chronique d’un été, 1960. dir. jean rouch and edgar morin

6

Chronique d’un été, 1960. Dir. Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin. Film still.

http://www.mitpressjournals.org/action/showImage?doi=10.1162/grey.2007.1.26.6&iName=master.img-000.jpg&w=348&h=232

Calling from the Inside: Filmic Topologies of the EverydayTOM MCDONOUGH

We must, however, not forget that language has other functions than that of ensuring mutual understanding.

—André Martinet, Éléments de linguistique générale (1960)

A small notice appeared in the arts and theater section of Parisian daily Le Mondeon Thursday, October 19, 1961, announcing the opening of a new film, Chroniqued’un été (Chronicle of a Summer), at the Agriculteurs cinema on the rued’Athènes, just behind the Gare Saint-Lazare: “Jean Rouch—author of Moi, unnoir and Pyramide humaine—and Edgar Morin have tried an experiment in‘cinéma-vérité’ with some Parisians who talk without pretense about their pro-fessional and private life. This film won the Critics Award at the last CannesFestival.”1 Behind this rather laconic notice lay one of the most widely discussedand influential documentary films of the decade. Ethnologist Jean Rouch, whohad gained a significant reputation over the previous decade for his ever moreambitious films of African life (including the aforementioned Me, a Black Manof 1957 and Human Pyramid of 1959), joined sociologist Edgar Morin to pro-duce a study of what he called “this strange tribe living in Paris,” turning theethnographic gaze back upon the métropole at the moment of decolonization.Filmgoers at the Agriculteurs would have seen images shot on the boulevardsof Paris, not so different from those in the neighborhood where they now were sitting, images of other Parisians like themselves, stopped on the street andasked a curiously inchoate question: “Tell us, are you happy?” Chronique d’unété was a film, then, whose subject was everyday life itself, that rather unformed,amorphous daily existence and its imbrication with (or disjunction from) thebroader world and the forces of history. And as such, it was by no means unique:at the same moment that Chronique was being filmed in Paris, Guy Debord wasshooting his short film, Critique de la séparation (Critique of Separation), a pro-ject that he himself described as an “experimental documentary”2 He, too, wasconcerned with investigating everyday life at the ambiguous opening of thisnew decade, and his film also at least implicitly revolved around the questioninsistently posed in Rouch and Morin’s documentary: Are you happy? But the

Grey Room 26, Winter 2007, pp. 6–29. © 2007 Grey Room, Inc. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology 7

meaning of this question, and how it ultimately might be answered, differedprofoundly from one film to the next; here, in close proximity the one with theother, we find two radically differing conceptions of the documentary form, ofthe possibilities for open dialogue and communication between its subjects, andfinally of everyday life itself.

This conjunction of concerns was by no means coincidental: Debord’s filmwas undoubtedly, among other things, a response to Chronique d’un été. We canbe sure that he was aware of the project, since Morin had originally hoped toenlist Debord’s Situationist colleague Asger Jorn in the filming early in October1960. (The majority of the film had been shot that summer, but Morin evidentlywished to include a segment of Jorn in his Paris studio.) This was a wildly naiverequest on Morin’s part, because at that time the Situationists were engaged in aheated campaign of calumny against Arguments, the revisionist journal Morincoedited along with several other colleagues; given that Debord was derisive ofthe entire milieu, there was no chance of Jorn accepting the offer. The latter’scurt refusal led to a brief but bitter campaign of accusation and counteraccusationbetween the two groups (revolving, as always, around claims of plagiarism), butwhat is most significant is the certainty that Debord, at the time he was shoot-ing his Critique, was informed of Rouch and Morin’s ambition to create, as hedescribed it, “a film on the everyday life of the French.”3 And despite his dis-dain for the latter, one imagines that Debord could not help but have been curious about the planned film, not least because of Rouch’s involvement.Although our knowledge of Debord’s filmic interests is at best imprecise, hisadmiration for the anthropologist-filmmaker is undeniable: next to the films ofhis Lettrist colleagues, Rouch’s cinematic work was the only one of the 1950ssingled out for praise by the Situationists.4 But there is one final intersectionbetween Debord and Chronique that should be mentioned: at least one of theparticipants in the film (Jacques Mothet, who appeared only very briefly) was amember of the post-Trotskyite group Socialisme ou Barbarie with which Debordwas collaborating rather intensely at the time, so here too we find an intriguingintersection at the moment of the production of the two films.5

But these fugitive connections, however interesting, are not at the heart of mysubject here. My claim is not merely that Debordknew of Chronique d’un été, but that his own“experimental documentary” can be understoodonly if we see it as a refutation of this other filmand the entire project of which it was a part—as, that is, a radically different vision of docu-mentary and a radically different analysis of

8 Grey Room 26

Guy Debord at the shooting ofCritique de la separation, 1960.


“the everyday life of the French.” Now the idea of a new documentary form wasmuch in the air at the time, not least thanks to the publication in January 1960 ofMorin’s article “For a New Cinéma-Vérité,” a report on the International Festivalof Ethnographic Film held in Florence. Both Morin and Rouch had been mem-bers of the jury, and the former’s essay seems to have been a development fromconversations held at that time. Here the sociologist called for a documentarycinema that would capture “the authenticity of life as it is lived,” or “the depthof everyday life as it is really lived.”6 In the past, Morin contended, documen-tary had ceded these realms to the more sensitive explorations of fictional film,contenting itself with the examination of the individual’s milieu, his or herexternal relations within industrial or agricultural labor, the role of moderntechnology, the experience of the mass. But now he demanded that documen-tary “reinterrogate man [sic] by means of cinema” via the integration of anethnographic model of participant observation, the filmmaker united in the closestpossible contact with his or her subjects. His exemplar of this new cinéma-véritéwas Rouch who, “equipped only with a 16mm camera and a tape recorder slungacross his shoulders,” had abandoned the heavy appurtenances of the film direc-tor and could immerse himself in a given community like a scuba diver explor-ing some exotic undersea world.7 It only remained for future explorers to turnthis ethnographic eye from African society to the contemporary West, to “workers,the petite bourgeoisie, the petty bureaucrats, . . . the men and women of ourenormous cities.” What was the aim of this new documentary that wished, asMorin wrote, “to penetrate beyond appearances, beyond defenses, to enter theunknown world of everyday life?” Nothing less than the abolition of separation,“breaking the membrane that isolates each of us from others in the metro, on thestreet, or on the stairway of the apartment building.” Documentary wouldbecome “a ‘cinema of brotherhood.’”8

