简介:Voice 1 (male fessional announcer type) This neighborhood(1) was made for the wretched dignity of the petty bourgeoisie, for respectable oupations and intellectual tourism. The sedentary population ..
Voice 1 (male fessional announcer type) This neighborhood(1) was made for the wretched dignity of the petty bourgeoisie, for respectable oupations and intellectual tourism. The sedentary population of the upper floors was sheltered from the influences of the street. This neighborhood has remained the same. It was the strange setting of our story, where a systematic questioning of all the diversions and works of a society, a total critique of its idea of happiness, was expressed in acts. These people also srned subjective fundity. They were interested in nothing but an adequate and ncrete expression of themselves. Voice 2 (Debord, monotone) Human beings are not fully nscious of their real life - usually groping in the dark; overwhelmed by the nsequences of their acts; at every moment groups and individuals find themselves nfronted with results they have not wished. Voice 1 They said that oblivion was their ruling passion. They wanted to reinvent everything each day; to bee the masters and possessors of their own lives. Just as one does not judge a man aording to the nception he has of himself, one cannot judge such periods of transition aording to their own nsciousness; on the ntrary, one must explain the nsciousness through the ntradictions of material life, through the nflict between social nditions and the forces of social duction. The gress achieved in the domination of nature was not yet matched by a rresponding liberation of everyday life. Youth passed away among the various ntrols of resignation. Our camera has captured for you a few aspects of a visional microsociety. The knowledge of empirical facts remains abstract and superficial as long as it is not ncretized by its integration into the whole ” which alone permits the supersession of pial and abstract blems so as to arrive at their ncrete essence, and implicitly at their meaning. This group was on the margins of the enomy. It tended toward a role of pure nsumption, and first of all the free nsumption of its time. It thus found itself directly engaged in qualitative variations of everyday life but deprived of any means to intervene in them. The group ranged over a very small area. The same times brought them back to the same places. No one went to bed early. Discussion on the meaning of all this ntinued... Voice 2 Our life is a journey ” In the winter and the night. ” We seek our passage...� Voice 1 The abandoned literature nevertheless exerted a delaying action on new affective formulations. Voice 2 There was the fatigue and the ld of the morning in this much-traversed labyrinth, like an enigma that we had to resolve. It was a looking-glass reality through which we had to disver the potential richness of reality. On the bank of the river evening began once again; and caresses; and the importance of a world without importance. Just as the eyes have a blurred vision of many things and can see only one clearly, so the will can strive only inpletely toward diverse objects and can pletely love only one at a time. Voice 3 (young girl) No one unted on the future. It would never be possible to be together later, or anywhere else. There would never be a greater freedom. Voice 1 The refusal of time and of growing old automatically limited enunters in this narrow, ntingent zone, where what was lacking was felt as irreparable. The extreme precariousness of the means of getting by without working was at the root of this impatience which made excesses necessary and breaks definitive. Voice 2 One never really ntests an anization of existence without ntesting all of that anization's forms of language. Voice 1 When freedom is practiced in a closed circle, it fades into a dream, bees a mere representation of itself. The ambiance of play is by nature unstable. At any moment ordinary life� can prevail once again. The geographical limitation of play is even more striking than its temporal limitation. Any game takes place within the ntours of its spatial domain. Around the neighborhood, around its fleeting and threatened imlity, stretched a half-known city where people met only by chance, losing their way forever. The girls who found their way there, because they were legally under the ntrol of their families until the age of eighteen, were often recaptured by the defenders of that detestable institution. They were generally nfined under the guard of those creatures who among all the bad ducts of a bad society are the most ugly and repugnant nuns. What usually makes documentaries so easy to understand is the arbitrary limitation of their subject matter. They describe the atomization of social functions and the isolation of their ducts. One can, in ntrast, envisage the entire plexity of a moment which is not resolved into a work, a moment whose movement indissolubly ntains facts and values and whose meaning does not yet appear. The subject matter of the documentary would then be this nfused totality. Voice 2 The era had arrived at a level of knowledge and technical means that made possible, and increasingly necessary, a direct nstruction of all aspects of a liberated affective and practical existence. The appearance of these superior means of action, still unused because