern Library, 1967), 107. 44. Charles Baudelaire, “Moesta et Errabunda,” in Selected Poems, ed. and trans. Carol Clark (London: Penguin Books, 1995), 72. 45. Certainly Lefebvre aligned the film with his own project, citing Chronique in a footnote to his Critique of Everyday Life, vol. 2 (1961), trans. John Moore (London and New York: Verso, 2002), 359, n. 4. 46. Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness had been translated into French in 1960 by scholars associated with the Lefebvre-Morin group around the journal Arguments: see Histoire et conscience de classe, trans. Kostas Axelos and Jacquelin Bois (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, Coll. “Arguments,” 1960). 47. Michael Löwy, Georg Lukács—From Romanticism to Bolshevism, trans. Patrick Camiller (London: NLB, 1979), 98. On this work see also Andrew Arato and Paul Breines, The Young Lukács and the Origins of Western Marxism (New York: The Seabury Press, 1979), especially 33–49. 48. Georg Lukács, Soul and Form (1910), trans. Anna Bostock (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1974), 152–153.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2007.1.26.6 by guest on 03 October 2021 49. Lukács, Soul and Form, 153. 50. Lukács, Soul and Form, 158; see the comments in Michael Löwy, Georg Lukács—From Romanticism to Bolshevism, 101. 51. Georg Lukács, L’Âme et les formes, trans. Guy Haarscher (Paris: Gallimard, 1974). 52. Lucien Goldmann, “Georg Lukacs l’essayiste” (1950), in Recherches dialectiques (Paris: Gallimard, 1959), 247–259; on this essay, see Michael Loewy, Marxisme et romantisme révolu- tionnaire (Paris: Le Sycomore, Coll. “Petite bibliothèque,” no. 4, 1979), 73–102. Debord cites Goldmann’s Recherches dialectiques in “Editorial Notes: The Meaning of Decay in Art” (1959), trans. John Sheply, in Guy Debord and the Situationist International, 85–93. 53. Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life, vol. 2, 356. 54. Morin, “Chronicle of a Film,” 328. 55. “Jean Rouch” (1969), interviewed in G. Roy Levin, Documentary Explorations (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1971), 144. 56. “Jean Rouch,” 144; emphasis added.

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