Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the reimagining of Guy Debord’s film ‘The Society of the Spectacle’ with the creation of cut-up montages using footage appropriated from video-sharing platform YouTube. Détournement is discussed in terms of the original and the redux versions created in the age of social media.

Paper long abstract:

To date, the author has produced two contemporary reimaginings of Guy Debord’s 1974 cinematic analysis of consumer culture ‘The Society of the Spectacle’, based on his influential book. The film used found footage and détournement in a radical Marxist critique of mass marketing and its role in the alienation of modern society. Debord argued that détournement had a double purpose: negating the ideological conditions of artistic production, and on the other hand, negating this negation to produce something that is politically educative. It achieves negation in two main ways: either it adds details to existing works, thus revealing a previously obscured ambiguity, or it cuts up a range of works and recombines them in new and surprising ways. The new ‘redux’ experimental films are a contemporary détournement of Debord’s film, using footage appropriated from the video-sharing social media platform YouTube, edited together into a montage using a non-linear cut-up technique. Social media platforms are designed to demand both our attention, and contribution. The films consider that by curating our lives via social media we contribute to the spectacle, and at the same time consume it. We are spectator and spectacle, on the precipice of the transition of post-human to non-human modes of production, simultaneously the producers, products, and consumers of augmented capitalism. This paper explores these reimaginings and whether montage and détournement techniques can be applied to editing to negate ‘platform culture’ and produce work that is politically educative and subverts the detached spectatorialism of the age of social media.