KC
18th October 2005, 21:49
My school is having a films of the Situationist International week, where they show one of their films and you can discuss it. These are the films being shown:
Monday, October 17 - 7pm
Writer, filmmaker, translator and SI archeologist Keith Sanborn will be in attendance on Monday, October 17 to introduce the evening and provide a talk-back session after the film.
The Society Of The Spectacle (La société du spectacle)
(Guy Debord, France, 90 min., French w/ Eng. St., Film on Video, 1973)
Situationist founder Guy Debord’s own 1973 adaptation of his 1967 book by the same name. Enormously influential in France, the film is an astonishingly sophisticated and coherent response to the experience of May 1968. A filmic essay, based primarily on “detourned,” that is pre-existing and recontextualized, images, including: sequences from Hollywood features, East Block features, news footage, documentary footage, tv commercials, pornography, and a vast number of stills, some of which seem to have been shot explicitly for this film. The film also makes use of intertitles which include both acknowledged and unacknowledged detourned quotations from Dante, Hegel, Marx, Meister Eckhart, Shakespeare, Cieszkowski, von Clausewitz, Pouget and others. While this film is a considerable achievement in the domain of cinema, it is not just a film; it is a conscious attempt to change the world. English subtitles by Keith Sanborn.
Refutation Of All Judgments Which Have Up To Now Been Brought Whether In Praise Or Hostile To The Film Called “Society Of The Spectacle”
(Guy Debord, France, 20 min., French w/ Eng. St., Film on Video, 1975)
Debord’s response in film to the written critiques which greeted his film The Society of the Spectacle.
Tuesday, October 18 – 7pm
Venom & Eternity (Traité de bauve et d’éternité)
(Jean Isidore Isou, France, 90 min., French w/ Eng. St., 16mm B&W, 1951)
Poet and founder of the Lettrist Movement, Jean Isidore Isou wrote, scored, photographed, directed and starred in Venom & Eternity – a self-described “revolt against cinema.” In the film Isou attempts to discuss what was wrong with the cinema and goes on to show examples of what he thinks it should consist of. Featuring an appearance by Jean Cocteau, who, musing as to the film’s future, would ask: “Is VENOM a springboard or is it a void? In fifty years we’ll know the answer...The day will come, perhaps, when Isou’s style will be in fashion.” Causing riots and stomp-outs during its initial screenings in France and the US, the film went on to influence a generation of avant-garde filmmakers including, most profoundly, a young Stan Brakhage – declaring Venom & Eternity as a “portal though which every film artist is going to have to pass.”
Wednesday, October 19 – 7pm
Can Dialectics Break Bricks? (La Dialectique peut-elle casser des briques?)
(René Viénet & Gerard Cohen, France, 90 min., French w/ Eng. St., Film on Video, 1973)
Annouced as “the first entirely détourned film in the history of cinema,” Viénet and Cohen transformed a typical kung-fu film into an examination of class and intellectual sectarianism. According to Viénet: “The cinema, which is the newest and most serviceable means of expression of our era has been marking time for 3/4 of a century. By way of review, let us say that it has in fact become the ‘7th art’ dear to cinephiles, ciné-clubs, PTA’s. Let us state that for our purposes the cycle has come to an end.... Let us appropriate the stammerings of this new writing; let us appropriate above all its most achieved examples, the most modern ones, those which have escaped artistic ideology even more than American B-movies: newsreels, trailers, and above all advertisements.” Informed by nearly twenty years of theoretical reflection and practice by the SI, Can Dialectics Break Bricks is also of product of Viénet’s extensive interest and knowledge of China. English subtitles by Keith Sanborn.
Thursday, October 20 – 7pm
Guy Debord, His Art and His Times (Guy Debord, son art et son temps)
(Brigitte Cornand, France, 60 min., French w/ Eng. St., Video, 1994)
A portrait-testament, made at the request of the writer-philosopher-artist during the year 1994, when he realized his end was near due to a painful illness eating away at him. In this work Guy Debord sums up his life, emphasizing the importance of his films and his attraction for painting, then pays homage to his friends Asger Jörn, Gil Wolman, Alice Becker Ho and others. Debord also offers a commentary on our society through a succession of extracts from televised reports, important moments of the last ten years, “torpedoed” by the author’s written commentary inscribed on the screen like the pages of a book.
Thursday, October 21 – 8pm
The Girls of Kamaré (Les Filles de Kamaré)
(René Viénet, France, 75 min., French w/ Eng. St., Film on Video, 1974)
Proudly wearing the mantle of "the first subversive Japanese porno film," The Girls of Kamaré presents itself as a detournement—read subversion—of Noribumi Suzuki’s A Pair of Panties for Summer. In this film, René Viénet furthers his exploration of Sadean women in head-on collision with all legal and moral restraints, which, left unopposed, give rise to the survival sickness experienced by most of the world. The legacy of colonialist torture, the flatulence of Sartre, and the Orientalism of Barthes and de Beauvoir are all mercilessly critiqued. By utterly transforming the sadistic genre conventions of the Japanese girls’ reform school film, The Girls of Kamaré becomes the vehicle for the expression of a revolutionary rage against the very constraints from which aficionados of the genre take their pleasure. English subtitles by Keith Sanborn.
