Performance Research A Journal of the Performing Arts ISSN: 1352-8165 (Print) 1469-9990 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rprs20 From Street to Screen David Archibald & Carl Lavery To cite this article: David Archibald & Carl Lavery (2018) From Street to Screen, Performance Research, 23:7, 109-119, DOI: 10.1080/13528165.2018.1558427 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/13528165.2018.1558427 © 2019 The Author(s) Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group Published online: 31 Jan 2019. Submit your article to this journal View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rprs20 From Street to Screen Debord’s drifting cinema DAVID ARCHIBALD & CARL LAVERY In addition to his roles as editor of the journal music. In addition to their overt didacticism, Internationale situationniste and principal theorist of Debord’s film essays constantly call the medium the Situationist International (SI), it is often of cinema into question in ways that resonate forgotten that Guy Debord was, above all else, with the Brechtian-inspired apparatus theory a filmmaker. Between 1952 and his death in 1994, of critics such as Jean-Louis Baudry (1978) and Debord wrote and directed six films, and abandoned Jean-Lous Comolli (1980), and of British Marxist numerous others, including a feature-length work, commentators associated with the leading De l’Espagne, that he was working on in the early academic journal Screen in the 1970s and 1980s. 1980s. To borrow from Jason Smith (2013), these However, in an age of what Gilles Deleuze terms works can be divided into three periods. The ‘control societies’ (1992) and what Debord anti-cinema of Hurlements en faveur de Sade (Howls himself, in his final period, called ‘integrated for Sade, 1952) in which Debord experiments with spectacle’ (1990 [1988]: 9), these now somewhat Lettriste techniques, such as an extra-diegetic orthodox (and perhaps discredited) forms of voiceover and silent, black and white screens; the thinking through the politics of cinema – centred, counter-cinemas of Sur le passage de quelques as they are, on ‘showing the apparatus’ – can personnes à travers une assez courte unité de temps no longer account for the political relevance of (On the Passage of a Few Persons Through a Rather Debord’s film. A different method of analysis Brief Unity of Time, 1959) and Critique de la is needed – one in which the focus of attention séperation (Critique of Separation, 1961), defined by is not based on contextualizing what the films Debord as ‘confused documentaries’ on the Lettrist say or in historicizing what they show, as most International (LI) and Situationist International commentators on his films have done to date (Debord 2003 [1959]: 18, 15); and three film essays, (Coppola 2003; Danesi 2011), but rather on La Société du spectacle (Society of the Spectacle, how their rhythmic structures seek to liberate 1 The twenty-two minutes 1973), Réfutation de tous les judgements, tant élogieux the audience from the dominant refrains of of Refutations, for instance, qu’hostiles, qui ont été jusqu’ici portés sur le film ‘La neoliberal capitalism. are made up entirely of Société du spectacle’ (Refutation of All the Judgements, There is a temporal irony involved in Debord’s Debord’s responses, in text and image, to criticisms of Pros or Cons, Thus Far Rendered on the Film ‘The cinema, for while, as we outline below, it is the filmic version of The Society of the Spectacle’,1975)1 and In girum imus always melancholically focused on the past, its Society of the Spectacle. nocte et consumimur igni (1978), where Debord significance is projected into the future. In this 2 Debord also released a posthumous television detourns images, texts, films and even the hostile respect, Debord’s films are marked by what art film, screened on Canal+ in criticisms of film critics, to theorize about the ever critic Boris Groys calls ‘contemporaneity’ – an January 1994, Guy Debord, son art, son temps (Guy greater circulation of spectacular commodities uncanny mode of temporality in which to be Debord – His Art and His across the world.2 historically attuned is always to be out of date, Time). The film was a collaboration between In common with the cinematic experiments of never in step with one’s time: Debord and the journalist his contemporaries, such as Alain Resnais, Chris Brigitte Cornand. the contemporary is actually constituted by doubt, Marker, Agnès Varda and Jean-Luc Godard, film, 3 It should be noted, hesitation, uncertainty, indecision – by the need however, that Debord was for Debord, transcends