If I Loved Life, I Wouldn’t Make Movies: Revisiting Situationist Film
Admission starts at $5
November 14, 2024, 7pm
Brooklyn, NY 11205
USA
We are delighted to invite you to the first part of If I Loved Life, I Wouldn’t Make Movies: Revisiting Situationist Film, a four-part screening program guest-curated by Ethan Spigland and Paul Grant, drawing on the Situationist critique of the spectacle as well as the Situationist International’s strategy of détournement: the subversive reappropriation of preexisting cultural materials. Part One presents Guy Debord’s melancholy and magisterial final film In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni (1978, 94 minutes). Ethan Spigland will introduce the program.
See details on Parts Two and Three on Saturday, November 16, here; and on Part Four on Sunday, November 17, here.
Films
Guy Debord, In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni (1978, 94 minutes)
Debord’s last film, In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni (1978), begins with a scathing critique of the spectator who goes to the cinema to forget about his alienated quotidian life. Over a montage of détourned Hollywood battle scenes juxtaposed with images of the canals of Venice, the second, more autobiographical half of the film evolves into a meditation on history, loss, and the misrepresentation of his own ideas. In girum’s two great themes, as Debord explained in a 1977 production note, are water, which he equates with time, and fire, which he describes as “the bursting of the instant” in the form of “revolution, Saint-Germain-des-Prés, youth, love, and the unfinished endeavors in which men go to die.”
For more information, contact program [at] e-flux.com.
Accessibility
–Two flights of stairs lead up to the building’s front entrance at 172 Classon Avenue.
–For elevator access, please RSVP to program@e-flux.com. The building has a freight elevator which leads into the e-flux office space. Entrance to the elevator is nearest to 180 Classon Ave (a garage door). We have a ramp for the steps within the space.
–e-flux has an ADA-compliant bathroom. There are no steps between the Screening Room and this bathroom.