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FILM SOUNDTRACKS
On the Passage of a Few Persons Through a
Rather Brief Period of Time
Critique of Separation
Voice 1 (male “professional announcer” type): This neighborhood(1) was made for the wretched dignity of the petty
bourgeoisie, for respectable occupations and intellectual tourism. The sedentary
population of the upper floors was sheltered from the influences of the street. This
neighborhood has remained the same. It was the strange setting of our story, where a
systematic questioning of all the diversions and works of a society, a total critique of
its idea of happiness, was expressed in acts.
These people also scorned “subjective profundity.” They were interested in
nothing but an adequate and concrete expression of themselves.
Voice 2 (Debord, monotone): Human beings are not fully conscious of
their real life — usually groping in the dark; overwhelmed by the consequences of
their acts; at every moment groups and individuals find themselves confronted with results
they have not wished.
Voice 1: They said that oblivion was their ruling passion. They wanted
to reinvent everything each day; to become the masters and possessors of their own lives.
Just as one does not judge a man according to the conception he has of himself, one
cannot judge such periods of transition according to their own consciousness; on the
contrary, one must explain the consciousness through the contradictions of material life,
through the conflict between social conditions and the forces of social production.
The progress achieved in the domination of nature was not yet matched by a
corresponding liberation of everyday life. Youth passed away among the various controls of
resignation.
Our camera has captured for you a few aspects of a provisional microsociety.
The knowledge of empirical facts remains abstract and superficial as long as it is not
concretized by its integration into the whole — which alone permits the supersession
of partial and abstract problems so as to arrive at their concrete essence, and
implicitly at their meaning.
This group was on the margins of the economy. It tended toward a role of pure
consumption, and first of all the free consumption of its time. It thus found itself
directly engaged in qualitative variations of everyday life but deprived of any means to
intervene in them.
The group ranged over a very small area. The same times brought them back to the same
places. No one went to bed early. Discussion on the meaning of all this continued...
Voice 2: “Our life is a journey — In the winter and the
night. — We seek our passage...”
Voice 1: The abandoned literature nevertheless exerted a delaying
action on new affective formulations.
Voice 2: There was the fatigue and the cold of the morning in this
much-traversed labyrinth, like an enigma that we had to resolve. It was a looking-glass
reality through which we had to discover the potential richness of reality.
On the bank of the river evening began once again; and caresses; and the importance of
a world without importance. Just as the eyes have a blurred vision of many things and can
see only one clearly, so the will can strive only incompletely toward diverse objects and
can completely love only one at a time.
Voice 3 (young girl): No one counted on the future. It would never be
possible to be together later, or anywhere else. There would never be a greater freedom.
Voice 1: The refusal of time and of growing old automatically limited
encounters in this narrow, contingent zone, where what was lacking was felt as
irreparable. The extreme precariousness of the means of getting by without working was at
the root of this impatience which made excesses necessary and breaks definitive.
Voice 2: One never really contests an organization of existence
without contesting all of that organization’s forms of language.
Voice 1: When freedom is practiced in a closed circle, it fades into a
dream, becomes a mere representation of itself. The ambiance of play is by nature
unstable. At any moment “ordinary life” can prevail once again. The geographical
limitation of play is even more striking than its temporal limitation. Any game takes
place within the contours of its spatial domain. Around the neighborhood, around its
fleeting and threatened immobility, stretched a half-known city where people met only by
chance, losing their way forever.
The girls who found their way there, because they were legally under the control of
their families until the age of eighteen, were often recaptured by the defenders of that
detestable institution. They were generally confined under the guard of those creatures
who among all the bad products of a bad society are the most ugly and repugnant: nuns.
What usually makes documentaries so easy to understand is the arbitrary limitation of
their subject matter. They describe the atomization of social functions and the isolation
of their products. One can, in contrast, envisage the entire complexity of a moment which
is not resolved into a work, a moment whose movement indissolubly contains facts and
values and whose meaning does not yet appear. The subject matter of the documentary would
then be this confused totality.
