Returning to a text that we have published before, we close our series on Guy Debord’s films with a reflection on the same by Giorgio Agamben.
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In the present film, for example, I am simply stating a few truths over a background of images that are all trivial or false. This film disdains the image-scraps of which it is composed. I do not wish to preserve any of the language of this outdated art, except perhaps the reverse shot of the only world it has observed and a tracking shot across the fleeting ideas of an era. I pride myself on having made a film out of whatever rubbish was at hand; and I find it amusing that people will complain about it who have allowed their entire lives to be dominated by every kind of rubbish.
Film by Guy Debord
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In societies dominated by modern conditions of production, life is presented as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has receded into a representation.
In a world that is really upside down, the true is a moment of the false.
When the real world is transformed into mere images, mere images become real beings — dynamic figments that provide the direct motivations for a hypnotic behavior.
Film by Guy Debord
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Until the environment is collectively dominated, there will be no real 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 reinforce their solid environment of boredom. As long as we are unable to make our own history, to freely create situations, our striving toward unity will give rise to other separations. The quest for a unified activity leads to the formation of new specializations.
Film by Guy Debord
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The appearance of events that we have not created, of events that others have in fact created against us, now obliges us to be aware of the passage of time and its results, to assess 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 has been consumed to the point of ceasing 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?
Film by Guy Debord
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The arts of the future can be nothing less than disruptions of situations.
Film by Guy Debord
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Considering the story of my life, it is obvious to me that I cannot produce a cinematic “work” in the usual sense of the term.
Guy Debord, In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni
In the summer heat of a southern European capital city swept by tides of mass tourism, tax evading pensioners and “nomads”, real-estate speculation, gentrification and “touristification” – while its hinterlands burn and the physical infrastructure that makes possible this capital flight cracks and breaks -, a small, alternative cinema organises a retrospective of Guy Debord’s films. Whatever the motivation for the showings, the timing seemed more than fitting.
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Official news is elsewhere. Society broadcasts to itself its own image of its own history, a history reduced to a superficial and static pageant of its rulers — the persons who embody the apparent inevitability of whatever happens. The world of the rulers is the world 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.
This dominant equilibrium is brought back into question each time unknown people try to live differently. But it was always far away. We learn of it through the papers and newscasts. We remain outside it, relating to it as just another spectacle. We are separated from it by our own nonintervention. And end up being rather disappointed in ourselves. At what moment was choice postponed? When did we miss our chance? We haven’t found the arms we needed. We’ve let things slip away.
Guy Debord, Critique of Separation, (from the film soundtrack)
From lundi matin #486, 01/09/2025
A few months ago, the Madleen was intercepted by the Israeli army a few kilometres off the coast of Gaza. On August 31, a flotilla of several dozen boats set sail for the Mediterranean in the hope of breaking the blockade that surrounds, starves, and genocides Gaza. The most realistic minds, as well as the most cynical, see this as a futile or senseless attempt given the power against which the sailboats can only crash. In this excellent text, the author and director Sylvain George demonstrates and defends the exact opposite. What is at stake in this flotilla is a shift in our political reference points; incompleteness as a path, vulnerability and obstinacy as power, fragmentation as form.
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France’s “Let’s block everything” or the will to insurrection
… the fire is not smoldering beneath the usual surface of daily acquiescence.
Temps Critiques
With week on from September 10, the day that coincided with a call to “Block Everything” in France, we share a critical article below from the Temps Critiques magazine (09/09/2025), carried also in lundi matin (16/09/2025) and published in English translation by Ill Will magazine (10/09/2025).
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