Chronique d’un été was meant to be the realization of this manifesto, whatMorin called a “sociological fresco” of Paris during the summer of 1960, whenthe Algerian War was believed to be in its final chapter. (The war would, in fact,drag on for two more years.) For its creators the film began as a desire to elucidate the unexplored “depths” of private life of which Morin had spoken inhis cinéma-vérité essay; they would inquire after not only the sociological basesof the private sphere (housing, work, leisure), but also its existential profundi-ties, “the style of life, the attitude people have toward themselves and towardothers, their means of conceiving their most profound problems and the solu-tions to those problems,” as Morin later described it.9 The echoes between thisprogram and that of Henri Lefebvre, the greatest theorist of everyday life as a philosophical category and Morin’s close colleague at Arguments, are unmis-

McDonough | Calling from the Inside: Filmic Topologies of the Everyday 9

takable. What they both shared was an awareness of the very obscurity of thesubject in question; when Lefebvre had returned to write the lengthy forewordto the second edition of his Critique of Everyday Life in 1958, he was compelledto confess “a certain obscurity in the very concept of everyday life. Where is it tobe found?” he wrote:

In work or in leisure? In family life and in moments “lived” outside of culture?Initially the answer seems obvious. Everyday life involves all three elements,all three aspects. It is their unity and their totality, and it determines theconcrete individual. And yet this answer is not entirely satisfactory.10

Indeed, Lefebvre’s recognition that “for the historian of a specific period, for theethnographer, for the sociologist studying a society or a group, the fundamentalquestion would be to grasp a certain quality, difficult to define and yet essentialand concrete,” could well stand as the coda to Chronique, this film which wasmade precisely through the collaboration of a sociologist and an ethnographer.11

Rouch and Morin would evolve certain procedures in order to penetrate thatobscurity and access the difficult-to-define quality of everyday life. Notably theysought “psychoanalytic stimulants” that might enable participants to talk aboutsubjects they would normally be unwilling or unable to discuss. Morin hadalready broached this question in his 1960 essay, in which he wrote of partici-pants in this new documentary form playing out their lives before the filmmakerin a game that “has the value of psychoanalytic truth, that is to say, preciselythat which is hidden or repressed comes to the surface in these roles.”12 InChronique both he and Rouch were avowed participants, provocateurs really,challenging their subjects with questions, hoping to precipitate a crisis—some-times with startling success. The camera acted as a “catalyst,” an “accelerator,”provoking its subjects to reveal themselves under circumstances that, whileentirely artificial, were supposed to have the paradoxical effect of bringing hid-den truths to the surface. Even contemporary viewers recognized the innovative

10 Grey Room 26


quality of this approach; Le Monde’s film critic noted how the central figures inChronique managed thereby to tackle “some of the key problems of our time”:

Disgust with an occupational universe become inhuman, and nostalgia fora job “you could take an interest in”; obsessive fear (in the Jewish woman)of certain memories; difficulty in accepting a complete sexual freedom;temptation of a peace of mind without responsibility or rebellion in thestudent; a casual “difficulté d’être”; fear of loneliness; a confused wish forlove and brotherhood: such are the main themes that can be drawn fromthis succession of “spontaneous” confessions.13

In the intervening decades, this inscription of the camera into the film text hasbecome banal (if not sinister), but at the time of Chronique’s release in 1961 itwas nothing short of astonishing (the same reviewer in Le Monde spoke repeat-edly of the “shamelessness” of the film and its subjects) and appeared to offeran unprecedented window into the otherwise opaque daily lives of those filmed.The camera became a sort of surrogate analyst or father-confessor, coaxing andsometimes forcing a discourse of truth from its subjects, a technology of visionbecome a technology of self.

Defenders of Rouch’s work have often returned to this conception of the cam-era as provocateur, as an assertive presence in the filmic event whose role wasstressed and which in fact ceased to be a mere technical obstacle (as it wasthought to be in most ethnographic filmmaking, which had attempted to hidethe work of the camera and microphone) and became instead the primary pre-text for the subject’s revelation of self.14 But the status of the technological appa-ratus in Rouch’s film is notably unstable. One of the great myths that grewaround Chronique d’un été was that of its experimentation with new cameratechnology: shooting had begun with Raoul Coutard (Godard’s cameraman for Àbout de souffle, 1959, and subsequent films) using a standard Arriflex, but wheneven this relatively portable 16 mm camera proved too bulky, Rouch brought inthe Quebecois documentarist Michel Brault, who had extensive experience withhandheld camera technology. With the help of a technician at the Eclair camerafactory, they were able to use an experimental piece of equipment that was light,silent, highly portable, and outfitted with synch sound (a prototype of the KMTCoutant-Mathot Eclair, originally developed for satellite and military surveil-lance use). This camera allowed the film crew to operate freely on the streets ofParis, to move about while filming and capture its subjects in the midst of theirdaily activities: it was the technological basis of this new cinéma-vérité. But thistechnology, this camera-work, had a paradoxical effect: if the visible presenceof the camera had a provocative effect on participants in the film, it was also at



the same time curiously invisible. Miniaturization, portability, and the like wasa means of hiding the work of the camera and microphone, of seeming to restitutethe lived in a raw manner and eliminating any intervention of the filmmaker andhis technique. Viewers are subject to what has been called a “natural language”of cinema, in which film is figured as a duplicate of a pro-filmic “reality.” Thisentailed precisely a repression of the work of signification, in favor of “thepreservation of the homogeneous nature of reality which can be easily andunproblematically rendered visible.”15 Chronique d’un été occupied an uneasyground between this conception of film as evidence and a recognition of film as text, as in other words a semiotic activity that produced and not merelyreflected meaning.

Something of Rouch’s ambivalence can be sensed in his attitude toward DzigaVertov. The term cinéma-vérité was itself an homage to the Soviet filmmaker, atranslation of his term kino-pravda (film-truth), and discussions of Chroniqueoften reference his Man with a Movie Camera (1929) and its reflexive docu-mentary practice as a precedent for the later film.16 But the alignment of thesepractices cannot hold: at the most basic level, Vertov’s practice had dependedcrucially on experiments with montage, while Rouch’s valorization of the directtranscription of reality could only conceive of montage as a formalist distortion,a dead end. Indeed Rouch’s version of Vertov renaturalized his kino-eye, themechanized eye of the camera, as a sort of synthesis of the human eye and itstechnological prosthesis that produced a greater humanity as well as a greaterobjectivity.17 Rather than a tool in ideological struggle (in which montage wasthe site of a contestation of meaning), the camera was thought of as an innocent,neutral instrument (“a mirror, and also a window open to the outside,” as Rouchonce remarked)18 that was in fact the site of production of the most spontaneousideology, that of a metaphysics of reality.