Voice 2: The era had arrived at a level of knowledge and technical
means that made possible, and increasingly necessary, a direct construction of
all aspects of a liberated affective and practical existence. The appearance of these
superior means of action, still unused because of the delays in the project of liquidating
the commodity economy, had already condemned aesthetic activity, whose ambitions and
powers were both outdated. The decay of art and of all the values of former mores had
formed our sociological background. The ruling class’s monopoly over the instruments
we needed to control in order to realize the collective art of our time had excluded us
from a cultural production officially devoted to illustrating and repeating the past. An
art film on this generation can only be a film on its absence of real creations.
Everyone unthinkingly followed the paths learned once and for all, to their work and
their home, to their predictable future. For them duty had already become a habit, and
habit a duty. They did not see the deficiency of their city. They thought the deficiency
of their life was natural. We wanted to break out of this conditioning, in quest of
another use of the urban landscape, in quest of new passions. The atmosphere of a few
places gave us intimations of the future powers of an architecture it would be necessary
to create to be the support and framework for less mediocre games. We could expect nothing
of anything we had not ourselves altered. The urban environment proclaimed the orders and
tastes of the ruling society just as violently as the newspapers. It is man who makes the
unity of the world, but man has extended himself everywhere. People can see nothing around
them that is not their own image; everything speaks to them of themselves. Their very
landscape is alive. There were obstacles everywhere. There was a cohesion in the obstacles
of all types. They maintained the coherent reign of poverty. Everything being connected,
it was necessary to change everything by a unitary struggle, or nothing. It was necessary
to link up with the masses, but we were surrounded by sleep.
Voice 3: The dictatorship of the proletariat is a desperate struggle,
bloody and bloodless, violent and peaceful, military and economic, educational and
administrative, against the forces and traditions of the old world.
Voice 1: In this country it is once again the men of order who have
rebelled. They have reinforced their power. They have been able to aggravate the
grotesqueness of the ruling conditions according to their will. They have embellished
their system with the funereal ceremonies of the past.
Voice 2: Years, like a single instant prolonged to this point, come to
an end.
Voice 1: What was directly lived reappears frozen in the distance, fit
into the tastes and illusions of an era, carried away with it.
Voice 2: The appearance of events that we have not made, that others
have made against us, now obliges us to be aware of the passage of time, its results, the
transformation of our own desires into events. What differentiates the past from the
present is precisely its out-of-reach objectivity; there is no more should-be; being is so
consumed that it has ceased to exist. The details are already lost in the dust of time.
Who was afraid of life, afraid of the night, afraid of being taken, afraid of being kept?
Voice 3: What should be abolished continues, and we continue to wear
away with it. We are engulfed. We are separated. The years pass and we haven’t
changed anything.
Voice 2: Once again morning in the same streets. Once again the
fatigue of so many similarly passed nights. It is a walk that has lasted a long time.
Voice 1: Really hard to drink more.
Voice 2: Of course one might make a film of it. But even if such a
film succeeds in being as fundamentally disconnected and unsatisfying as the reality it
deals with, it will never be more than a re-creation — poor and false like this
botched traveling shot.
Voice 3: There are now people who pride themselves on being authors of
films, as others were authors of novels. They are even more backward than the novelists
because they are unaware of the decomposition and exhaustion of individual expression in
our time, ignorant of the end of the arts of passivity. They are praised for their
sincerity since they dramatize, with more personal depth, the conventions of which their
life consists. There is talk of the liberation of the cinema. But what does it matter to
us if one more art is liberated through which Tom, Dick or Harry can joyously express
their slavish sentiments? The only interesting venture is the liberation of everyday life,
not only in the perspectives of history but for us and right away. This entails the
withering away of alienated forms of communication. The cinema, too, has to be destroyed.
Voice 2: In the final analysis, stars are created by the need we have
for them, and not by their talent or lack of talent or even by the film industry or
advertising. Miserable need, dismal, anonymous life that would like to expand itself to
the dimensions of cinema life. The imaginary life on the screen is the product of this
real need. The star is the projection of this need.
