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Hampton critiques Guy Debord's films. Best known for his monumentally unforgiving 1967 book The Society of the Spectacle, Debord made that densely eloquent Marxist jeremiad into a 1973 motionless picture--an industrial training film for cultural saboteurs. In societies dominated by modern conditions of production, he lectures as footage of a spacewalking astronaut in earth's orbit segues to a stripper writhing on stage, life is presented as an immense accumulation of spectacles.

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"We don't know what to say." Of all the distress signals from all the gin joints of the avant-garde, none hit the bull's-eye of modern alienation more precisely than a few soundtracked words at the start of Guy Debord's short, devastating Critique of Separation (Critique de la séparation, 61). "But so many things we wanted have not been attained, or only partially and not like we imagined. What communication have we desired, or experienced, or only simulated? What real project has been lost?"

That "parodic-serious" soliloquy and its methodology cuts more than one way-indicating a fundamental inadequacy in movies themselves, as well as pointing to Debord's own mesmeric, unattainable project. Though this ardent French philosopher of revolt made six incursions into severe, blankly charismatic experimental cinema between 1952 and 1978, his goal was the total supersession of art and politics alike, the creation of beatific, disruptive "situations" that would realize poetry concretely in daily life. As part of his lifelong intellectual battle against all "respectable occupations and intellectual tourism," he rejected the emerging cult of auteurism: Godard, Resnais, and Antonioni were supposed to be breaking courageous new ground, but Debord brushed off their ilk like yesterday's lint.

By Critique's been-there-exploded-that lights, the latest art films were already corpses; their embalmed organs weren't even fit for transplant. Debord felt the cinema had to be razed along with every other tool of bourgeois and state socialization. He didn't want to elevate movies with therapeutic doses of tasteful abstraction, drip-dry anguish, or contrived playfulness-he sought to drive the audience out of the cinema and into the streets, to dispel the hold of images over reality and find the terra incognita of a genuinely free world beneath the cardboard banality of the present society.

Turning filmmaking against itself was but one Debord praxis among many: prior to his last act of radical self-determination (committing suicide in 1994), in his nothingbut-spare-time he authored negationist graffiti ("Never work!") and more considered, expansive riot-as-urban-renewal tracts (The Decline and Fall of the Spectacle-Commodity Economy), consorted with teenage runaways (on screen, he appears to be trying to pick one up as Critique's voiceover begins), founded microscopic yet imposing subversive movements (notably the Situationist International), invented his own military board game ("Kriegspiel"), drank prodigious quantities of alcohol, and (lest we forget) systematically fomented the Paris upheavals of May '68.

Best known for his monumentally unforgiving 1967 book The Society of the Spectacle (La Société du spectacle), Debord made that densely eloquent Marxist jeremiad into a 1973 motionless picture-an industrial training film for cultural saboteurs. "In societies dominated by modern conditions of production," he lectures as footage of a spacewalking astronaut in earth's orbit segues to a stripper writhing on stage, "life is presented as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has receded into a representation." Technology, fetish, advertising, bureaucracy, celebrity: all this and more converge in a self-perpetuating stasis to dispossess the individual and enthrone the commodity. Images-whether official, commercial, or "artistic"-mediate social relations and colonize the imagination, replacing experience with an endless shell game of vicarious pleasures and reified consumption.

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By now this picture of Society has become a postmodern cliché, watered down and tarted up by every intellectual Boy Scout with a global positioning device and secret decoder ring, then further refracted or diffused through wildly hit-and-miss Hollywood productions like The Matrix and Fight Club. (Think of Brad Pitt's Tyler Durden as a half-pugilist, half-leprechaun Debord mascot-the schizoid logic of show business at its most self-divided.) But Debord's original account had one especially salient thing going for it: he granted no special exemption or dispensation to members of the art and knowledge industries, whom he insisted were as embedded in or dependent upon the spectacle as the tawdriest starlet, the vilest capitalist, or the most parasitic party hack.

What a kick in the "fashionable blockhead": to Debord's mind, all those Mau-Maoist Weekend warriors and their carefully choreographed Blow-Ups were no better than a de Gaulle/Brezhnev remake of the remake of Imitation of Life. Alienation and estrangement were just being wrapped in stylish trappings and sold back to the unwary and self-satisfied. So much for the myth of an activist spectator-the thrall of the spectacle was just being distributed through superficially differentiated modes of abject passivity, whether consumer, academic, careerist, aesthetic, or all of the above.

