TONY CONRAD TAKES ON VIDEO: WHO’S WATCHING WHO ?
Friday 13 June 2008, at 7pm
London Tate Modern

CONCORD ULTIMATUM
Tony Conrad, USA, 1977, video, b/w, sound, 35 min (10 min excerpt)
In Concord Ultimatum, I bend the structuralist / materialist film idiom in the direction of narrative, by addressing the video apparatus, the camera, directly. Materialist films were structured around a frank recognition of the primacy of the cinematic apparatus, but the recognition itself of this materialism required critical assessment; that is, a hidden stage of the materialist work, virtual to the work itself, is its identification and assessment as materialist. In Concord Ultimatum I hoped to assimilate the critical stage into the work, by repositioning the conditions of representation in the virtual space of audience reception.

REDRESSING DOWN
Tony Conrad, USA, 1988, video, colour, sound, 18 min
Redressing Down uses the distance between the body and architectural / environmental space as a metaphor for the relationship between maker and viewer. It invokes the body in relation to personal living space, in that personal space constructs an essential site for mediated social activity. A series of vignettes, each of which grips the viewer in a setting of psychic expectancy, constructs a psychological and cultural ‘virtual reality’, each viewer’s feedback into the video is their own theatrical construction of the tape’s events.

IPSO FACTO
Tony Conrad, USA, 1985, video, colour, sound, 7 min
A story of technology, appropriation, and authority. High technology is a palisade of errors behind which artists are marionettes of industry or addicts of solitaire. Inappropriate appropriation abounds here – inappropriate because what’s quoted is either not an entry in the cultural ark(ive) or is vulnerable to criticism. Then there’s the completely untrustable face, a pasty puffy morning after case, an old futz that nobody would ever believe, who mouths quotes from Mussolini (an authority no one can take seriously, the most maligned and possibly least acceptable thinker of the century), and who looks out from his monitor upon an old-fashion audience that listens unblinkingly, without a peep or guffaw.

LOOKERS
Tony Conrad, USA, 1984, video, colour, sound, 4 min (pilot segment)
An analytical crisis ensues when the viewer’s activity is accounted within the work: without a (historic) closure, there can be no criteria of quality, nor a universal reference for judgement. Postmodern discourse has at least made a down payment on this cost to theory. Lookers seeks a different answer by moving against the tide; it explores the inclusion of discipline itself within the realm of interactions which encompass the work and viewer. In this fragment, there is a stress on the visual perceptual mode. Other footage expands Lookers into other sensory modalities, and implements a more alluring discipline.

EGYPT 2025
Tony Conrad, USA, 1986, video, colour, sound, 13 min (work in progress)
The First Intermediate Period was the occasion for a remarkable constellation of innovations in Egyptian thought and civil order. After the death of Pepy the First, none of the numerous claimants to his sacred throne was able to reverse the dire drought that announced the modern incursions of the Sahara into Egypt; one after another they were secretly denounced and executed; and simultaneously Egypt was visited by refugees filtering in across the eastern and western sands. Local nobles were unopposed in their power, and they attained to the same privileges as pharaoh in the afterworld (‘the West’). For the first time men and women too won rights of private ownership, of contracted marriages, and (with a proper burial) of entry to the West. Remarkably, individuals began reflecting in writing on the world around them, and the first introspective literature was invented. Egypt 2025 immerses itself in this concatenation of catastrophes, which is elaborated across the mixed space of family, gender, writing, law, civil order, religion, personal identity, and death. Any historical complex is simultaneously an invocation of our own condition, the conviction that sustains ’history’ as narrative arises amid the multiplication of overdetermining details that compose its ‘authenticity’.

