If I Loved Life, I Wouldn’t Make Movies. Part I. Guy Debord: In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni

If I Loved Life, I Wouldn’t Make Movies. Part I. Guy Debord: In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni

Guy Debord, In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni (still), 1978.

If I Loved Life, I Wouldn’t Make Movies: Revisiting Situationist Film

If I Loved Life, I Wouldn’t Make Movies. Part I. Guy Debord: In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni

Admission starts at $5

Date
November 14, 2024, 7pm
172 Classon Avenue
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.

Category
Avant-Garde, Film
Subject
Situationism, Media Critique, Spectacle
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If I Loved Life, I Wouldn’t Make Movies: Revisiting Situationist Film

Guy Debord (1931–1994) was a French theorist, filmmaker, and founding member of the Situationist International, a group that sought to critique and subvert capitalist society. He is well-known for his book and film The Society of the Spectacle in which he offers one of the most sustained critiques of a media and consumer culture that alienates individuals from authentic social relations. His ideas are considered to have played a key role in shaping the events of May 1968 in France. Debord’s work continues to influence critical theory, political thought, cinema, and other art practices.

Ethan Spigland is a professor in the Humanities and Media Studies Department at Pratt Institute. He received an MFA from the Graduate Film Program at Tisch School of the Arts, New York University, and a maitrîse in Philosophy from the University of Paris VIII under the supervision of Gilles Deleuze and Jean-François Lyotard. Ethan is also an award-winning screenwriter, filmmaker, visual artist, critic, and curator. He completed two short films in collaboration with renowned architect Steven Holl. One of these, Luminosity Porosity, formed part of an installation at the Gallery Ma in Tokyo, Japan. His project, Elevator Moods, was featured in the Sundance Film Festival and South By Southwest, and won a Webby Award in the Broadband Category. His short film, The Strange Case of Balthazar Hyppolite, won the Gold Medal in the Student Academy Awards, and was shortlisted for an Oscar. He writes regularly on film and media for The Brooklyn Rail, Film Comment, and many other publications. He is a contributor to the recently published book Reading with Jean-Luc Godard on Caboose Press.

Paul Grant teaches film and literature at Kiuna and Champlain Colleges in Quebec. He is the author of Cinéma Militant: Political Filmmaking and May 1968, and co-author of Lilas: An Illustrated History of the Golden Ages of Cebuano Cinema. He has translated the work of, among others, Serge Daney, Jean-Patrick Manchette, Jean-Louis Schefer, and Roger Vailland. His writing has appeared in La Furia Umana, Situations: Project of the Radical Imagination, The Brooklyn Rail, Film International, Philippine Quarterly of Culture and Society, and Film Comment. He is currently writing a monograph on Philippine regional cinemas.

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