Yesterday I attended a film screening of, amongst others, Guy Debord’s seminal Letterist film Hurlements en faveur de Sade, shown at Goldsmiths University by our good friends the New Cross Situationists. It’s easy to see how this film caused so much scandal when it was first shown in 1952- the first screening was stopped after the first few minutes as the audience rioted and demanded their money back. As this was a free screening sadly no such scenes were realised, but 14 out of the 23 people in the audience did walk out before the end. A situation was created!
Those of us who stuck it out for the whole 1 hour 15 mins went down the pub afterwards, got drunk and in true Situationist style argued about everything from the class nature of Guy Debord to the class nature of Blur. The south bank of the Thames is not the left bank of the Seine, but we try our best.
Next Wednesday the New Cross Situationists are showing two more Guy Debord films, the classic La Societe du Spectacle and the retrospective In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni, with English subtitles. Main building (RHB) room 308 at 5pm, all welcome (Facebook group.) Do say hi if you come along!
Reminder: 1968 and All That is tomorrow, 10am-10pm, central London.
Hi, OT but I’m probably seeing Keith tonight so I’ll give him a good kick up the bum… Carry on.
Hey I went, only went to two lectures, one was a completely anarchic meeting with no chair and the speaker knew too much about the subject, so much so he went completely off subject all the time, and the other, the guy doing the lecture had a mad rant about how all modern art was crap because it wasn’t about politics and was enjoyed by the rich, and everyone disagreed with him, which was good.
In true 1968 fashion, there was someone outside leafleting ‘why we are not attending this event’, I think maybe they got swept away with nostalgia.
Yeah, it was a pretty weird event, but interesting and entertaining all the same. I got there kinda late so didn’t go to that many lectures. Eamon McCann was great, Shelia Rowbotham prompted a good discussion on contemporary feminism, and Ben Watson and Mervelet Didier gave a fantastic rambling Lipstick Traces-style lecture trying to relate the Paris uprising to a Frank Zappa concert. I’ll have to track down some books by them.
Was the ‘modern art is crap’ lecture the one on Banksy with Stewart Home? I went to that, got there a bit late and stood in the doorway watching, got bored, left after about 15 mins and went to see Mark Marqusee instead. The guys with the barely legible handwritten photocopied ‘why we are not attending this event’ leaflets were a laugh. And quite a few anarchic meetings with no chair, or a chair picked from the floor. All good fun though.