NO EUROPE
Tony Conrad, USA, 1990, video, colour, sound, 13 min
Science fiction can invent a ‘future’ in a way that historical romances are not permitted to do. No Europe violates this convention, freely projecting a past in which the ‘white man’ (and woman) in America was not from Europe at all, but instead has somehow derivatived from a primitive cave-dwelling condition to which ‘Caucasians’ would have been weirdly ill adapted, since they would have received no assistance, as the historical Europeans did, from Indians – a people whom we are led to understand may instead have been living in Europe. Needless to say, this script is rife with rudeness and inconsistency.

ACCORDION
Tony Conrad, USA, 1981, video, colour, sound, 5 min
Around 1958 or 1959 Henry Flynt and I did a public performance of a Duo by Christian Wolff on two violins. Henry was an able performer; I, on the other hand, was not. My tone was shrill and thin, without the warmth of vibrato or the nuanced bowing that comes with long practice. Nevertheless, the ‘lesson’ of John Cage’s music was the equivalence of all sounds, and for me the successful testing of this notion against the amateurism of my own practice was a fascinating confirmation of my forwardness in ‘going public’ as a musician. Henry informed me that in fact Christian particularly liked the qualities of our performance. This attitude, which in effect accepted (or even found substantial interest in) amateurism in musical performance, was significant for me in releasing my self-assurance as a performer. From this point forward I was comfortable with, and even preferential toward, amateurism in performance. In 1980, I made Accordion, a video performance that caricatured inept performance as a heroic enterprise.

IN LINE
Tony Conrad, USA, 1986, video, colour, sound, 7 min
A trisection of the spectator’s power over their own image language: word, trance, and command are installed as valences of the artist’s license; revealed as figures of parental authority. How peculiar that people like being an audience because they enjoy their submission to the authority of the program. This ritual of being dominated is a conspiracy with themselves that we enjoy but refuse to acknowledge. “Oh, no. I don’t like TV because I’m submissive; it’s because it makes me feel good.” The programs are always carefully crafted to be sensitive to people’s self-protectiveness, even if they offer a good scare, or a good cry. Well, if this is all true, what happens when, by chance, you submit to a program that refuses to be polite about your closet masochism? That … tells all? In the wake of Combat Status Go, and in the course of making the trilogy “The Poetics of TV” (which comprises Ipso Facto, An Immense Majority and In Line), I discovered that meta-narrative devices could be employed ironically – even perniciously. Even an ‘advanced’ viewer might not have a chance to enjoy full independence from the strictures of the work, but they would enjoy the demonstration of their encumbrance by older viewing habits (or one might say the deconstruction of narrative conceits), to the extent that they found themselves trapped by the unravelling devices of these three short tapes.

All texts or quotes by Tony Conrad.

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JONAS MEKAS PRESENTS FLUX PARTY
Friday 17 October 2008, 11:15pm til late
London Rio Cinema

Legendary artist-filmmaker Jonas Mekas presents Flux Party featuring the Fluxfilm Anthology as assembled by George Maciunas, rare Fluxus audio and surprise performances. Drinks and Fluxcakes will be served.

Fluxus was a provocative and humorous art movement that produced objects, performances and events which challenged the boundaries between traditional art and everyday life. Early Fluxus pieces included feeding a bale of hay to a piano, a painting to be stepped on, or the sound of dripping water.

The Fluxfilm Anthology, showing here in its most comprehensive version to date, includes Zen for Film (clear film for collecting dust), Four (Yoko Ono’s infamous film of bare bottoms), Smoking (cigarette smoke shot with a high speed camera) and other films of comical street performances, counting games, x-ray movies and interference patterns. The Fluxfilms embodied the minimal aesthetic, playfulness and poetic dimensions of Fluxus and transposed its performative aspects into the cinema.

This informal late night event is a unique chance to see films by artists such as George Brecht, John Cale, Dick Higgins, Yoko Ono, Nam June Paik, Paul Sharits, Chieko Shiomi, Ben Vautier, Wolf Vostell and Robert Watts presented on the big screen of the Rio Cinema, East London’s splendid art deco picture palace. Jonas Mekas will be present to discuss Fluxus and his friend and fellow Lithuanian émigré, the late George Maciunas.