| | | | |

But just what was this reality that Rouch and Morin set out to “explore” withthe help of their novel documentary techniques, their noiseless mobile camerasand convivial interview style? Perhaps the question is best answered by sayingthat they conceived reality in essentially Freudian terms. We will recall thatFreud had presupposed the existence of two real and unknown worlds—oneexterior, the other psychic, interior—and, relying upon Kant, had rejoiced at theconclusion that, of the two, only interior reality stood a chance of being under-stood.19 Even if Freud, at the end of his life, would arrive at a rather differentconception of this partition of interior-exterior (whereby the psychic apparatus

12 Grey Room 26

extended into space, and space in its turn was the projection of this appara-tus),20 his work and that of his followers remained encumbered by this ineradi-cable intuition that psychic life was an inside delimited by a surface (the skin)turned toward exterior reality. Rouch and Morin would adopt an identical perspective, in that Chronique d’un été superimposed the topography of theFreudian unconscious on that of the Lefebvrian everyday. Like analysts beforetheir patient, they hoped to coax out the mysteries of this peculiarly socialunconscious—the lived experience of Parisians circa 1960. And in fact the dif-ficulties encountered in this project seem to stem from the fact that in order tograsp this fundamentally elusive unconscious, one needed a device that, whileexternal to it, was simultaneously dependent upon and responsive to the conditions of that very internal realm. For Freud this had of course been the psy-choanalytic experience itself; for the filmmakers it was the technique of cinémavérité, with its various “stimulants” to revelation. Here, in their interviewingmethods as in the analytic relation, the two apparently separate worlds inter-penetrated in the crossed form of a chiasma joining the subject’s desire to thatof Rouch and Morin themselves: “the border is so large that it absorbs the twoworlds that it separates.”21

The filmstrip marked the frontier of those two worlds: that, on the one hand, ofthe supposedly neutral scientific researchers behind the camera; and that, on theother hand, of their subjects, loci of everydayness, who are filmed. But as in theanalytic experience, that clear topography of interior/exterior was continuallytroubled by Rouch and Morin’s filmic dispositif, by their need to precisely breakdown the boundaries separating investigator from object. Indeed the techniquesthey pioneered in Chronique d’un été unavoidably constructed a filmstrip/border broad enough to encompass both the worlds that the camera had of neces-sity to separate. But cinéma vérité both summoned forth that confusion, thatmutual desire of analyst and analysand, and simultaneously disavowed it:Chronique, symptomatically, concluded with a scene of the two filmmakerswalking through the Musée de l’Homme and discussing the outcome of the pro-ject, reinscribing its authors’ status as dispassionate observers and a stabletopography of the division of worlds. But to this duality of Freudian realities wemight counterpose a Lacanian topology that brings into play rather more preciserelations. As J.-D. Nasio has written, “in place of two realities, it is a question ofone alone, uniform, without partition,” and it is this psychoanalytic reality thattopology tries to take into account.22

So Freud’s conception of a clash and interference between two worlds andtheir respective languages is abandoned. That which replaces it is suggested inLacan’s extension and alteration of Plato’s allegory of the cave:


The place in question is the entrance to the cave, towards the exit of whichPlato guides us, while one imagines seeing the psychoanalyst enteringthere. But things are not that easy, as it is an entrance one can only reachjust as it closes (the place will never be popular with tourists), and the onlyway for it to open up a bit is by calling from the inside.23

In other words, it is always closing time at the cave of the unconscious, and theonly way of gaining access is to be inside already. In contrast to the clear border-line dividing interior from exterior in Freudian topography, Lacanian topologyproposes a cave mouth that more closely resembles a Möbius strip, which hasonly one side and one surface. Interior and exterior no longer evoke heteroge-neous surfaces; rather the opposition between these two “worlds” has becomeinternal to the circular structure of the topological object itself. Any analysis ofthe unconscious/everyday must position itself both within and outside thiscave, eschewing the simplifying fictions of inclusion/exclusion that govern anearlier Freudian topography. To pursue Lacan’s analogy, the representation ofthe everyday occurs precisely at the mouth of the cave, at which the philoso-pher/revolutionary attempting to escape meets the psychoanalyst entreatingentry: the mouth of the cave, characterized by its rapid opening and shutting(“what we have to account for is a gap, beat, or alternating suction . . .”),24 becomesthe projector and screen onto which the everyday, the “unconscious” of officialhistories, enters into visibility even as it continually resists formalization. Thiswould be a cinematic topology of the everyday, one that insisted on its ownimbrication within the social and psychic structures it set out to represent, asagainst cinéma vérité’s metaphysical claim of a disinterested observation,premised on a belief in the evidential power of film.

| | | | |

Debord’s Critique de la séparation opened with a trailer for itself that can onlybe characterized as a parody of this cinematic language. After images of a stillphotograph of a girl wearing a bikini (an image that had appeared earlier in theInternationale situationniste journal),25 a text frame (“Coming soon to thisscreen”), and a very brief glimpse of newsreel footage of a riot in the BelgianCongo, we are given a rather long traveling shot—apparently filmed out the window of an automobile—down the Boulevard Saint-Michel, past the Muséede Cluny and the intersection with the Boulevard Saint-Germain. Debord’s cinematographer, André Mrugalski, here made use of camera work that directly recalled that of Raoul Coutard in À bout de souffle (as well as, of course,

14 Grey Room 26

Chronique d’un été), and in this sequence one can in fact distinctly make out,on the eastern side of the boulevard, an awning with the name “RAOUL”printed in large letters—surely a coincidence, but still a remarkable index of itsintended target!26 Exactly coinciding with this sequence was a voiceover by awoman of the following text, reciting the opening sentence of André Martinet’sforeword to his Éléments de linguistique générale (Elements of General Linguistics,1960): “If we reflect how natural and advantageous it is for man to identify hislanguage with reality, we shall appreciate how high a degree of sophisticationhad to be reached before he could dissociate them and make of each a separateobject of study.”27 The same voice went on to narrate the credits for the film,which she described as a “documentary,” while a text frame exclaimed “REALcharacters! An AUTHENTIC story!,” before the screen returned to another shortsegment from the Congo newsreel. This brief introductory sequence to Debord’sfilm was nothing if not a highly condensed critique of the premises of cinéma-vérité (with all its pretensions to spontaneity, rawness, instinctiveness, sincer-ity) and of any assumption of film as a “natural language” with a privileged,indexical relation to reality. The Martinet quote was deployed as an epigraphprecisely to indicate the critical relation to be developed here between the film-text and pro-filmic “reality.” Each would become an object of study in thisfilm in which any notion of the “real” or the “authentic” would be thrown intoradical doubt through, above all else, the volatilization of the meaning of imagesand text in its use of montage.