"Cinema is dead. No more films are possible," declared a Debord mouthpiece at the outset (or onset) of Howls for Sade (Hurlements en faveur de Sade): the year is not 1973, nor 1961, but 1952. This ebullient feature-length anti-film can be viewed for the first time in decades on Guy Debord: Oeuvres cinématographiques complètes, a three-DVD set lovingly curated by Olivier Assayas and Debord's widow Alice Becker-Ho that gathers up Debord's widely scattered and, in most cases, virtually unseen works. (No English-subtitled version of the French box is as yet available, but Ken Knabb's translation of the complete screenplays is available and easy to follow.) Howls retains an exhilarating sandpaper-on-celluloid quality: composed of alternating passages of empty white screen over which its five disembodied voices-ghosts of an absent future-can be heard speaking non sequiturs and aphorisms in quiet tongues, and black screen (where the speakers are silent for increasingly long intervals). It is a tour de force of incongruous humor, staccato poetry bursts, and cool provocation.

Casually hijacking Isidore Isou's precocious Lettrism-a dandified post-Dada movement, with its program of sound poetry and filmic decomposition, le cinema discrépant-right out from under the leader's nose, here Debord invoked artistic boredom to goad the audience into rebelling against it. Enforcing absolute visual monotony (broken only by the switch from white light to dark, with occasional specks or lightning-bolts on the film stock itself), Howls creates an intricate verbal mosaic of blind quotations (Rio Grande, Saint-Just, Breton), personal asides, news bulletins, girlish interjections, and phenomenally absurd patter. (Debord: "What is a one and only love?" Serge Berna: "I will answer only in the presence of my attorney.") The rhythm of ever more protracted silences broken by spurts of cryptic talk only intensifies the sense that these speakers are drunk on more than alcohol. Perched on the brink of an intoxicating void, Debord still gives himself the best lines: "We were ready to blow up all the bridges, but the bridges let us down." And a bit later, one last leap of nihilist faith: "Like lost children, we live our unfinished adventures."

The full tear-gas-canister effect of the film can't be had on DVD, not only because Howls demands a restive audience; it also needs the equivalent of Michèle Bernstein-who would become Debord's first wife-seated in the balcony as designated banshee to out-howl the disgruntled cinema patrons below. This wasn't art, but war-albeit in the form of a single-minded prank, the kind meant to start a fire or at least a stampede for the theater exits. It had something else too: the first of his we'll-be-famous-someday-you'll-see allusions to Les Enfants du paradis, as if Debord were really drawing an invisible treasure map for the enfants perdus to the liberated paradise that should rightfully have been at hand. The future is ours, Debord insisted, as if he were already there, looking back from a high tower. "Gun Crazy. You remember. That's how it was. No one was good enough for us." Hearing those headily compacted words today, it is easy to forget that Breathless and Bande à part hadn't even been conceived yet. Howls already positions Debord's inchoate group beyond all that, past Ginsberg's as yet unpublished Howl, too, on the road to an upheaval so extreme it meant to leave the Beats and the Nouvelle Vague playing catch-up, choking on the dust of time.

(The DVD contains its own probably inadvertent joke on the audience: only 17 of the 24 unbroken minutes of blackness/silence that conclude Hurlements have been included on the disc, thus cheating spectators out of seven precious minutes of nothingness to which they are rightfully entitled.)

The 1959 short On the Passage of a Few People Through a Rather Brief Moment in Time (Sur le passage de quelques personnes à travers une assez courte unité de temps) and Critique of Separation are less sequels or continuations than reveries disguised as progress reports. On the Passage immediately takes us back to those thrilling days of 1952: the milieu of Debord's rechristened Lettrist International, the cafés and bars where these mysterious children of the damned (or at least of Marx and Lautremont) schemed against "all the works and diversions of a society" and "its notion of happiness." This time there are images accompanying the steady flow of words: a loving examination of a photo that includes Debord, Bernstein, and the matinee-idol handsome painter Asger Jorn; documentary footage of comrades and favorite haunts complete with derisive Coming Attractions intertitles ("The most gripping suspense . . . prestigious décor . . ."); riot cops in action; and even clips of a young, undiscovered Anna Karina lathering up in a soap commercial. A manifesto mocking "talk about 'liberating the cinema,'" the 18-minute film demands instead "the liberation of everyday life . . . for us, right now."