Seminal figures of the New York downtown art scene since the beginning of the 1960s, Jonas Mekas (b.1922) and George Maciunas (1931-78) were connected through many different projects. Mekas was a central force of the avant-garde film scene and presented early screenings at Maciunas’ AG Gallery. Maciunas coordinated Fluxus as an international community of artists, whose contributors also included Joseph Beuys, Henry Flynt, Takehisa Kosugi, John Lennon and La Monte Young.

Maciunas was also fundamental in the emergence of SoHo as an artistic centre in New York. As early as 1966, he began to purchase dilapidated industrial buildings and convert them into cooperative real estate, starting the trend for loft style living. Jonas Mekas was one of the first to participate in the Fluxhouse venture, acquiring space for both his own home and the Filmmakers’ Cinematheque / Anthology Film Archives.

Last year, Mekas returned to Lithuania to inaugurate the Jonas Mekas Visual Arts Center in Vilnius, presenting his own Fluxus collection to the public for the first time in a joint Mekas / Maciunas exhibition. The centre is planning an extensive film archive and a Fluxus Research Institute. In 2009, Mekas will act as the Ambassador of Vilnius during its year as the European Capital of Culture.

Curated by Anne-Sophie Dinant and Mark Webber. Presented by the South London Gallery. With thanks to Benn Northover, Serpentine Gallery, Re:Voir and the Rio Cinema.

FLUXFILM ANTHOLOGY
The most complete known version of the Fluxfilm Anthology.

Fluxfilm No. 1:  Zen For Film, Nam June Paik, 1964, 20 min
“Clear film, accumulating in time dust and scratches.”

Fluxfilm No. 2: Invocation of Canyons and Boulders, Dick Higgins, 1966, 3 min version.
“Mouth, eating motions.”

Fluxfilm No. 3: End After 9, George Maciunas, 1966, 1 min
“Word & number gag, no camera.”

Fluxfilm No. 4: Disappearing Music For Face, Chieko Shiomi, 1966, 10 min
“Transition from smile to no-smile, shot at 2000fr/sec. Camera shows only a CU of the mouth area.” Camera: Peter Moore

Fluxfilm No. 5: Blink, John Cavanaugh, 1966, 5 min
“Flicker: White and black alternating frames.”

Fluxfilm No. 6: 9 Minutes, James Riddle, 1966, 9 min
“Time counter, in seconds and minutes.”

Fluxfilm No. 7: 10 Feet, George Maciunas, 1966, 13 sec
“Prestype on clear film measuring tape, 10ft. length. No camera. At the end of every foot of film numbers appear, 1, 2, etc to 10.”

Fluxfilm No. 8: 1000 Frames, George Maciunas, c.1966, 42 sec
“Numerals on clear film from 1 to 1000.”

Fluxfilm No. 9: Eyeblink, Yoko Ono, 1966, 1 min
“High speed camera, 200fr./sec. view of one eyeblink.” Camera: Peter Moore

Fluxfilm No. 10: ENTRANCE to EXIT, George Brecht, 1966, 7 min
“A smooth linear transition from white, through greys to black, produced in developing tank. The ‘door sign’ ENTRANCE fades in, white letters on the black background, stays for a few seconds, then slowly fades into white. Five-minute fade into black and the title EXIT, which stays for a few seconds then fades into white.”

Fluxfilm No. 11: Trace No. 22, Robert Watts, 1965, 1 min
“X-ray sequence of mouth and throat; eating, salivating, speaking.”

Fluxfilm No. 12: Trace No. 23, Robert Watts, 1966, 3 min
“Begins with a shot of a demarcation line on an asphalt tennis court. A hand points to the distant landscape, then numbers 408 and 409 appear on a female torso. The female then passes different decorated plastic hot dogs, banana shapes suggestively between her legs, through her arm pits, etc. Ends with an egg floating on water.”