If Rouch and Morin had assumed a sort of transparency between their cine-matic language and reality, Chronique d’un été was underpinned to an evengreater degree by the status accorded spoken language, which became its guar-antor of truth. Indeed the advances in synch sound technology of which theyhad taken advantage had allowed the film to be “about” nothing more than people talking. Yet what struck contemporary viewers was less the dialogue somuch desired by the film’s two directors—less, that is, the moments in whichcommunication might serve, as Martinet put it, “to establish contact,” to allowpeople “to enter into relations with one another”28—than those points in whichcommunication broke down and gave way to incomprehension and inexpress-ibility in “certain gestures, certain tics, certain stammerings, and above all cer-tain silences.” This same reviewer remarked that “silences play a large role inChronique d’un été. That of the two Black men learning the reason for the youngJewish woman’s tattoo, that of the secretary driven to the brink of hysteria, areoverwhelming.”29 It was just these moments of confusion, however, the gropingformulations, awkwardnesses, and silences of many of the participants inChronique, that—within the economy of vérité filmmaking—functioned to anchor


the film all the more tenaciously in an objective reality and that attested to itsspontaneous, unmediated relation to this truth. For stammering and uncertaintyhere always operated as a prelude to enlightenment, to the arrival at knowledge,whether of the external world or of oneself; it was always a spur to furtherspeech on the subject’s part in an ongoing quest for an objective view. Critiquede la séparation went further, placing in doubt the authority of its own subjectof enunciation, the directorial commentary provided over the image track by thevoice of Debord himself. He in fact opened with a confession of his own confu-sion, “we don’t know what to say,” an uncertainty that threatened to leave onemute and that hung, as it were, over the entire film.30

This sentiment would be reiterated, the film compared with “a blurry, drunkenvision” (CCW, 36); at another point, Debord admitted on his voiceover that“none of this is very clear. It is a completely typical drunken monologue, withits incomprehensible allusions and its tiresome delivery. With its vain phrasesthat do not await response and its sententious explanations. And its silences”(CCW, 35). A subtitle in the closing moments seemed to capture the exasperationof the viewer subjected to this drunkard’s rant: “I didn’t understand all of it”(CCW, 39). Drunkenness, physical fatigue, the inability to “find the right word,”all were moments in which the communicative role of language broke down, asMartinet had pointed out in his book on linguistics.31 Yet this incomprehension,and the silences of Critique, differed fundamentally from those of the partici-pants in Chronique. If in the latter they had served as evidence for subjects’unconscious (and unself-conscious) display of what they felt, of a kind of emo-tional truth that appeared unconcerned with the reactions of the film’s viewers,the structure of Debord’s film seemed to purposely foster this sense of bewil-derment. A simultaneous use of images, voiceover narration, and subtitlingthroughout the film made it particularly difficult to follow, made any straight-forward understanding elusive. And this was hardly inadvertent on Debord’spart; such a refusal of transparency has been described by Tom Levin as part ofa double-edged “mimesis of incoherence,” “the deliberate staging of confusionas both a refusal of a false and reductive pseudo-coherence of (narrative) spec-tacle and as a reflection of the fundamental incoherence of the reality of late

16 Grey Room 26

Right and opposite: Critique de la separation, 1961. Dir. Guy Debord. Film still.


capitalism.”32 Or, as Debord stated within the film itself, “the poverty of meansis charged with expressing plainly the scandalous poverty of the subject” (CCW,35, trans. modified).

But we can, thanks to our preceding comments, make Levin’s invaluable analy-sis more precise, for Debord’s subject was not so much the incoherent reality oflate capitalism as a whole, but rather (like Chronique) that of everyday life undersuch conditions. Critique was a film structured around “all that clandestinity ofprivate life regarding which we possess nothing but pitiful documents” (CCW,33, trans. modified). Debord’s language here was significant. If Rouch and Morin,as ethnographers of the contemporary urbanized West, sought to penetrate thedepths of everyday life, to bring light to its mysterious abyssal foundations,Debord would insist on the contrary on its very impenetrability, on its resistanceto representation. Critique opened precisely on a private note, with a trackingshot of Debord sitting with a group of people at a Left Bank café, the camerazooming in to focus on the director himself, deep in conversation with an attrac-tive young woman (played by Caroline Rittener, in what would appear to be heronly cinematic performance) with whom he walks off. Rittener (who providedthe voiceover for the trailer sequence) would reappear throughout Critique dela séparation as a representation of the lost object of desire, as an emblem of thefailed attempt at “a more intense life that has not really been found” (as Debordremarked while she appeared on screen; CCW, 32, trans. modified), and as suchshe played a major role in the film’s thematics of loss and exhaustion, of the veryimpossibility of communication. That impossibility was indelibly linked with aspecific experience of libidinal frustration:

this incomprehension is ubiquitous in everyday encounters. Somethingmust be stated precisely, but time is lacking, and we are not sure of havingbeen understood. Before we have done, or said, what was necessary, we’vealready gone away. We’ve crossed the street. We’ve gone overseas. We can’tgo back (CCW, 30, trans. modified).

If the tendency in recent scholarship has been to see Critique as another instanceof Debord’s melancholy poetics, as one more nostalgic reflection on his libertine



youth in Saint-Germain-des-Près,33 we might note that despite such references(and undoubtedly Critique was, at least in part, a mediated autobiographicalstudy) the subject here was not one person’s private life, but the conditionsunder which that life was collectively experienced at this moment. Underlyingthe existential anxiety surrounding communication in this film lay a clear setof social determinants—determinants whose presence was already suggested inthe passage just quoted, for if crossing the street was a subjective choice, going“overseas” in 1960 inevitably hinted at a less voluntary displacement: that ofyoung conscripts being sent to fight in Algeria.

In both Critique and Chronique, private life continually bled into a broaderinvestigation of the sociopolitical conditions within which it was lived. Morinand Rouch’s interview subjects, for example, broached increasingly broad ques-tions regarding the contemporary political situation abroad (in particular, thecolonial wars in Algeria and the Congo) and the blocked perspectives for trans-formation within France itself; despair, solitude, and boredom appeared as thedominant themes of many of the discussions recorded by the two directors. Theresult was a certain confusion, evident not only in the breakdowns of dialogueon camera, but also in the very conception of the project on the part of its makers,who seemed torn between creating a neutral, ethnographic document about“mankind” [sic] and, alternately, outlining a set of social positions from whicha new, non-Stalinist Left might be articulated (hence the presence in the film ofSocialisme ou Barbarie militants and a very young Régis Debray). But whereasin Chronique those sociopolitical conditions appeared haphazardly as it were,as disruptions of the directors’ original plans for the film that were in fact oftenthe subject of resistance (on the part of Morin in particular), in Critique theywere staged with deliberate intent as a means to precisely call into question thetypical “coherence” of the documentary form, its didactic certainty, and its searchfor comprehension. Just after the film’s opening café sequence, Debord’s voiceintoned, over a slow, 360-degree panoramic survey of the cityscape surroundingthe terrain vague of the Plateau Saint-Merri (present-day site of the Beaubourg):

18 Grey Room 26

Right and opposite: Critique de la separation, 1961. Dir. Guy Debord. Film still.