The images of the advertisements during the intermissions are more suited than any
others for evoking an intermission of life.
To really describe this era it would no doubt be necessary to show many other things.
But what would be the point?
Better to grasp the totality of what has been done and what remains to be done than to
add more ruins to the old world of the spectacle and of memories.
We don’t know what to say. Words are formed into sequences; gestures are recognized.
Outside us. Of course some methods are mastered, some results verified. Quite often
it’s amusing. But so many things we wanted have not been attained; or only partially
and not like we thought. What communication have we desired, or experienced, or only
simulated? What true project has been lost?
The cinematic spectacle has its rules, which enable one to produce satisfactory
products. But dissatisfaction is the reality that must be taken as a point of departure.
Whether dramatic or documentary, the cinema functions to present a false, isolated
coherence as a substitute for a communication and an activity that are absent. To
demystify documentary cinema it is necessary to dissolve what is called its subject
matter.
A well-established rule is that anything in a film that is said other than by way of
images must be repeated or else the spectators will miss it. That may be true. But this
sort of incomprehension is present in all everyday encounters. Something must be
specified, but there’s not enough time and you are not sure of having been
understood. Before you have said or done what was necessary, the other person’s
already gone. Across the street. Overseas. There will never be another chance.
After all the dead time and lost moments, there remain these endlessly traversed
postcard landscapes; this distance organized between each and everyone. Childhood?
It’s right here; we have never gotten out of it.
Our epoch accumulates powers and dreams of itself as being rational. But no one
recognizes these powers as their own. No one becomes an adult — there is only the
possible eventual transformation of this long restlessness into a routine somnolence.
Because no one ceases to be held under guardianship. The problem is not that people live
more or less poorly, but that they live in a way that is always out of their control.
At the same time, it is a world in which we have been taught change. Nothing stops. It
changes more every day; and I know that those who day after day produce it against
themselves can appropriate it for themselves.
The only adventure, we said, is to contest the totality, whose center is this way of
living, where we can test our strength but never use it. In reality no adventure is
directly formed for us. The adventures form part of the whole range of legends transmitted
by cinema or in other ways; part of the whole spectacular sham of history.
Until the environment is collectively dominated, there will be no individuals —
only specters haunting the objects anarchically presented to them by others. In chance
situations we meet separated people moving randomly. Their divergent emotions neutralize
each other and maintain their solid environment of boredom. As long as we are unable to
make our own history, to freely create situations, striving toward unity will introduce
other separations. The quest for a central activity leads to the formation of new
specializations.
And only a few encounters were like signals emanating from a more intense life, a life
that has not really been found.
What cannot be forgotten reappears in dreams. At the end of this type of dream, half
asleep, the events are still for a brief moment taken as real. Then the reactions they
give rise to become clearer, more distinct, more reasonable; like, so many mornings, the
memory of what one drank the night before. Then comes the awareness that it’s all
false; that “it was only a dream”; that there are no new realities and no going
back into it. Nothing you can hold on to. These dreams are flashes from the unresolved
past. They unilaterally illuminate moments previously lived in confusion and doubt. They
strikingly publicize those of our needs that have not been answered. Here is daylight, and
here are perspectives that now no longer mean anything. The sectors of a city are, at a
certain level, decipherable. But the personal meaning they have had for us is
incommunicable, like all that secrecy of private life regarding which we possess nothing
but pitiful documents.
Official news is elsewhere. The society sends back to itself its own historical image
as a merely superficial and static history of its rulers. Those who incarnate the external
fatality of what is done. The sector of rulers is the very sector of the spectacle. The
cinema suits them well. Regardless of its subject matter, the cinema presents heroes and
exemplary conduct modeled on the same old pattern as the rulers.
All existing equilibrium, however, is brought back into question each time unknown
people try to live differently. But it’s always far away. We learn of it through the
papers and newscasts. We remain outside it, confronted with just another spectacle. We are
separated from it by our own nonintervention. It makes us disappointed in ourselves. At
what moment was choice postponed? We haven’t found the arms we needed. We have let
things go.