Fluxfilm No. 13: Trace No. 24, Robert Watts, 1966, 3 min
“Begins with a picture of Marilyn Monroe, then shifts to a female body, shot from belly button down, which is wriggling under piles of cellophane.”

Fluxfilm No. 14: One, Yoko Ono, 1966, 5 min
“High speed camera 2000fr/sec. match striking fire.” Camera: Peter Moore.

Fluxfilm No. 15: Eye Blink, Yoko Ono, 1966, 1 min
“Same as No. 9, probably.” Camera: Peter Moore.

Fluxfilm No. 16: Four, Yoko Ono, 1967, 6 min
“Sequences of buttock movement as various performers walked. Filmed at constant distance.” With Susanna Campbell, Philip Corner, Anthony Cox, Bici Hendricks, Geoffrey Hendricks, Kyoko Ono, Yoko Ono, Ben Patterson, Jeff Perkins, Susan Polang, Jerry Sablo, Carolee Schneemann, James Tenney, Pieter Vanderbiek, Verne Williams. Camera: Jeff Perkins, Anthony Cox.

Fluxfilm No. 17: 5 O’Clock in the Morning, Pieter Vanderbiek, 1966, 5 min
“A handful of rocks and chestnuts falling, filmed with high speed camera.” Camera: Peter Moore.

Fluxfilm No. 18: Smoking, Joe Jones, 1966, 6 min
“Sequence of cigarette smoke shot with high speed camera, 2000fr/sec.” Camera: Peter Moore.

Fluxfilm No.19: Opus 74, version 2, Eric Andersen, 1966, 1 min
“Single frame exposures, color. Different image each frame, various items in the room, etc.”

Fluxfilm No. 20: ARTYPE, George Maciunas, 1966, 4 min
“Artype patterns, intended for loops.” Benday dot patterns. Dots, lines.  “Screens, wavy lines, parallel lines, etc. on clear film. No camera.”

Fluxfilm No. 22: Shout, Jeff Perkins, 1966, 3 min
“Close-ups of two faces, shouting at each other.” Starring Jeff Perkins and Anthony Cox. Camera: Yoko Ono.

Fluxfilm No. 23: Sun in Your Head, Wolf Vostell, 1963, 6 min
“Single Frame sequences of TV or film images, with periodic distortions of the image. The images are airplanes, women men interspersed with pictures of texts like: ‘silence, genius at work’ and ‘ich liebe dich.’ The end credit is ‘Television décollage, Cologne, 1963’.” Camera: Edo Jansen.

Fluxfilm No. 24: Readymade, Albert Fine, 1966, 45 sec
“Color test strip from developing tank.”

Fluxfilm No. 25: The Evil Faerie, George Landow, 1966, 30 sec
“A man on the roof making flying gestures with his hands. Film is preceded by a picture of an object of ‘L’ shape shakingly moving. At the end of the film, image of ‘Kodak girl’ briefly appears.” With Steven M. Zinc.

Fluxfilm No. 26: Sears Catalogue 1-3, Paul Sharits, 1965, 28 sec
“Pages from Sears catalogue, single frame exp.”

Fluxfilm No. 27: Dots 1 & 2, Paul Sharits, 1965, 46 sec
“Single frame exposures of dot-screens.”

Fluxfilm No. 28: Wrist Trick, Paul Sharits, 1965, 28 sec
“Various gestures of hand held razorblade, single frame exposures.”

Fluxfilm No Number: Unrolling Event, Paul Sharits, 1965, 5 sec
“Toilet paper event, single frame exposures.”

Fluxfilm No. 29: Word Movie, Paul Sharits, 1965, 4 min
“Single frame exposures of words, color.”