of the delays in the ject of liquidating the modity enomy, had already ndemned aesthetic activity, whose ambitions and powers were both outdated. The decay of and of all the values of former mores had formed our sociological background. The ruling class's monopoly over the instruments we needed to ntrol in order to realize the llective of our time had excluded us from a cultural duction officially devoted to illustrating and repeating the past. An film on this generation can only be a film on its absence of real creations. Everyone unthinkingly followed the paths learned once and for all, to their work and their home, to their predictable future. For them duty had already bee a habit, and habit a duty. They did not see the deficiency of their city. They thought the deficiency of their life was natural. We wanted to break out of this nditioning, in quest of another use of the urban landscape, in quest of new passions. The atmosphere of a few places gave us intimations of the future powers of an architecture it would be necessary to create to be the support and framework for less mediocre games. We uld expect nothing of anything we had not ourselves altered. The urban environment claimed the orders and tastes of the ruling society just as violently as the newspapers. It is man who makes the unity of the world, but man has extended himself everywhere. People can see nothing around them that is not their own image; everything speaks to them of themselves. Their very landscape is alive. There were obstacles everywhere. There was a hesion in the obstacles of all types. They maintained the herent reign of poverty. Everything being nnected, it was necessary to change everything by a unitary struggle, or nothing. It was necessary to link up with the masses, but we were surrounded by sleep. Voice 3 The dictatorship of the letariat is a desperate struggle, bloody and bloodless, violent and peaceful, military and enomic, educational and administrative, against the forces and traditions of the old world. Voice 1 In this untry it is once again the men of order who have rebelled. They have rerced their power. They have been able to aggravate the grotesqueness of the ruling nditions aording to their will. They have embellished their system with the funereal ceremonies of the past. Voice 2 Years, like a single instant longed to this point, e to an end. Voice 1 What was directly lived reappears frozen in the distance, fit into the tastes and illusions of an era, carried away with it. Voice 2 The appearance of events that we have not made, that others have made against us, now obliges us to be aware of the passage of time, its results, the transformation of our own desires into events. What differentiates the past from the present is precisely its out-of-reach objectivity; there is no more should-be; being is so nsumed that it has ceased to exist. The details are already lost in the dust of time. Who was afraid of life, afraid of the night, afraid of being taken, afraid of being kept Voice 3 What should be abolished ntinues, and we ntinue to wear away with it. We are engulfed. We are separated. The years pass and we haven't changed anything. Voice 2 Once again morning in the same streets. Once again the fatigue of so many similarly passed nights. It is a walk that has lasted a long time. Voice 1 Really hard to drink more. Voice 2 Of urse one might make a film of it. But even if such a film sueeds in being as fundamentally disnnected and unsatisfying as the reality it deals with, it will never be more than a re-creation ” poor and false like this botched traveling shot. Voice 3 There are now people who pride themselves on being authors of films, as others were authors of novels. They are even more backward than the novelists because they are unaware of the deposition and exhaustion of individual expression in our time, ignorant of the end of the s of passivity. They are praised for their sincerity since they dramatize, with more personal depth, the nventions of which their life nsists. There is talk of the liberation of the cinema. But what does it matter to us if one more is liberated through which Tom, Dick or Harry can joyously express their slavish sentiments The only interesting venture is the liberation of everyday life, not only in the perspectives of history but for us and right away. This entails the withering away of alienated forms of munication. The cinema, too, has to be destroyed. Voice 2 In the final analysis, stars are created by the need we have for them, and not by their talent or lack of talent or even by the film industry or advertising. Miserable need, dismal, anonymous life that would like to expand itself to the dimensions of cinema life. The imaginary life on the screen is the duct of this real need. The star is the jection of this need. The images of the advertisements during the intermissions are more suited than any others for evoking an intermission of life. To really describe this era it would no doubt be necessary to show many other things. But what would be the point Better to grasp the totality of what has been done and what remains to be done than to add more ruins to the old world of the spectacle and of memories. 1. This film, which evokes the lettrist experiences at the origin of the situationist movement, opens with shots of the Paris district frequented by the lettrists in the early 1950s.展开