Cécile Guilbert on the cinema of guy debord
Cécile Guilbert, now one of the most important young novelists and essayists in France, was eighteen, bored and wandering around her native Paris on a sweltering day in June 1981, when on a whim she entered the dim, empty cinema on the rue Cujas, which resembled more a porno cinema than any of the glitzy corporate picture houses of the great boulevards. Inspired, moved and disturbed by what she had seen (a programme of 4 films by Guy Debord) she hurried to look for a copy of the almost unfindable Society of the Spectacle, whose arguments struck her with the force of revelation. ‘Debord for me was an adventure and a great discovery,’ she says. ‘Everywhere you read that France was changing and that democracy would solve all our problems, but in the film ‘In girium imus nocte et consumimur igni’ Debord was telling us, in his grave and melancholy way, that the war was not yet finished, that it could not yet be finished whilst the spectacle was transforming life into non-life. I did not know then much about Hegel or )Marx’s) The German Ideology, but I knew that what Debord was saying was true because I could see it all around: the spectacle of politics, the illusion of democratic power. I left the cinema feeling as if I had seen something transgressive, like a porno film or a novel by Georges Bataille, but most of all I knew what I had just seen was not cinema but something else.’
andrew hussey
the game of war: the life and death of guy debord
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