Fluxfilm No. 30: Dance, Albert Fine, 1966, 2 min
“Face Smiling. Hammering a brick. CU of an ear (moving?). Face twitching. Dancing on one leg. Rolls, twitches on the floor. Boxes the wall.”

Fluxfilm No. 31: Police Car, John Cale, 1966, 1 min
“Underexposed sequence of blinking lights on a police car.”

Fluxfilm No. 36: Fluxfilm No. 36, Peter Kennedy & Mike Parr, 1970, 3 min
“Tips of feet walking at the edge of frame, all around the frame.”

Fluxfilm No. 37: Fluxfilm No. 37, Peter Kennedy & Mike Parr, 1970, 2 min
“Face going out of focus by layering sheets of plastic between camera and subject.”

Fluxfilm No. 38: Jen e vois rien Je n’entends rien Jen e dis rien, Ben Vautier, 1965, 5 min
“Seeing, Hearing, Saying Nothing. Ben stands with ears, eyes, mouth bandaged.”

Fluxfilm No. 39: La traverse du port de Nice á la nage, Ben Vautier, 1963, 2 min
“Swimming across Nice harbour fully clothed. Ben swims across a bay in Nice.”

Fluxfilm No. 40: Fair un effort, Ben Vautier, 1969, 2 min
“Lifting and holding up a chest of drawers.”

Fluxfilm No. 41: Regardez moi cela suffit, Ben Vautier. 1962, 3 min
“Sitting on a promenade in nice with a sign: Watch me, that’s all.

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PNEUMA MONOXYD
Saturday 25 October 2008, from12-7pm
London BFI Southbank Studio

PNEUMA MONOXYD
Thomas Köner, Germany-Serbia, 2007, video, colour, sound, 10 min
As surveillance becomes a fundamental of today’s society, Köner’s work focuses on its implications by monitoring observation and usurping its tools. With the intention of taking a step forward from here, the artist began to invent his own imaginary tool. The scenes in Pneuma Monoxyd are observed with such an imaginary tool. Its ability to unlock future, past and present unveils the moment as it is being pieced together, blurred and unstable. Premonition, memory and splinters of ‘here’ and ‘now’ become perceptible as part of the fabric of the observed time. A static gaze of a Balkan market unveils the present moment as a porous frontier and seems like a window looking out to the beyond. (Transmediale 2008)

Thomas Köner attended music college in Dortmund and studied electronic music at the CEM-Studio in Arnhem. Extending his explorations of sound and duration to images, he began to work on video installations, photography and net art. Alchemie (1992) was the first of a sequence of collaborations with film artist Jürgen Reble in which sound and image were integrally manipulated during live performance. Köner has also composed music to accompany historic silent films for the Louvre and the Musée d’Orsay, Paris. He has been awarded the New Media Prize at the Montreal International Festival New Cinema New Media (2000), the Golden Nica at the Prix Ars Electronica (2004) and the Tiger Cub Award, International Film Festival Rotterdam (2005). His installation Suburbs Of The Void received the Transmediale 2005 award in Berlin and was presented at La Biennale di Venezia, Teatro La Fenice, as a live performance that the same year. Köner participated in the Media Art Biennal Seoul in 2008, and is currently working on a suite of five permanent sound installations commissioned by the Musée Rimbaud in Charleville-Mézières. www.koner.de

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A SENSE OF PLACE
Saturday 25 October 2008, at 2pm
London BFI Southbank NFT3

FOUR TORONTO FILMS
Nicky Hamlyn, UK, 2007, 16mm, b/w & colour, silent, 18 min
The suite of four short films explores ideas about framing, centred round the attempt to find a necessary correspondence between the facts of the camera apparatus; fixed, rectangular frame and aspect ratio, and the work’s subject matter. A related idea concerns the figuration within the films of the manner in which the camera creates its own pro-filmic. To this end, there is a more or less recurring theme of frames within frames. Three of the four sections were filmed in, or within a stones throw of, the house in Toronto where I stayed while completing the work as an artist in residence at LIFT workshops (sidewalk, window, back lane). The fourth section was made at Koshlong Lake, near Haliburton, about 100 miles northeast of Toronto. (Nicky Hamlyn)

