Overview

Guy Debord, founder of the Situationist International, fomenter of the May 1968 revolt in France, and author of The Society of the Spectacle, was also the creator of six tantalizingly inaccessible films. Technically and aesthetically, these films are among the most brilliantly innovative works in the history of the cinema. But they are not so much ""works of art"" as carefully calculated subversive provocations. Following the still-unsolved Mafia-style assassination of the films' financer and producer in 1984, all the films were withdrawn from circulation for nearly twenty years. One of the films is an adaptation of Debord's book The Society of the Spectacle. Others evoke his adventures in the bohemian underworld of 1950s Paris, which he contrasts with the increasingly ignorant, ugly, and alienated world that has since been produced by modern capitalism. In each case Debord simultaneously attacks the film medium itself, challenging spectators to create their own adventures instead of passively consuming the pseudo-adventures that are presented to them. Ken Knabb's meticulous translation of all the filmscripts (which Debord's widow Alice asked him to make to accompany the long-awaited rerelease of the films, beginning with a complete retrospective at the Venice Film Festival) is supplemented with numerous illustrations and documents and elucidated by extensive annotations. For this new edition Knabb has revised the translations, updated the filmography, and added the scathing video that Debord made shortly before his death: Guy Debord, His Art and His Time.

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Reviews

""Hats off to Ken Knabb for his heroic effort to recreate the films of Guy Debord on paper, and in English. Knabb's book contains the scripts for Debord's films alongside detailed descriptions of scenes, followed by select frames from each of the films, plus well-chosen documents about the films, situationist theories, and the context of the times. . . . This book is definitely recommended for anyone who is deeply interested in Debord or the situationists."" --Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed

Author Information

Guy Debord was the founder of the Situationist International (1957), the editor of its journal Internationale Situationniste (1958-69), the author of several books, and the creator of seven films, including one based on his book The Society of the Spectacle. Ken Knabb has translated numerous works by Guy Debord and the Situationist International, including Debord's The Society of the Spectacle and the Situationist International Anthology, both (re)published by PM Press in 2024. Knabb's own writings are published in Public Secrets: Collected Skirmishes of Ken Knabb (1997) and in The Joy of Revolution and Other Writings (PM Press, 2026) and posted on his Bureau of Public Secrets website: www.bopsecrets.org.

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