If anyone has seen any of these films, what did you think of them? Could you provide a review? Maybe some background information or some good info to have going into the film being talked about?
Monday, October 17 - 7pm
Writer, filmmaker, translator and SI archeologist Keith Sanborn will be in attendance on Monday, October 17 to introduce the evening and provide a talk-back session after the film.
The Society Of The Spectacle (La société du spectacle)
(Guy Debord, France, 90 min., French w/ Eng. St., Film on Video, 1973)
Situationist founder Guy Debord’s own 1973 adaptation of his 1967 book by the same name. Enormously influential in France, the film is an astonishingly sophisticated and coherent response to the experience of May 1968. A filmic essay, based primarily on “detourned,” that is pre-existing and recontextualized, images, including: sequences from Hollywood features, East Block features, news footage, documentary footage, tv commercials, pornography, and a vast number of stills, some of which seem to have been shot explicitly for this film. The film also makes use of intertitles which include both acknowledged and unacknowledged detourned quotations from Dante, Hegel, Marx, Meister Eckhart, Shakespeare, Cieszkowski, von Clausewitz, Pouget and others. While this film is a considerable achievement in the domain of cinema, it is not just a film; it is a conscious attempt to change the world. English subtitles by Keith Sanborn.
Refutation Of All Judgments Which Have Up To Now Been Brought Whether In Praise Or Hostile To The Film Called “Society Of The Spectacle”
(Guy Debord, France, 20 min., French w/ Eng. St., Film on Video, 1975)
Debord’s response in film to the written critiques which greeted his film The Society of the Spectacle.
Tuesday, October 18 – 7pm
Venom & Eternity (Traité de bauve et d’éternité)
(Jean Isidore Isou, France, 90 min., French w/ Eng. St., 16mm B&W, 1951)
Poet and founder of the Lettrist Movement, Jean Isidore Isou wrote, scored, photographed, directed and starred in Venom & Eternity – a self-described “revolt against cinema.” In the film Isou attempts to discuss what was wrong with the cinema and goes on to show examples of what he thinks it should consist of. Featuring an appearance by Jean Cocteau, who, musing as to the film’s future, would ask: “Is VENOM a springboard or is it a void? In fifty years we’ll know the answer...The day will come, perhaps, when Isou’s style will be in fashion.” Causing riots and stomp-outs during its initial screenings in France and the US, the film went on to influence a generation of avant-garde filmmakers including, most profoundly, a young Stan Brakhage – declaring Venom & Eternity as a “portal though which every film artist is going to have to pass.”
Wednesday, October 19 – 7pm
Can Dialectics Break Bricks? (La Dialectique peut-elle casser des briques?)
(René Viénet & Gerard Cohen, France, 90 min., French w/ Eng. St., Film on Video, 1973)
Annouced as “the first entirely détourned film in the history of cinema,” Viénet and Cohen transformed a typical kung-fu film into an examination of class and intellectual sectarianism. According to Viénet: “The cinema, which is the newest and most serviceable means of expression of our era has been marking time for 3/4 of a century. By way of review, let us say that it has in fact become the ‘7th art’ dear to cinephiles, ciné-clubs, PTA’s. Let us state that for our purposes the cycle has come to an end.... Let us appropriate the stammerings of this new writing; let us appropriate above all its most achieved examples, the most modern ones, those which have escaped artistic ideology even more than American B-movies: newsreels, trailers, and above all advertisements.” Informed by nearly twenty years of theoretical reflection and practice by the SI, Can Dialectics Break Bricks is also of product of Viénet’s extensive interest and knowledge of China. English subtitles by Keith Sanborn.
Thursday, October 20 – 7pm
Guy Debord, His Art and His Times (Guy Debord, son art et son temps)
(Brigitte Cornand, France, 60 min., French w/ Eng. St., Video, 1994)
A portrait-testament, made at the request of the writer-philosopher-artist during the year 1994, when he realized his end was near due to a painful illness eating away at him. In this work Guy Debord sums up his life, emphasizing the importance of his films and his attraction for painting, then pays homage to his friends Asger Jörn, Gil Wolman, Alice Becker Ho and others. Debord also offers a commentary on our society through a succession of extracts from televised reports, important moments of the last ten years, “torpedoed” by the author’s written commentary inscribed on the screen like the pages of a book.
Thursday, October 21 – 8pm
The Girls of Kamaré (Les Filles de Kamaré)
(René Viénet, France, 75 min., French w/ Eng. St., Film on Video, 1974)
Proudly wearing the mantle of "the first subversive Japanese porno film," The Girls of Kamaré presents itself as a detournement—read subversion—of Noribumi Suzuki’s A Pair of Panties for Summer. In this film, René Viénet furthers his exploration of Sadean women in head-on collision with all legal and moral restraints, which, left unopposed, give rise to the survival sickness experienced by most of the world. The legacy of colonialist torture, the flatulence of Sartre, and the Orientalism of Barthes and de Beauvoir are all mercilessly critiqued. By utterly transforming the sadistic genre conventions of the Japanese girls’ reform school film, The Girls of Kamaré becomes the vehicle for the expression of a revolutionary rage against the very constraints from which aficionados of the genre take their pleasure. English subtitles by Keith Sanborn.
If anyone has seen any of these films, what did you think of them? Could you provide a review? Maybe some background information or some good info to have going into the film being talked about?