The cinematic spectacle has its rules that allow one to arrive at satisfactoryproducts. However the reality from which one must start is dissatisfaction.The function of cinema is to present an isolated, false coherence, whetherdramatic or documentary, as a substitute for an absent communication andactivity. To demystify documentary cinema it is necessary to dissolve whatis called its subject (CCW, 29–30, trans. modified).

Il faut dissoudre ce que l’on appelle son sujet. Debord played on the doublemeaning of the term “subject,” suggesting the need to break up both the care-fully circumscribed subject matter of the typical documentary film as well as itsexistential guarantor, the coherent ego of its author. So on one hand the rhythmof a documentary on “private life” would continually be interrupted by whatseemingly lay at its very horizon—the public struggles of those “unknown men”[sic] (and here the screen showed images of rioting Congolese and of theAlgerian revolutionary Djamila Bouhired)34 who would try to “live differently”(CCW, 34, trans. modified)—to the point where its ostensible subject was revealedto be just one aspect of a broader condition; namely, the imposition of a spec-tacular distance or separation between individuals and their ability to activelymold the lifeworld, whether on the personal or collective plane. If Chroniqued’un été could also be said to have similarly (if inadvertently) exploded the doc-umentary form, Critique would go further and also, as we have seen, call intoquestion the production of the authorial ego itself, to which both Rouch andMorin tenaciously clung as the sole foundation for coherence and unity remain-ing in their film. It is no coincidence that the panoramic view over the PlateauSaint-Merri in Critique was accompanied by subtitles that quoted the openinglines of Dante’s Inferno: “Midway upon the journey of our life / I found myselfwithin a forest dark, / For the straightforward pathway had been lost.” The mean-ings are undoubtedly multiple (and once again overdetermined by a set ofopaque autobiographical references), but at least two are worth noting here: first,that the quote functions as a confession of authorial impotence and a refusal of



any position of mastery and knowledge; and second, in the absence of anyVirgilian guide, the subsequent film can lead its viewer only deeper into theobscurities of that forest dark.

“At the extreme, unhappy subjectivity is reversed into a certain sort of objec-tivity: a documentary on the conditions of non-communication” (CCW, 36–37,trans. modified). Contrast this description of the project of Critique de la sépa-ration with Rouch and Morin’s project in Chronique d’un été, which dependedprecisely on fostering free dialogue among the participants as well as betweenthem and the two directors. This was a film founded upon a faith in the possi-bility of open communication and the abolition of separations: “the authorsthemselves mingle with the characters,” Morin asserted; “there is not a moat oneither side of the camera but free circulation and exchanges,” resulting in whathe called “a psychodrama carried out collectively among authors and charac-ters.”35 The artificiality of the film studio was abandoned in favor of everydaysettings, the rooms and apartments in which the participants lived; the coldinterview format was replaced by the shared meal with its “atmosphere of cama-raderie,” all in the hope of making “each person’s reality emerge,” in search ofa flash of the truth “which is hidden within us, beneath our petrified relation-ships.”36 The techniques of cinéma-vérité constituted an elaborate means bywhich representation could be conjured away, replaced by a fantasy of imme-diacy and reciprocity, and the camera become a tool, akin to the psychoanalyst’scouch, for fostering communication. Debord’s Critique sought, in contrast, touse the cinema reflexively as a means of analyzing the limitations of communi-cation both in social relations at large and within the medium itself. The filmbecame, inevitably, an instance of the situation it endeavored to study. His“experimental documentary” held out a goal at the very opposite to that of Rouchand Morin’s search for what they called “commensality.” As one read in a sub-title within the film, it was part of a global attempt “to disturb everywhere themachinery of the existing false dialogue” (CCW, 36, trans. modified).

The Debordian strategy of the mimesis of incoherence found an echo in othercritical reflections on culture under the conditions of advanced capitalism.Lucien Goldmann, when asked by Raymond Bellour to respond to Chronique

20 Grey Room 26


d’un été for a special issue of the film journal Artsept, commented on the sociallimits of artistic coherence:

Truth, realism, coherence and aesthetic unity are values whose attainmentis not, these days, a simple problem of good faith, effort, talent, or evenindividual genius. It is also, in the first instance, the problem of the diffi-culties and limits which a cultural milieu brings to bear on the productsof the mind.37

The question then became not the greater or lesser attainment of such classicalvalues of the artwork, but the degree of reflexivity or self-consciousness withwhich one dealt with the inevitable failure of artistic communication today,with what Goldmann characterized as “the inherent difficulties of both socio-logical research and aesthetic creation in contemporary industrial society.”38

And here we may insist on the distinction to be drawn between the approach ofDebord and that of Rouch and Morin, for the latter only inadvertently, as it were,admitted these difficulties into their film (which strained, as we have seen, topreserve its internal logic against the centrifugal tendencies of its subject matter),while the former situated them at the very heart of his project, to the extent thatthey became the very subject of this curious antidocumentary. Once again thenotion of “separation” was central to this distinction. Rouch and Morin had setout, really rather naively, to abolish the separation between its participants inthe name of immediacy and of brotherhood (an undertaking emblematized mostforcefully perhaps by the scene in which Angelo, a factory worker, spoke withLandry, a student from West Africa), and deployed a naturalized language of cinematic realism in order to erase the marks of meaning production. Debord,however, operated with an altogether more intractable paradox: that a critique of separation in contemporary society required an analysis that insisted on separation—of viewer from film, of film from pro-filmic reality. This insistenceon separation was evident even in the matter of cinematic technique, in theemphasis Debord would place on the “formalist” techniques of editing thatRouch had long spurned.39

“Separation” here implied montage (what the Situationists termed détourne-ment, to underline the acts of cultural theft it entailed), not merely as a kind of physical cutting but also as a method of distanciation, and, by implication, ofmediation. Again Goldmann’s comments on Chronique d’un été seem appositehere: in questioning its use of “unguided or barely directed interviews and clinical conversations as means of access to the knowledge of human reality,”he noted:



[T]he major methodological difficulty which was long since pointed outin the methodological works of Hegel and Marx: when it’s a question ofhuman realities, the truth is never immediate, and anything which isimmediate remains abstract and, for that very reason, stained by inexacti-tude as long as it is not inserted into the whole by a number of more or lesslarge and complex mediations.40

At least some of the “incoherence” of Critique de la séparation owed to Debord’sattempts to incorporate just such “large and complex mediations” into anyexperiment in the representation of everyday life. Those mediations were in part visual—the appropriated images from which much of the picture-track wascomposed (comics, identity photos, newspaper clippings, excerpts and stillsfrom other films)—and in part textual. Several of the subtitles that appearedduring the course of the film referred back to the works of Marx, or to theMarxist analyses of SI, in distinct counterpoint to much of the audio track and filmed sequences.41 One in fact should remain cautious when discussingDebord’s deliberate incomprehensibility, because he himself insisted on a greaterlogic governing the arrangement of all the film’s components: “The relationbetween the images, the spoken commentary and the subtitles is neither com-plementary nor indifferent, but is intended to itself be critical” (CCW, 213).