fictional narrative, the for prolonged reflection, for a delay. We want to highly critical of La 3 production of dramatic stories. On the contrary, postpone our decisions and actions in order to have Nouvelle Vague and was particularly hostile to cinema is a technology for politics, a device for more time for analysis, reflection, and consideration. Godard, calling him explicitly critiquing the society of the spectacle And that is precisely what the contemporary is – a ‘Maoist liar’ in the short text ‘Cinema and through the use of direct address, intertitles, a prolonged, even potentially infinite period of delay. Revolution’ (2003 [1969]: images and the insertion of often incongruous (Groys 2009) 219). PERFORMANCE RESEARCH 23·7 : pp.109-119 ISSN 1352-8165 print/1469-9990 online © 2019 The Author(s) 109 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13528165.2018.1558427 Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. PR 23.7 On Drifting.indd 109 23/01/2019 09:38 The fact that Debord is our contemporary is to capture attention through an expanded The imperative now, as Michael J. Shapiro neither surprising nor contradictory. As the Retort notion of the cinematic (Crary 2015) – highlights in Politics and Time (2016), is to be Collective have argued (2006; see also pp.4–5 in a redistributed technology of screens, networked specific about how one utilizes affect. Shapiro this issue), capitalism is both an ideology and communications, and informational labour. In exemplifies his point by focusing on how ‘the economic structure that simultaneously changes our present, the drift is both a temporal and choreography of the camera’ (2016: 90–166) can and stays the same. So while Debord’s six films ontological condition, something that contests perturb ‘the imposed rhythms of labour’ in the are explicit attempts to critique twentieth- what François Hartog critiques as ‘presentism’ ‘global factory’ (97, 103).5 5 Critics who tie affect to century forms of alienation, they retain their (2015: xiii–xv), the sense in which capital seeks Shapiro’s language highlights the need specifics include Massumi (2002) and Thrift (2007). acuity for us today for how they interrupt to erase alternative ways of living in time by to think of cinematic politics in terms of 6 Debord’s awareness that twenty-first-century capitalism’s temporal tethering us to a now that wants to last forever. a corporeal performance, a dance whereby the the ‘realism’ of the film regime. This is a regime in which capital has The necessity of making such a critical shift intensity of capitalism’s refrains, those things resides in its affective dimension is also apparent moved beyond Taylorist and Fordist models of in our understanding of drifting is evident if we that capture bodies and minds as rhythms and in the letter to Frankin, industrial production, founded on the rhythm consider the following words from philosopher not as discourse or form, are disrupted and when he mentions that the brevity of the film might of the conveyor belt, and instead takes place in Bernard Stiegler: jammed. As opposed to Walter Benjamin’s work against his purpose. and through the signs, speeds and intensities ideas on the dialogical potential inherent in an For him, a longer duration In today’s control societies (also modulation is more suitable for of ‘deterritorialized factories’. This move from societies), aesthetic weapons play an essential aesthetic of shocks and jolts, Shapiro, like Beller translating ‘the slow the ‘alienation of non-communication’ to what role (this is what Jeremy Rifkin has referred to as and Stiegler, recognizes that alienation effects movement of exposure and ‘cultural capitalism’); it has become a matter of negation … I was trying to the Marxist autonomist thinker Franco Berardi and affects are no longer tenable, in and by embody in Passage’ (2003 terms ‘the panic’ and ‘depression’ of an ‘excess controlling the technologies of aisthēsis (the audio- themselves, in a neoliberal world. Today, we are (1960]: 214). The key idea, of communication’ institutes a different order visual or the digital, for example) and, in this way, jolted and shocked on a daily basis, subjected to again, is rhythmic: the controlling the conscious and unconscious rhythms of references to movement, of rhythmic and, by extension, aesthetic politics information overload, tyrannized by deadlines pace and embodiment bodies and souls; modulating through the control (Berardi 2009: 100–2). For while the aim of and signs, compelled to engage in the ‘labour prove this. of flows these rhythms of consciousness