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New translations of the soundtracks from all six of Guy Debord's films are now online at http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/debord.films .
Some excerpts:
"The spectacle is not a collection of images; it is a social relation between people that is mediated by images. . . . Spectators are linked solely by their one-way relationship to the very center that keeps them isolated from each other."
"The function of the cinema, whether dramatic or documentary, is to present a false and isolated coherence as a substitute for a communication and activity that are absent."
"Society broadcasts to itself its own image of its own history, a history reduced to a superficial and static pageant of its rulers -- the persons who embody the apparent inevitability of whatever happens."
"This dominant equilibrium is brought back into question each time unknown people try to live differently. But it was always far away. We learn of it through the papers and newscasts. We remain outside it, relating to it as just another spectacle. We are separated from it by our own nonintervention."
"Others unthinkingly followed the paths learned once and for all, to their work and their home, to their predictable future. For them, duty had already become a habit, and habit a duty. They did not see the deficiency of their city. They thought the deficiency of their life was natural. We wanted to break out of this conditioning, in search of different uses of the urban landscape, in search of new passions."
"Thus was mapped out a program calculated to undermine the credibility of the entire organization of social life. Classes and specializations, work and entertainment, commodities and urbanism, ideology and the state -- we showed that it all needed to be scrapped. . . . These perspectives have now been widely adopted, and people everywhere are fighting for or against them. But back then they would certainly have seemed delirious, if the behavior of modern capitalism had not been even more delirious."
"The only interesting venture is the liberation of everyday life, not only in a historical perspective, but for us, right now. This project implies the withering away of all the alienated forms of communication. The cinema, too, must be destroyed."
===== ***************************************************************** "Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute, and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute. THAT'S relativity."
Albert Einstein
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