Nevertheless the experience of the viewer was undoubtedly one of confusion,faced with a film that consistently refused the normative redundancy of soundand image typically found in Hollywood cinema in favor of radical hetero-geneity—“written texts interrupt or are superimposed on images, subtitles areoften accompanied by other texts read on the voice-over, and so on,” in whatTom Levin has aptly described as “a frontal attack on the conflation of the iconico-indexical signifiers of the cinema with reality.”42 And we might add thatfor every subtitle that referenced a philosophico-critical analysis, we find anotherthat frankly expressed Debord’s own sentiments of incoherence, distance, andloss: Dante, as we have seen, but also Pascal (“Who would care to have as frienda man who talked like that? Who would choose him to be his confidant? Whowould have recourse to him in affliction? And finally to what purpose in lifecould he be put?” CCW, 36, trans. modified),43 and Baudelaire (“already furtheraway than India and than China,” CCW, 36, trans. modified).44 In these selectionswe should see neither one more instance of the Debordian canon of “classics,”nor an assertion of some essential private melancholy, as has become fashion-able in the last decade of exegesis, but rather a particular and deliberate image ofeveryday life that was being constructed in this film—an image that can standin only the sharpest contrast to that of Chronique d’un été.

22 Grey Room 26

To put the matter in the simplest of terms: if we can align Rouch and Morin’sproject with the positions adumbrated by Lefebvre in his Critique of EverydayLife, as I have attempted here to do,45 we can also align Debord’s project withthat of Georg Lukács—not, however, the work of the mature Lukács, the Lukácsof History and Class Consciousness (which had just been translated into Frenchand was being eagerly read by Debord at this time),46 but the work of the earlyLukács, the Lukács of Soul and Form, and in particular of its famous last essay,“The Metaphysics of Tragedy.” It was here that he developed the contrast betweenabsolute life, what he called “authentic life,” and relative life, “the concrete lifeof society” as lived in an empirical, corrupt, and corrupting world. At its heart,the tragedy stemmed precisely from the conflict between these two modes of living, between “the desire for personal fulfillment” and “reified objective real-ity.”47 This was the conflict that underlay Debord’s analysis of everyday life circa1960 in Critique de la séparation, between “all the empty time, all the lostmoments” (CCW, 30) of a meaningless daily existence and an ever elusive “moreintense life” (CCW, 32), whether it be found in amorous adventure or radicalsociopolitical transformation. The confusion of the film was a perfect mirror ofwhat Lukács had termed the chiaroscuro of the everyday:

Life is an anarchy of light and dark: nothing is ever completely fulfilled in life,nothing ever quite ends; new, confusing voices always mingle with thechorus of those that have been heard before. Everything flows, everythingmerges into another thing, and the mixture is uncontrolled and impure;everything is destroyed, everything is smashed, nothing ever flowers intoreal life [zum wirklichen Leben]. To live is to live something through to theend; but life means that nothing is ever fully and completely lived through tothe end. Life is the most unreal and unliving of all conceivable existences.48

The sentiment, even the tone, are recognizably Debordian, and find expressionthroughout the film. But against this formless, unreal existence both Lukács andDebord hold out the possibility of a different life, glimpsed in fleeting momentsof pure negation. “Suddenly there is a gleam, a lightning that illumines thebanal paths of empirical life,” we read in Soul and Form: “something disturb-ing and seductive, dangerous and surprising; the accident, the great moment,the miracle; an enrichment and a confusion.”49 Debord spoke of something analogous, dreams in which the repressed of our social unconscious returned,dreams that he described as “flashes from the unresolved past, flashes that illu-minate moments previously lived in confusion and doubt. They provide a bluntrevelation of our unfulfilled needs” (CCW, 33). So we see that the incommuni-cable in Debord’s film is even more complex than we first suspected: not only


the opacity of a reified everydayness in advanced capitalism, but also theuniqueness, the untranslatability of those moments when the absolute appearsin the midst of the empirical world. Lukács, at this early moment of his career,had rejected the romantic vision of a reconciliation of the absolute with life,with the avant-garde project of turning life into poetry, and had insisted on atotal rejection of the empirical world in favor of “a different life opposed to andexclusive of ordinary life.”50 And so, too, a half century later, did Debord, whorefused Lefebvre’s “revolutionary romanticism” in favor of a more rigorous con-ception of negation that was a legitimate heir to the work of Lukács.

But to call Critique de la séparation a “Lukácsian” film may at first seemanachronistic, given that his Seele und die Formen would not be translated intoFrench for more than a decade.51 But all the relevant passages discussed abovewere in fact easily available to Debord, in a book we may be certain that he readat this time: in the 1950s Lukács’s early work had been rescued from oblivionby Lucien Goldmann, who wrote of the former’s tragic worldview in an essay of 1950 that was reprinted in his Recherches dialectiques of 1959.52 The workwas celebrated, and obviously current in the beginning of the 1960s in Paris,because Lefebvre himself could cite “Lukács’s well-known statements (about‘the anarchy and the chiaroscuro of everyday life’)” in the conclusion of the second volume of his Critique of Everyday Life (1961).53 So Debord had the meansto draw upon this critical strain of thought, and could put this pre-MarxistLukács to effective, and poetic, use in his film, which we might understand thento be an analysis of everyday life from within that life’s own parameters—a filmthat refused to adopt a purely external model of critique. Rouch and Morin’sfilm had, to some extent, done the same, but only so long as the two filmmakerscould be seen at its conclusion, pacing the hallways of the Musée de l’Hommeand providing the viewer with some conclusions. Even here, however, incom-prehension troubled their desire for closure, as Morin’s voice brought the filmto a close, remarking “that’s the difficulty of communicating something. We arein the know . . . ,” or, more accurately, “we too are implicated.”54 Somehow thevery model they had established in order to create dialogue and “brotherhood”had turned out to thwart that end, and the blind fatality of ordinary life had not

24 Grey Room 26


been dispelled. Debord had accepted that failure from the start, had acknowl-edged the impossibility of filming absolute life (the living that, paradoxically,life in the present had rendered impossible). Finally, the point would not be tosignify such a life through art, but to produce it, to achieve what no film could,the abolition of separation.