21 ALLEYS
Robert Todd, USA, 2007, 16mm, colour, soumd, 9 min
Since 1989, Boston-based filmmaker Robert Todd has been quietly developing one of the most distinctive bodies of work in the American film scene. Todd’s beautifully shot films draw together documentary and experimental elements; they don’t hew to a single, clearly defined style, but nevertheless show a consistency of poetic vision, spirit, and purpose. Through suspended moments of reflection and anticipation, Todd’s films explore the difficult-to-define emotions engendered by the stresses of civilization. (Cinemateque Ontario)

LAST DAYS IN A LONELY PLACE
Phil Solomon, USA, 2007, video, b/w, sound, 22 min
Farewell my friends, Farewell my dear ones, If I was rude, Forgive my weakness, Goodbye my friends, Goodbye to evening parties, Remember me, In the spring, To work for your bread, Soon you must leave, Remember your families, And work for your children, I don’t need much, and the older I become, I realize, My friendships, Will carry me over any course of distance, any cause of sorrow, My friends that last, Will dance one more time with me. I don’t need words, This, I need. (Polly Jean Harvey, Before Departure)

LOSSLESS #2
Rebecca Baron & Douglas Goodwin, USA, 2008, video, b/w, sound, 3 min
Access to experimental films has been limited by the scarcity of prints and often by filmmakers’ careful regulation of viewing conditions and formats. Though for years bootleg tapes, DVDs, and even unauthorized prints have circulated, many experimental films are now receiving much higher circulation through high-quality bit torrents available to anyone with an interest who knows how to find them in the world they share with Britney Spears videos, pornography, amateur video diaries, and first-run movies on the Internet. Lossless by Rebecca Baron and Douglas Goodwin, is a series of works that looks at the dematerialization of film into bits, exposing the residual effects of the process that makes file sharing possible. They used several methods to alter these works, either interrupting the data streaming by removing basic information holding together the digital format or comparing 35mm to DVD and examining the difference between each frame. The project considers the impact of the digital age on filmmaking and film watching, the materiality and demateriality of film as an artistic medium, as well as the social aspects of how the online community functions and the audience for such obscure films. (Carpenter Centre for the Visual Arts, Harvard University)

TRILOGY: KETTLE’S YARD
Jayne Parker, UK, 2008, video, b/w & colour, sound, 25 min
Linear Construction, Woman with Arms Crossed, and Arc form Trilogy: Kettle’s Yard, three films sited at Kettle’s Yard, University of Cambridge, and featuring cellist Anton Lukoszevieze. These films are documents of musical performance: respectively ‘Récitation’ (1980) by Georges Aperghis; ‘Sensitivo, per arco solo, n. 7 da 7 Fogli’ (1959) by Sylvano Bussotti; and ‘Raimondas Rumsas’ (2002) by Laurence Crane. They include art objects from the Kettle’s Yard collection, opening up metaphorical space and meaning. Each piece holds a special interest: In ‘Récitation’ the cellist is required to tap the strings with his left hand while speaking phonemes based around the word ‘violoncelle’. Of ‘Sensitivo’ Anton writes, ‘The score of ‘Sensitivo’ is a graphic score for any solo stringed instrument. It was composed to allow a situation where the instrumentalist encounters and creates the graphic score with a combination of improvised gestures and concrete sounds from the notation. In my realization I use the bow to a certain extent as if it were a pen or brush in the hand of an imaginary graphic artist, scanning the contours of drawn and scribbled lines …’ Anton plays sitting in front of Rodin’s bronze of Eve, which Rodin sometimes referred to as ‘Woman with Arms Crossed’. ‘Raimondas Rumsas’ was written specially for Anton to play with his Bach-Bogen, a curved bow capable of playing up to four strings at once. (Jayne Parker)

