Dismantling the Spectacle: The cinema of Guy Debord

Abstract

The artist and theoretician Guy Debord formulated a radical critique of society in the 1960s with his theses about the »society of spectacle«. The term spectacle is used to criticize socio-economic conditions (e.g. alienation) as conveyed by images from the mass media (cinema and television). Debord is a leading member of the Situationist Internationale (SI), which adopted an ambivalent attitude towards the cinema in the first issue (1958) of its magazine Internationale situationiste (IS). On the one hand, it insisted that the existing cinema should be destroyed. But then strategies were developed, e.g. use for another purpose (detournement), which was deployed to reinterpret entire films, by adding a new soundtrack, for example.

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