| | | | |

Rouch himself would somewhat reluctantly reach a similar conclusion severalyears later, reflecting in an interview on his experience as a filmmaker of theevents of May ’68. He began by imagining the project of Chronique d’un ététransformed into a species of revolutionary pedagogy:

Instead of having a stupid strike, which they had, in the labs or in the theaters,they should have been able to occupy a movie theater and every day projectrushes of what happened the day before. Then you would’ve had a cinematicreflection of reality that could have modified this reality in that it would havebroadcast what happened in one place to all of Paris at the moment whenthis world was in the midst of searching out its way. That’s the example.55

But Rouch immediately recognized the impossibility of this fantasy of the uttertransparency of lived experience and filmic representation:

That was the example, if you like, that made me understand that it wasn’tpossible to do that, because you would have to do it day after day, imme-diately, to take advantage of this information. And you couldn’t do itbecause you were involved in this game, and you can’t make a film and bean actor at the same time—it’s not possible.56

Within the metaphysics of cinéma vérité, one indeed could not be both directorand actor. Within its topography of inclusion and exclusion this particular com-bination was forbidden—or, at least, it had to be overtly disavowed, regardless ofthe subterranean intertwining of desires between filmmaker and subject.Debord’s practice in Critique de la séparation, however, permitted just this, evenas it acknowledged the impossibility of the sort of transcendence of representa-tion dreamed of by Rouch in his revolutionary metafilm. Indeed for Debord,filming at the mouth of Plato’s cave was less a matter of figuring a cinematicescape, of dispelling the shadows, than of listening to the speech that comesfrom within, of listening to the utterances of everyday life. Calling from within,he outlined a topological practice of cinema that might still prove fruitful forour own obscure era.



Notes1. “Les films nouveaux,” Le Monde, 19 October 1961, 13.2. “. . . I have been consumed non-stop until yesterday, since my return from England on the

29th of September, with the shooting of a short film (experimental documentary) called Critiqueof Separation. This obligation to work 14 or 15 hours each day on it has really handicapped me.”Letter of 10 October 1960 to Patrick Straram, Guy Debord, Correspondance, vol. 2 (Paris: LibrairieArthème Fayard, 2001), 24.

3. “. . . Morin has just asked Asger for permission shoot in his (tapestry) studio a sequence of afilm on the everyday life of the French, that he is making at the moment as sociologist-scriptwriter,with the film-maker Jean Rouch. Asger absolutely refused to receive Morin, because of his shadymaneuvers against us in the past.” Letter of 1 October 1960 to Maurice Wyckaert, Guy Debord,Correspondance, vol. 2, 16. See also the account provided in “Renseignements situationnistes,”Internationale situationniste 5 (December 1960), 13.

4. See the favorable mention of “experiments that have remained on the fringe of cinema, likecertain films by Jean Rouch, as regards content.” “Le cinéma après Alain Resnais,” Internationalesituationniste 3 (December 1959), 8. Undoubtedly the SI had in mind the same films that Jean-Luc Godard was singling out for praise in these years, and most particularly Rouch’s Moi, un noir;see his comments in “B.B. of the Rhine” (1958), in Godard on Godard, ed. Jean Narboni and TomMilne (New York: The Viking Press, 1972), 101.

5. For an anecdotal account of Debord’s work with Socialisme ou Barbarie, see ChristopheBourseiller, Vie et mort de Guy Debord (Paris: Plon, 1999), 164–170; and the more scholarly essayby Bernard Quiriny, “Socialisme ou Barbarie et l’Internationale situationniste: notes sur une‘méprise,’” Archives & Documents situationnistes 3 (Fall 2003), 27–65. For a firsthand account bya member of the group, see Daniel Blanchard, Debord dans le bruit de la cataracte du temps(Paris: Sens & Tonka, 2000).

6. Edgar Morin, “Chronicle of a Film,” in Jean Rouch, Ciné-Ethnography, ed. and trans. StevenFeld (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 229, 230 (trans. modified). Morin’sessay “Pour un nouveau cinéma-vérité” originally appeared in France-Observateur no. 506 (14January 1960).

7. Morin, “Chronicle of a Film,” 230.8. Morin, “Chronicle of a Film,” 231 (trans. modified).9. Morin, “Chronicle of a Film,” 232–233.10. Henri Lefebvre, “Foreword” (1958), Critique of Everyday Life, vol. 1, trans. John Moore (London

and New York: Verso, 1991), 31.11. Lefebvre, “Foreword,” Critique of Everyday Life, vol. 1, 7.12. Morin, “Chronicle of a Film,” 232.13. Jean de Baroncelli, “Le cinéma: ‘Chronique d’un été,’” Le Monde, 27 October 1961, 13.14. This argument is most concisely and convincingly argued in Jean-André Fieschi, “Slippages

of Fiction,” trans. Tom Milne, in Anthropology-Reality-Cinema, ed. Mick Eaton (London: BritishFilm Institute, 1979), 67–77.

15. Mick Eaton, “The Production of Cinematic Reality,” in Anthropology-Reality-Cinema, 42.16. See Jean Rouch, “Cinq regards sur Vertov,” in Georges Sadoul, Dziga Vertov (Paris: Éditions

Champ Libre, 1971), 11–14. (It is perhaps worth noting that this important text on Vertov was

26 Grey Room 26

published by Champ Libre, Gérard Lebovici’s house, with which Debord had a very close rela-tionship as unofficial editorial adviser.) As Morin noted, however, the origin of this film practicewas “more Robert Flaherty than Dziga Vertov.” Edgar Morin, “Chronicle of a Film,” 231.

17. As pointed out by Mick Eaton, “The Production of Cinematic Reality,” 51.18. Jean Rouch, quoted from a 1963 interview in Eaton, “The Production of Cinematic Reality,” 51.19. “We shall be glad to learn, however, that the correction of internal perception will turn out

not to offer such great difficulties as the correction of external perception—that internal objectsare less unknowable than the external world.” Sigmund Freud, “The Unconscious” (1915), in TheStandard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 14, ed. and trans.James Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1957), 171.

20. See in particular his remarks in “An Outline of Psycho-Analysis” (1940) (“the hypothesiswe have adopted of a psychical apparatus extended into space . . .”) and in “Findings, Ideas,Problems” (1941) (“Space may be the projection of the extension of the psychical apparatus. Noother derivation is probable. Instead of Kant’s a priori determinants of our psychical apparatus.Psyche is extended; knows nothing about it.”). Both in The Standard Edition . . . , vol. 23, 196 and 300.