THE MIRACLE OF DON CRISTOBAL
Lawrence Jordan, USA, 2008, 16mm, colour, sound, 12 min
For a long time I have wanted to construct a melodrama (animated) from the funky engravings of the 19th century which illustrated ‘young peoples’ adventure stories. Eventually, through a great deal of selection, such a film fell into place. I have attempted to present the high emotional overlay of very mundane events in this ‘alchemical melodrama’. To that end, Puccini combines with blatant sounds of police sirens and old door buzzers on the soundtrack, while ‘real’ and nightmare images compete for screen time. (Lawrence Jordan)

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GUY DEBORD
Saturday 25 October 2008, at 4pm
London BFI Southbank NFT3

SUR LE PASSAGE DE QUELQUES PERSONNES À TRAVERS UNE ASSEZ COURTE UNITÉ DE TEMPS
Guy Debord, France, 1959, 35mm, b/w, sound, 18 min
You have rightly noticed the difference in the text-image relation between the first and second parts of Passage. Detourned phrases can be found throughout the film, but the majority are in the first part. My plan was as follows: The film begins like a typical, technically ordinary documentary. Gradually it becomes less clear and more disappointing, which might at first seem to be the result of a pretentious ‘ideological’ interpretation of an otherwise clear subject, because the text appears increasingly inadequate and pompously inflated in relation to the images (the tone of Lefebvre = Marx-Goldman-Huizinga!). The question then arises: What is the subject of this film? – which I think represents an irritating and upsetting break with the habitual spectacle. With the appearance of the first blank screen, the film begins to contradict itself in every way – and thus becomes more clear as its creator takes sides against it. It is both a rather explicitly anti-art-film about the unaccomplished work of this era and an ultimately realistic description of a way of life deprived of coherence and significance. The form corresponds to the content. It does not describe this or that particular activity (merchant marine, oil exploration, some historic monument to admire – or even to demolish, as in Franju’s magnificent Hôtel des invalides), but the very core of present-day activity in general, which is empty. It is a portrayal of the absence of ‘real life.’ This slow movement of exposure and negation is what I was trying to embody in Passage. But very summarily and arbitrarily, I must admit. Despite the prevalent fixation on the economic obstacles, the main problem is actually that short films are quite unsuitable for truly experimental cinema. Their very brevity tends to encourage a moderate, neatly edited form of expression. But it does seem interesting to détourn the fixed form of the traditional documentary, and this tends to tie us to the inviolable 20-minute limit. (Guy Debord, Letter to André Frankin, 1960)

IN GIRUM IMUS NOCTE ET CONSUMIMUR IGNI
Guy Debord, France, 1978, 35mm, b/w, sound, 105 min
‘I will make no concessions to the public in this film,’ says Guy Debord at the beginning of his 1978 film, and he stays true to his word. The palindromically-titled In girum (roughly translated as ‘we spin around the night consumed by fire’) is not so much a difficult film as an act of pure negation from the founder of the Situationist International. Like all of Debord’s films, In girum stands apart from cinema, not to mention the modern world as it has evolved into its present state. Images from magazines, comics, and popular films are turned inside out (a process defined by Debord as détournement) to illustrate what he sees as the complete vacuity of mediatized society, of which we the viewers are unknowing participants. To those who complain that they do not understand his purpose or his historical allusions, Debord suggests that they ‘blame their own sterility and lack of education rather than my methods; they have wasted their time at college, bargain shopping for worn-out fragments of second-hand knowledge.’ In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni is an act of condemnation, but it is also an affirmation – of our ability to build on the best rather than the worst in mankind, to create a true Utopia rather than a paltry counterfeit. Without exaggeration, this is one of the most provocative experiences you’ll ever have at the movies. (Kent Jones, Film Society of Lincoln Centre)

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