'Communication containing its own critique': the Situationists contra Jean-Luc Godard
The Situationist International were no devotees of the work of Jean-Luc Godard, referring to him as a ‘representative of formal pseudo-liberty’ and ‘pseudo-critic of customs and values’, the two characteristics indicative of what they called the 'fakery of recuperated modern art'.  ‘Godardism’, as the Situationists put it, existed only to prevent Situationist expression in the cinema.  This is why, as a later article in the Internationale situationniste journal entitled ‘Cinema and Revolution’ alleges, Godard was rendered obsolete by the riots, strikes and occupations of May ’68 and heckled by those revolutionaries who encountered him on the streets. Godard’s films, so the article further contends, would be consigned to the dustbin of history.  With reference to Godard’s British Sounds and Le Gai Savoir (both 1969) and Debord’s La Societe du spectacle (1972 from the 1967 book), my paper will examine how both Godard and Situationist Guy Debord responded to the immediate post-May period on film, in order to analyse their profound divergences in their attitudes toward the political task of filmmaking. It is well worth acknowledging that the considerable vitriol meted out to Godard was in part due to his work’s apparent proximity to the theories the Situationists were putting forward themselves in the 1960s.  Convergences in cinematic technique and theoretical exposition will be examined in this paper. Conversely, philosopher Jacques Ranciere has described the Debord’s cinematic work as directly opposed to the creed of Brechtian distanciation, a concept particularly associated with Godard.  My paper will interrogate Ranciere’s claim that Debord’s cinematic detournement is ‘positive’ and ‘lyrical’ in response to the perceived of negationism of much of Godard’s work in elucidating the opposing conceptions of cinematic agency at play in these films.