21. To follow the formulation of J.-D. Nasio, Les yeux de Laure (Paris: Aubier, Coll. “La psych-analyse prise au mot,” 1987), 153.

22. Nasio, Les yeux de Laure, 153–154.23. Jacques Lacan, “Position of the Unconscious” (1960, rewritten 1964), in Écrits, trans. Bruce

Fink (London and New York: W.W. Norton, 2005), 711.24. Lacan, “Position of the Unconscious,” 711.25. See Internationale situationniste 1 (June 1958), 26.26. In addition to Critique de la séparation, Mrugalski was Debord’s cinematographer in Sur le

passage de quelques personnes à travers une assez courte unité de temps (On the Passage of a Few People Through a Rather Brief Moment in Time, 1959) and In girum imus nocte et con-sumimur igni (1978). He also served as cinematographer for the short films Anna la bonne (1958,dir. Harry Kümel), Un steack trop cuit (1960, dir. Luc Moullet), and Le Scarabée d’or (1961, dir.Robert Lachenay); he served as assistant camera for Paris nous appartient (Paris Is Ours, 1960,dir. Jacques Rivette).

27. André Martinet, Elements of General Linguistics (1960), trans. Elisabeth Palmer (Chicago:The University of Chicago Press, 1964), 11.

28. Martinet, Elements of General Linguistics, 18.29. Jean de Baroncelli, “Le cinéma: ‘Chronique d’un été,’” 13.30. Guy Debord, “Critique of Separation” (1961), in Complete Cinematographic Works, ed. and

trans. Ken Knabb (Oakland, Calif.: AK Press, 2003), 29 (hereafter cited in text as CCW).31. See Martinet, Elements of General Linguistics, 169.32. Thomas Y. Levin, “Dismantling the Spectacle: The Cinema of Guy Debord,” in Guy Debord

and the Situationist International, ed. Tom McDonough (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002), 358. I needhardly note that this essay, like any that takes Debord’s films as its subject, owes the deepest debtto the foundational work of Levin.

33. See, for example, Vincent Kaufmann, Guy Debord (Paris: Librairie Arthème Fayard, 2001),85–86; and Jean-Marie Apostolidès, Les Tombeaux de Guy Debord (Paris: Exils, 1999), especially71–76.


34. In a famous photograph that had also been reproduced in the Internationale situationniste 2(December 1958), 33, with a caption reading “Algeria’s Independence” and an excerpt from PaulEluard’s 1933 poem “Violette Nozières.”

35. Morin, “Chronicle of a Film,” 233.36. Morin, “Chronicle of a Film,” 234, 232.37. Lucien Goldmann, “Cinema and Sociology” (1963), trans. John Higgins, in Anthropology-

Reality-Cinema, 66.38. Goldmann, “Cinema and Sociology,” 66.39. Debord’s editor for Critique was Chantal Delattre, who had also served this same function

for his Sur le passage . . . ; she would go on to work as assistant editor for, among other films, TheTrial (1962, dir. Orson Welles) and Échappement Libre (Backfire, 1964, dir. Jean Becker), beforeediting 2 ou 3 choses que je sais d’elle (1967, dir. Jean-Luc Godard) and Lettres de Stalingrad (1969).

40. Goldmann, “Cinema and Sociology,” 64, 65.41. Notably the following: “To give everyone social scope for the essential assertion of his vitality.”

(CCW, 31, trans. modified; see Karl Marx, “From The Holy Family” (1844), in Writings of the YoungMarx on Philosophy and Society, ed. and trans. Loyd D. Easton and Kurt H. Guddat (Garden City,NY: Doubleday, 1967), 394.)

“If man is formed by circumstances, then his circumstances must be made human.” (CCW,31–32, trans. modified; see Karl Marx, “From The Holy Family,” 394.)

“[Comrades,] unitary urbanism is dynamic, i.e., in close touch with styles of behavior.” (CCW,32, trans. modified; see Guy Debord, “Report on the Construction of Situations” (1957), trans.Tom McDonough, in Guy Debord and the Situationist International, 44)

“The passions have been interpreted enough. The point now is to discover others.” (CCW, 32,trans. modified; see Guy Debord, “Report on the Construction of Situations,” 50, a phrase that isitself a détournement of Marx’s eleventh thesis on Feuerbach.)

“The new beauty will be a beauty of situations.” (CCW, 32; fragment of a phrase from Debordin Internationale lettriste no. 2 [February 1953], 2.)

42. Levin, “Dismantling the Spectacle: The Cinema of Guy Debord,” 365.43. Pascal, Pensées, trans. H.F. Stewart (New York: Modern Library, 1967), 107.44. Charles Baudelaire, “Moesta et Errabunda,” in Selected Poems, ed. and trans. Carol Clark

(London: Penguin Books, 1995), 72.45. Certainly Lefebvre aligned the film with his own project, citing Chronique in a footnote to

his Critique of Everyday Life, vol. 2 (1961), trans. John Moore (London and New York: Verso,2002), 359, n. 4.

46. Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness had been translated into French in 1960 byscholars associated with the Lefebvre-Morin group around the journal Arguments: see Histoireet conscience de classe, trans. Kostas Axelos and Jacquelin Bois (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, Coll.“Arguments,” 1960).

47. Michael Löwy, Georg Lukács—From Romanticism to Bolshevism, trans. Patrick Camiller(London: NLB, 1979), 98. On this work see also Andrew Arato and Paul Breines, The Young Lukácsand the Origins of Western Marxism (New York: The Seabury Press, 1979), especially 33–49.

48. Georg Lukács, Soul and Form (1910), trans. Anna Bostock (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1974),152–153.

28 Grey Room 26

49. Lukács, Soul and Form, 153.50. Lukács, Soul and Form, 158; see the comments in Michael Löwy, Georg Lukács—From

Romanticism to Bolshevism, 101.51. Georg Lukács, L’Âme et les formes, trans. Guy Haarscher (Paris: Gallimard, 1974).52. Lucien Goldmann, “Georg Lukacs l’essayiste” (1950), in Recherches dialectiques (Paris:

Gallimard, 1959), 247–259; on this essay, see Michael Loewy, Marxisme et romantisme révolu-tionnaire (Paris: Le Sycomore, Coll. “Petite bibliothèque,” no. 4, 1979), 73–102. Debord citesGoldmann’s Recherches dialectiques in “Editorial Notes: The Meaning of Decay in Art” (1959),trans. John Sheply, in Guy Debord and the Situationist International, 85–93.

53. Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life, vol. 2, 356.54. Morin, “Chronicle of a Film,” 328.55. “Jean Rouch” (1969), interviewed in G. Roy Levin, Documentary Explorations (Garden

City, NY: Doubleday, 1971), 144.56. “Jean Rouch,” 144; emphasis added.
