Kept alive by a stream of reprints, anthologies and retrospectives from mostly anarchist presses, the Situationist critique continues to gain fresh adherents. It also plays a role in shaping the movement for global justice (or the “antiglobalization movement,” as its critics like to call it), from Naomi Klein’s book No Logo to the magazine Adbusters to the proliferating network of Independent Media Centers. Today, Situationism exerts considerable–though often unacknowledged and depoliticized–influence over academic discourse and artistic practice in many media. It remains a potent and at times exhilarating critique of contemporary society and of the power of the image untethered from its original context.Nearly forgotten after their dissolution in 1972, the Situationist legacy was recovered in 1989 with the publication of Greil Marcus’s Lipstick Traces, which purported to trace the subterranean relationships between medieval heresy, nineteenth-century utopianism, Dada, Surrealism, Situationism, soul music and punk rock. THE SOCIETY OF THE SPECTACLE can be viewed simply as an artifact of a particular moment in French and Western modern history in the aftermath of May 1968.

Of course, a film itself is a spectacle, but Debord, with the manner of his delivery and irreverent pacing, seems determined to both undercut viewers’ expectations while simultaneously drawing them in. In the nearly five decades since it was released, the issues raised in THE SOCIETY OF THE SPECTACLE have become more entrenched.

He accompanies these images with his critique of life both mediated and sustained by the spectacular, as the central pillar of a capitalist alienation so all-encompassing, even revolution may seem futile. The result is a kind of organized chaos that nonetheless manages to provide a sharp commentary on a world dominated by image and power.ĭebord casts a wide net, drawing in footage of topless women, manufacturing, fashion shoots, Hollywood movies, and scenes of wars, uprisings, and protests being crushed by police.

Using the classic Situationist technique of “détournement” (think pre-digital remixing), Debord overlays a dizzying array of still and film images with text from the book. Six years after the publication of his Situationist classic The Society of the Spectacle, Guy Debord released this semi-experimental, essay-film adaptation.

Society of the spectacle book