Admission starts at $5
November 14, 16, and 17, 2024
172 Classon Avenue
Brooklyn, NY 11205
USA
Join us on November 14, 16, and 17 at e-flux Screening Room for 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.
Founded in 1957, the Situationist International brought together multiple strands of avant-garde art and radical socio-economic critique to explore new approaches to revolutionary praxis. The SI leveled a trenchant attack on the commodification of culture and the alienating effects of modern capitalism with a focus on the concept of the “spectacle,” which they defined as the mediation of social relationships by images. Cinema was an ongoing and central concern for the Situationists. For Guy Debord, one of the SI’s founding members, it was not inevitable that the cinematic medium would adopt a spectacular form. The culpability for this development is not the technological apparatus of cinema but the society in which it arose.
This program groups together films created predominantly by members of the Situationist International and films that fall under their influence. Alongside recent restorations of well-known works by Guy Debord and René Viénet, it also presents rarely screened films by the Scandinavian Situationists, the Scandinavian group that broke away from the SI in 1962, and contributions from Groupe Cinéthique, a Marxist-Leninist film collective primarily recognized for their journal of the same name.
The films in this series draw on the Situationist critique of the spectacle as well as the SI’s practice of détournement: the subversive reappropriation of preexisting cultural materials. These strategies are most clearly deployed in the works of Guy Debord and René Viénet, but traces of this aesthetic-political approach can also be observed in Cinéthique’s pillaging of mainstream film imagery, re-contextualizing it with a Marxist-Leninist critique.
The critique of the spectacle, along with the practice of détournement, was not limited to the Situationists. The long ’68 saw many critiques of consumer capitalism that aligned with the Situationists’ ideas, even if they did not necessarily use the same terminology. On the practical side, there was also a shared aesthetic in recycling existing material—from comics to film. In this program we assemble works that use these two frameworks, perhaps to different ends though often proceeding along comparable lines. The aim is to situate these ideas and strategies in their historical context and to assess their relevance today.
For more information, contact program@e-flux.com.
Program
If I Loved Life, I Wouldn’t Make Movies. Part IV. And Be Careful If Cinema Intervenes: The Film Projects of Groupe Cinéthique
November 17, 2024, 5pm
If I Loved Life, I Wouldn’t Make Movies. Parts II and III. The Films of the Scandinavian Situationists; René Viénet and Détournement
November 16, 2024, 3pm
If I Loved Life, I Wouldn’t Make Movies. Part I. Guy Debord: In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni
November 14, 2024, 7pm