I have let time slip away. I have lost what I should have defended.
This general critique of separation obviously contains and covers some particular
memories. A less recognized pain, the awareness of a less explainable indignity. Exactly
what separation was it? How quickly we have lived! It is to this point in our unreflecting
history that I bring us back.
Everything that concerns the sphere of loss — that is to say, the past time I have
lost, as well as disappearance, escape, and more generally the flowing past of things, and
even what in the prevalent and therefore most vulgar social sense of the use of time is
called wasted time — all this finds in that strangely apt old military expression, en
enfants perdus,(2) its meeting ground with the sphere
of discovery, of exploration of unknown terrains; with all the forms of quest,
investigation, adventure, avant-garde. It is the crossroads where we have found and lost
ourselves.
All this, it must be admitted, is not clear. It is a completely typical drunken
monologue, with its incomprehensible allusions and tiresome delivery. With its vain
phrases which do not await response, and its overbearing explanations. And its silences.
The poverty of means has to plainly express the scandalous poverty of the subject.
The events that happen in individual existence as it is organized, the events that
really concern us and require our participation, are generally precisely those that merit
nothing more than our being distant, bored, indifferent spectators. In contrast, the
situation that is seen in some artistic transposition is rather often attractive,
something that would merit our participating in it. This is a paradox to reverse, to put
back on its feet. This is what must be realized in acts. As for this idiotic spectacle of
the fragmented and filtered past, full of sound and fury: it is not a question now of
transmitting it — of “rendering” it, as is said — in another neatly
ordered spectacle that would play the game of neatly ordered comprehension and
participation. No. Any coherent artistic expression already expresses the coherence of the
past, already expresses passivity. It is necessary to destroy memory in art. To undermine
the conventions of its communication. To demoralize its fans. What a task! As in a blurry
drunken vision, the memory and language of the film fade out simultaneously. At the
extreme, the miserable subjectivity is reversed into a certain sort of objectivity: a
documentary on the conditions of noncommunication.
For example, I don’t talk about her. False face. False relationship. A real person
is separated from the interpreter of that person, if only by the time passed between the
event and its evocation, by a distance that continually increases, that is increasing at
this very moment. Just as the conserved expression itself remains separated from those who
hear it abstractly and without any power over it.
The spectacle in its entirety is the era, an era in which a certain youth has
recognized itself. It is the gap between this image and its results; the gap between the
vision, the tastes, the refusals and the projects that previously defined it and the way
it has advanced into ordinary life.
We have invented nothing. We adapt ourselves, with a few variations, into the network
of possible courses. We get used to it, it seems.
No one has the enthusiasm on returning from a venture that they had on setting out on
it. My dears, adventure is dead.
Who will resist? It is necessary to go beyond this partial defeat. Of course. And how
to do it?
This is a film that interrupts itself and does not come to an end.
All conclusions remain to be drawn, everything has to be recalculated.
The problem continues to be posed, its expression is becoming more complicated. We have
to resort to other measures.
Just as there was no profound reason to begin this abstract message, so there is none
for concluding it.
I have scarcely begun to make you understand that I don’t intend to play the game.
[TRANSLATOR’S NOTES]
1. This film, which evokes the lettrist experiences at the origin of
the situationist movement, opens with shots of the Paris district frequented by the
lettrists in the early 1950s.
2. enfants perdus (literally, “lost children,”):
frontline soldiers sent on a virtually suicidal mission.
Voiceover soundtracks from Guy Debord’s films Sur le passage de quelques
personnes à travers une assez courte unité de temps (1959, B&W, 20 minutes) and
Critique de la séparation (1961, B&W, 20 minutes).
Translated by Ken Knabb (slightly modified from the versions in the Situationist
International Anthology).
No copyright.
[On Guy Debord’s Film “The
Society of the Spectacle”]
[On René Viénet’ Film “Can Dialectics Break
Bricks?”]
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