On the Passage is pointedly paradoxical: interpenetrated by scorn and nostalgia, it categorically rejects the "pathetic need" for movie stars "arising out of a dismal and anonymous life that would like to enlarge itself to the dimensions of cinematic life." Yet it presents the members of Debord's "provisional microsociety"-the dashing Jorn, Elaine Papai with her stunning, comehither glare, and the riffraff rest-as though they were icons in waiting, existential pinups poised to displace Che Guevara long before his poster would go up on dormroom walls everywhere. Critique of Separation takes this notion of enlarging anonymous life into still more concentrated fetishistic territory: its "heroine" is some cherubic Lolita with a Jean Seberg pageboy coif, Miss Bastille Bait of 1961. As the handheld camera and Debord alike hover over the androgynous doll, an irresistibly melancholy drone of longing and theory insinuates its way across "this distance organized between each and everyone." What's remarkable is how this confluence of lyricism, asperity, and oblique, theoretical autobiography assumes the feel-the serpentine flow-of unpatented popular culture. Occupying an underground space roughly midway between Rivette's Paris Belongs to Us and Marker's La Jetée, Critique slips into broad daylight with a brazen, conspiratorial sigh-a kaleidoscopic, voluptuous 19-minute ballad of despair, heroism, lust, paranoia, irony, and unexpected empathy.

Here the use of "detournement," the Situationist term for the diversion of images/texts/concepts from their original intent and converting or subverting them into new, critical forms, comes into its own. Debord uses comic strip panels and movie stills of adversarial knights, outtakes from On the Passage and stock footage as well as expressively displayed pages from Memoirs, his masterpiece of detournement. That 1957 collaboration with Jorn consisted of nothing more (or less) than the sublime juxtaposition of sentences and photos culled from other books and set off with a Pollock-Rorschach array of ink splashes, splatters, and blots. In addition, subtitles were thrown up on the screen for a further layering effect, ranging from Situationist slogans to "private jokes" and a snippet of The Divine Comedy. Critique's overall atmosphere suggests a few stray documentary reels that fell through a looking glass and were then reconstituted by a subterranean narrator who spun a history of class consciousness and poetic license from them.

There would be a hiatus of 13 years until Debord finally found a producer and patron in Gérard Lebovici; then in relatively quick succession came the 1973 feature adaptation of The Society of the Spectacle, followed by the 1975 short Refutation of All Judgments, Whether in Praise or Hostile, Which Have Up to Now Been Brought on the Film "The Society of the Spectacle" (Réfutation de tous les jugements, tant élogieux qu'hostiles, qui ont été jusqu'ici portés sur le film «La Société du spectacle»), and then the feature In girum imus node et consumimur igni (We Circle in the Night and Are Consumed by Fire, 78), unquestionably his greatest and most definitive work.

Since Refutation dismisses all possible criticisms of Society of the Spectacle on grounds that no member of the media would be capable of understanding it, a few suitably chastised observations might still be in order: 1) Debord submits his films not to the judgment of the living, but rather a jury of his presumed peers: Machiavelli, Marx, Hegel, Clausewitz, Villon; 2) There's an assembly-line quality to much of Society's metronomic montage, one chunk of tick-tock banalization after another, consumer rites interspersed with cheesecake nudes (including numerous snapshots of Becker-Ho, to whom the film is tenderly dedicated: the uncenterfold in a T&A dialectic?); 3) It locates the spectacle symbolically in a pre-'68 world, identifying it with a static black-and-white kinescope aura that assiduously turns back the clock and makes things like a Nixon/Mao handshake look as quaint as Marilyn Monroe in her birthday suit. Stranger still, May '68 doesn't seem to have taken place yet-as if history had been rewound and the uprising we're watching is merely a dress rehearsal foreshadowing the new, improved (i.e., victorious) version of those events to come.

If Society refuses to acknowledge the possibility that its revolutionary moment might already have passed into history, there is one wild-card element that contains a germ of recognition. It appears in the classic film clips that periodically interrupt Debord's main discourse, less sutured into the body of film than injected at a sharp, quizzical right angle. These telling sequences are lifted from, among others, Johnny Guitar, The Shanghai Gesture, Ten Days That Shook the World, They Died With Their Boots On, and Mr. Arkadin. They invoke graveyards and toast friendship; they exchange dreamy opium-den banter; they make bold, heedless cavalry charges; they go down in history like the scorpion stinging the uncomprehending frog because "it's my character. Let's drink to character!"

