Society of the Spectacle (English version)

Guy Debord's film The Society of the Spectacle (1973) originally a French language film presented with new English soundtrack. Admission is $6. Guy Debord (1931-­1994) was the most influential figure in the Situationist International, the small experimental group that played a key role in provoking the May 1968 revolt in France. The Society of the Spectacle is Debord's film adaptation of his own 1967 book of the same name. As passages from the book are read in voiceover the text is illuminated, via direct illustration or various types of ironic contrast, by clips from Russian and Hollywood features (including Potemkin, Ten Days That Shook the World, Johnny Guitar, Mr. Arkadin, etc.), TV commercials, softcore porn, and news and documentary footage, including glimpses of Spain 1936, Hungary '56, Watts '65, France '68 and other revolts of the past. Intertitle quotes from Marx, Machiavelli, Clausewitz or Tocqueville occasionally break the flow. For this showing Hugo Ball Room Labs has taken the crisp new DVD version of the French film and dubbed in Ken Knabb's translation as read by Dore Bowen, making it finally possible for you, the non-French speaker to appreciate the complex relation between text and images, instead of reading your way through subtitles.