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 Editorial | Auteurs | Immersion/Participation | Deserts of the Political | Akerman | Baldessari | Broodthaers |
| Debord | Douglas | Graham | Marker | Mulvey/Wollen | Wieland |
within the corpus of SI writings. Viénet insists that the SI must require each of its members to be just as capable of making a film as writing an article because film is just as powerful and accessible a polemical medium as articles, books, leaflets, or posters. Moreover, he argues, such cinematic experience would in turn «intensify» the written articulation of the same problems. [25] In an untranslated text entitled «For the Debate on Orientation, Spring 1970: A Note on the First Series of Texts,» Debord makes a similar argument, convinced that the production of films is important not only for rhetorical but also for financial reasons. [26] Under the heading «Le cinéma,» the last of a series of «Modest Propositions,» he writes: «Each film could give one or two Situationists working as assistants the opportunity to master their own style in this language; and the inevitable success of our works would also provide the economic base for the future production of these comrades. The expansion of our audience is of decisive importance.» [27] For these and other reasons Debord claims that of the many young filmmakers in various countries attempting to use film as instruments of revolutionary critique, at present:
«Only the positions and methods of the Situationists (as formulated in the theses by René Viénet in our previous issue) have direct access to a contemporary revolutionary usage of the cinema—although political and economic conditions can of course still pose problems.» [28] The claim is fleshed out n a series of LI and SI film reviews of movies by Julien Duvivier, the «cinematographic ruin» [29] (an indignant critique of «Marianne de ma jeunesse»), Federico Fellini (a pan of «La Strada»), Agnès Varda («La pointe courte» faulted for its vacuous politics), Alain Resnais (praised for «Hiroshima mon amour» then lambasted for «L´année dernière à Marienbad»), Norman McLaren («Blinkity Blank» accused of plagiarizing the Lettrist cinema), and Jean-Luc-Godard, «the dumbest of the pro-Chinese Swiss» (attacked in a number of articles for his cinematic politics, especially in «A bout de soufflé» and «Le gai savoir»). [30] The greatest insight into the «contemporary revolutionary usage of the cinema» by the SI, however, is to be had from the films they themselves—that is, first and foremost Guy Debord—made. «Je veux un ciné qua non!» [31]
