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

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

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

Admission starts at $5

Date
November 14, 16, and 17, 2024
e-flux Screening Room
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

Category
Film, Avant-Garde, Marxism
Subject
Spectacle, Situationism, Politics

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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