Many great things about last night’s Q & A w/ Ken Knabb following the screening of In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni at ATA. Comments and questions came rapidly from those both intimately and not very familiar w. Debord’s previous writing and films. And the comfort of the audience in expressing these various points of entrance (as receptive organs viewing the film) made last night’s Q & A feel different from other instances of this troubled genre, where some combination of location, history, community expectation, convention and institutional pressures can too often choke off all but a few ways of speaking and thinking in groups. Which is to say my own relationship to the Q&A is often troubled and many times I fail to perform (in public) those questions which would reveal the extent of how much I don’t know.
Last night’s lively range of discourses and comments included specific questions re: May ‘68, the SI’s articulation of alternative modes, Debord’s nostalgia for a Paris of the early 50s, arrogance, the charming, sly, self-conscious use of Pierre François Lacenaire throughout, failure to investigate his (one’s) own complicity/embeded-ness, subject composition, the martial arts, cinematography v. cineplagiarism, the valence of particular war footage (esp. use of Normandy invasion images), Marshall McLuhan, cartoons, buffoonery, one’s magical/golden youth, Godard, centrality, when did that France exist, did it ever, sentimentality, nostalgia. Perhaps the most exemplary case of so much variousness of response was the person who tore into Debord’s entire project (this is where the buffoon comment comes in), concluding by default that only Dore Bowen’s voicing of Knabb’s translation had any value.
Bowen does handle the text w/ great nuance and deftness; a shout-out here to her, and Konrad Steiner, for all the hard work that went into making this english voiceover. A labor of love which allows for english-speaking viewers to ‘take in’ the film as film, an impossible capacity if one were also receiving the text visually, via subtitles. (The english voiceover of Society of the Spectacle, also f/ Knabb’s translation, Bowen’s voice and Steiner’s image/film work, is showing again at ATA next week if you missed the first few times it screened around the bay area. I think copies of both DVDs will be available next week, too.)
Which is to say / I heart ATA. Since 1984. All-volunteer, artist-run.
Walking to BART w. Suzanne afterwards we fell to discussing that which, conspicuously, didn’t show up once in the long list of questions, comments and conversation: Debord’s near-pornographic attention to the (young, beautiful, beautiful even when ugly, even when alienatedly tripping towards a monstrous industrial outgrowth) female face and form.
Still thinking about this today. Not the montage which opens the film, of the paradigmatic bourgeois couple; the female half of this couple is, as you’d expect, blonde and shellaced. Rather, it’s how the film spends a great deal of its latter half (just as it turns more and more piercingly elegaic and nostalgia-sogged) towards caress of a particular image: the emblamtically grubby, haunting, young female companion. It’s like the water, the water, war, war, one’s youth, the water, a young beautiful girl, one’s lost youth, the water, a young beautiful girl, war, war, one’s lost friends, a young beautiful girl, failure, soldiers, charging, the water, the self, young beautiful girl, bayonets, the water the water the water. Because I don’t know enough to know the names of those repeating female faces that appear in the film, I can imagine some might represent fellow workers in revolt, students, etc. which immediately raises questions around division of labor, leadership, authoring of texts, full participation. But finally it’s difficult to see how the image in this particular case is turned at all against itself; it would seem to be doing nothing to act against that which it partakes of with such typical (template) representational appetites.
And why, among the many immediate responses and critiques last night, from fans and haters alike, this particular question didn’t surface outside of private conversation between two women.
(And this, too, has to do with failure.)
September 28, 2007 * 2:54 pm