Debord doesn't use these passages as examples of the spectacle, but as counterpoints to it. The actors-a rueful Welles, a headstrong Flynn, Joan Crawford and Sterling Hayden, Gene Tierney and Victor Mature-become Situationist recruits, double agents, coup plotters working against the tyranny of the normal. With the palindromic In girum imus node et consumimur igni, this magic circle is made complete. Returning to the Paris of his youth with a perspective that is both archaeological and self-mythologizing, Debord excavates the psychogeography of his past, his previous films, and his humble labors to extinguish the modern Inferno. Again he will enlist old favorites in the great cause: a split-second flash of The Third Man, a soundless reel of The Charge of the Light Brigade, Custer's Last Stand from They Died With Their Boots On. At first, In girum recapitulates the embittered audience-baiting monotone of Society and Refutation, but before long a subtle shift takes place: we enter the Boulevard of Crime through a battered print of Les Enfants du paradis, and Debord claims it as his allegorical stamping ground.

Soon after, the philosopher-criminal-aphorist Lacenaire materializes from the same film as Debord's stand-in, cutting a witty, ruthless, deliriously amoral figure. In girum now turns back to a maze of personal references, shot through with grandiose associations: the ancient waterways of Venice, the Lettrist urban planner-dreamer Ivan Chtcheglov as the Prince Valiant of old comic strips, a little Howl, a snatch of "Whisper Not" recorded by Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers at the Olympia in Paris, the camera panning over maps and aerial views of the city searching for the key to it. "Yet everything we would ever love was there. Time burned more intensely than elsewhere, and would soon run out. We felt the earth shake."

Spoken like-whom or what exactly? A film noir fugitive, a John Ford colonel, Lacenaire in the vestments of Baudelaire, the Devil himself in Les Visiteurs du soir? "Oh, what a splendid fire!" exclaims the latter, as if replying to Debord's remark about the side that "makes history by undermining all established satisfaction." If such moments anticipate Godard's cinephile museum pieces, they are closer in wayward spirit to Kenneth Anger: more spells of disorder cast by "a perverse Prince of Darkness" than attempts to rehabilitate cinema through history or vice versa. Debord does pull off one uncharacteristically "cinematic" effect here: the a capella Les Visiteurs song of "sad lost children" poignantly bleeds into a procession in which the Light Brigade gives way to photographs of Debord's past lovers. In girum is arranged in the eulogistic, fugue-like manner of a requiem for solo horn-Debord playing taps for Chtcheglov ("He transformed cities and life merely by looking at them"), the Situationist Cavalry, a Paris that vanished, and a world that never came into being.

There is one last testament contained on the DVD set: Guy Debord, His Art and His Times (Guy Debord, son art et son temps, 94), a video document if not documentary co-directed by Brigitte Cornand, and completed prior to Debord's suicide. Lacking a translation and going by the visuals alone, it appears to be a footnote to his work: a portrait, with little comment, of the current mass media as a toxic waste dump. No argument there, though that may be closer to shooting two-headed fish in a barrel than a critique as such. But undoubtedly, in life Debord overestimated the appetite for insurrection more than he underestimated the capacity of technology to expand the spectacle's breadth and lack of depth into numbing new realms like cyberspace. That Parisians have lately been rioting "against precariousness" and for job security goes to show how far we are from his unattained goals-the Situationists were nothing if not in favor of the precarious in their hunt for adventure, knowledge, and trouble.

As far as "serious" filmmaking goes, it has been reported Debord felt some affinity for at least one contemporary movie: My Dinner With Andre. In which case, perhaps In girum can be seen as an even more preeminent example of the cinema of logorrhea: "My Dinner with Ghosts." Whether this is a selling point remains to be seen, but Debord's no-quarter efforts might well appeal to anyone fed up with cinema's ideological sponge-bath tendencies, its well-insured, Managed Care hand-holding, and its embarrassing propensity for hooking up mossy things like The Squid and the Whale to critical life-support systems when their feeding tubes ought to be removed instead.

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