The Society of the Spectacle (2013, 75 min.) takes infamous Situationist Guy Debord’s film of the same name as a starting point and skeleton for a new video project. Through intensive research and détournement the film is part recreation, part criticism, and part inquiry.
Spectacle can be thought of as a piece of research by way of re-making or re-stating; a research project which makes use of Debord’s work not as a quotation but as an appropriation of a collective inheritance in the cultural commons. My film reflects a complexity in both theory and practice by overlaying emotional, aesthetic, historical, political, and theoretical discourses in a matrix that forces the viewer to engage on multiple registers simultaneously. As much as it is an experiment in video, it was also an experiential act of research that sought to glean lessons from Debord’s film while leveling critiques of its shortcomings; it was an act of translation in an effort to make these lessons and criticisms legible in a contemporary American context.