ABSTRACT
In the opening scene of one of Debord’s last films, In Girum Imus Nocte et Consumimur Igni , we see the audience of a cinema, staring fixedly in a perfect reverse shot, facing the spectators, while Debord’s voice-over intones:
I will make no concessions to the public in this film. Several excellent reasons justify this conduct to my mind and I shall give them. In the first place it is known well enough that I have never made any concessions to the dominant ideas of my epoch nor to any powers that be. Moreover, whatever the epoch, nothing important has been communicated by sparing the audience, even one composed of the contemporaries of Pericles; and in the frozen mirror of the screen the audience does not see anything at present evoking the respectable citizens of a democracy. 1
As the screen continues to show the mirror image of rows of viewers staring blankly at the spectator, Debord can be heard complaining that ‘here indeed is the crux’: that a public that has been completely deprived of freedom ‘deserves less than any other to be spared.’ 2 What follows is an unrelenting barrage of ‘harsh truths’ hurled against the spectator, an unforgiving description of present-day miseries under the regime of spectacular domination that is meant to jolt the public into self-awareness. Movie-going audiences, says Debord,
deceive themselves about everything, and can only talk nonsense about lies. They are poor wage-owners who believe they are people of property, mystified ignoramuses who think they are well-read. [. . .] How harshly the mode of production had treated them! By advancement through promotion, they have lost the little they had, and gained what nobody wanted. 3
The assault continues in much the same tone for several more minutes, as the voice-over accompanies a montage of scenes showing people waiting patiently outside the entrance of a cinema, advertising photos of modern employees, landscapes of factories and waste products, displays of packaged
foodstuffs marked ‘Red Label,’ pan shots of modern high-rise residences, and relaxed gatherings of modern employees sitting at a table playing Monopoly. Against these ordinary moments in the daily life of the spectacle’s model citizens, Debord’s denunciation rages on: ‘ill-fed on adulterated and tasteless food; with their ever-recurring illnesses badly looked after,’ the spectacle’s sad slaves must live ‘under perpetual and petty surveillance; maintained in modernized illiteracy and spectacular superstitions which correspond to a new built environment, according to the concentration camp like convenience of present day industry.’ Not only are they incapable of understanding the cause of their unhappiness, but they are ‘separated from each other by the general loss of any language adequate to describe the facts (a loss which prohibits the slightest dialogue), separated by incessant competition, always spurred on by the whip.’ 4
While the screen shows further scenes of an attractive young couple sitting on a foam divan with a telephone, or standing in line at the supermarket, or receiving guests, the voice-over compares their daily lives unfavorably to earlier systems of servitude – slavery, peonage, and factory labor. At long last, the assault comes to an end with a slow tracking shot toward the center of an advertising image showing the couple in their modern residence, furniture designed by Gae Aulenti, with the voice-over declaring that ‘a film which, for once, renders the public the service of revealing to it that its ill is not as mysterious as it imagines, and not as incurable, if one day we were to arrive at the abolition of classes and of the State’ will have ‘one virtue at least. It will have no other.’ 5
In Girum Imus Nocte came out in 1978, six years after the self-dissolution of the Internationale Situationniste , the revolutionary organization Debord headed from 1957 to 1972 that played such an important part in the Paris uprising of May 1968. The film’s title (an ancient Latin palindrome meaning ‘we go round and round in the night and are consumed by fire’) and its literary style somewhere between prophetic and nostalgic are nothing like the revolutionary theoretical prose of Debord’s pre-1968 writings, as seen, for example, in his preceding film The Society of the Spectacle (1973). But, while his tone may have changed, Debord’s rage against the official order is every bit as strong and has even gained in bitterness. For an American public, this unique style of invective is not unreminiscent of H. L. Menken, who in his own battle against philistinism wrote in 1922: ‘it is the safest and surest of all known tests. A man who gets his board and lodging on the ball in an ignominious way is inevitably an ignominious man.’ 6 This shift in tone is vividly apparent in the film’s dominant figural motif, which, in contrast to the recurring images of fire in The Society of the Spectacle , is of flowing water – a metaphor, as Debord pointed out in his notes to the text of the film, for the passage of time.
