So. 6.2. 21 Uhr: Can Dialectics Break Bricks? (René Viénet)
pirate cinema berlin
sebastian at rolux.org
Fri Feb 4 15:00:02 CET 2005
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The first entirely detourned film in the history of cinema
An epitaph for some friends
Can Dialectics Break Bricks?
René Viénet, F 1973
82 min, 386,182,354 bytes
Französisch mit englischen Untertiteln
Vorfilm: Can the Movie Industry Break File-Sharing?
Robert Luxemburg, D 2005, 1 min
Sonntag, 6. Februar 2005, 21:00 Uhr
Pirate Cinema Berlin, Ziegelstrasse 20
S Oranienburger Strasse, U Oranienburger Tor
Free entry, cheap drinks, bring a blank CD
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In unserer Reihe "Klassiker des urheberrechtsverletzenden Films" zeigen wir am
Sonntag den "ersten vollständig zweckentfremdeten Film in der Geschichte des
Kinos", René Vienéts "La dialectique peut-elle casser des briques?", bei dem es
sich um die französische Neuvertonung des ansonsten unveränderten Films "Crush
Karate" (a.k.a. "The Crush") von Doo Kwang Gee handelt und der so gut wie nie
öffentlich gezeigt wird, weswegen, wenn er doch mal irgendwo zu sehen ist, die
wenigen Zuschauer dieses seltene Ereignis meist in ihren Internet-Tagebüchern
für die Nachwelt festhalten: "An unserem letzten sonnigen Tag in Texas sind wir
nach South Austin gefahren, um uns 'Can Dialectics Break Bricks?' anzusehen, was
der lichteste Moment unserer ansonsten nebulösen Urlaubsreise werden sollte."
Schon anlässlich unseres Screenings von René Viénets "Les filles de Kamare" im
vergangenen Oktober (siehe http://berlin.piratecinema.org/screenings/20041010)
hatten wir versucht, den Zusammenhang zwischen der situationistischen Technik
der Zweckentfremdung und dem per File-Sharing mittlerweile überall, täglich und
millionenfach erfüllten Straftatbestand der Urheberrechtsverletzung deutlich zu
machen: dass die Filme der Situationisten nämlich gerade deshalb plötzlich
wieder so frisch aussehen, weil deren die Bilder ihren Zwecken entfremdende
Montage zu einem der grundlegenden Verfahren beim Umgang mit heruntergeladenen
Filmen geworden ist, die ja niemand, wie oft behauptet wird, bloss konsumiert,
sondern die sofort wieder in den Kreislauf der Produktion und Reproduktion
eintreten. Im Falle der Musikindustrie hiess das Massenphänomen, das die
Niederlage der einstmaligen Monopolisten beim Kampf um die Kontrolle der
Distributionskanäle hörbar machte, Bastard Pop; für die Filmindustrie, deren
ebenso unaufhaltsamer Niedergang ein paar Jahre (nämlich ein paar Megabit an
Bandbreite) zeitversetzt stattfindet, könnte man es Pirate Cinema nennen.
Und wenn "Burn Hollywood Burn" der Slogan ist, bei dem wir bleiben - obwohl
Public Enemy ja ursprünglich nicht dazu aufgerufen hatten, den vollständigen
Backkatalog von Hollywood aus dem Netz zu ziehen und auf CDs zu brennen, sondern
das weisse Kino durch ein schwarzes zu ersetzen (wobei wir natürlich hoffen,
dass das erstere das letztere befördert) - dann nicht zuletzt, weil den
Zusammenhang zwischen Kino und Riot, also die aus dem schlechten Angebot an
Filmen im Kapitalismus alle zwanzig Jahre für genügend Leute zwingend folgende
Notwendigkeit, sich zum Kaputtmachen dieses Kapitalismus zu organisieren, auch
René Viénet herstellt, dessen unten angehängter, ja nicht nur wegen des "Kindes
von Mao und Coca-Cola", als das Godard gedisst wird, so fulminanter Text aus der
vorletzten Nummer der "Internationale Situationniste" eben gerade endet mit den
"Schwarzen von Watts", für die es nichts zu Schönes gebe. Wenn es also ca. 2010
in Los Angeles wieder brennt (hoffentlich nicht am falschen Ort - Chuck D. war
in dieser Hinsicht schon weniger wählerisch als René Viénet), dann wird jeder
einzelne Grund dafür im Kino nicht nur zu suchen, sondern auch zu sehen sein.
(An einem Ort und in einer Zeit, an dem und in der - vor allem von Kuratoren:
einer weiteren Klasse von Mittelsmännern, die eines nicht zu fernen Tages als
überflüssiges Glied aus der Vertriebskette geworfen werden wird - so viel über
Politik und Kunst und deren angebliches Verhältnis geredet wird, lohnt es sich,
zumindest den Titel von Viénets Text zu lesen. Der lautet nämlich, Debords "The
Situationists and the New Forms of Action in Politics and Art" von 1963 zweck=
entfremdend, nicht "in" oder "zwischen", sondern *gegen* Politik und Kunst.)
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René Viénet
The Situationists and the New Forms of Action Against Politics and Art
Up to now our subversion has mainly drawn on the forms and genres inherited from
past revolutionary struggles, primarily those of the last hundred years. I
propose that we round out our agitational expression with methods that dispense
with any reference to the past. I don't mean that we should abandon the forms
within which we have waged battle on the traditional terrain of the supersession
of philosophy, the realization of art and the abolition of politics; but that we
should extend the work of the journal onto terrains it does not yet reach.
Many proletarians are aware that they have no power over their lives; they know
it, but they don't express it in the language of socialism and of previous
revolutions.
Let us spit in passing on those students who have become militants in the tiny
would-be mass parties, who sometimes have the nerve to claim that the workers
are incapable of reading Internationale Situationniste, that its paper is too
slick to be put in their lunchbags and that its price doesn't take into account
their low standard of living. The most consistent of these students accordingly
distribute the mimeographed image they have of the consciousness of a class in
which they fervently seek stereotypical Joe Worker recruits. They forget, among
other things, that when workers read revolutionary literature in the past they
had to pay relatively more than for a theater ticket; and that when they once
again develop an interest in it they won't hesitate to spend two or three times
what it costs for an issue of Planète. But what these detractors of typography
forget most of all is that the rare individuals who read their bulletins are
precisely those who already have the minimal background necessary to understand
us right away; and that their writings are completely unreadable for anyone
else. Some of them, ignoring the immense readership of bathroom graffiti
(particularly in cafés), have thought that by using a parody of gradeschool
writing, printed on paper pasted on gutters like notices of apartments for rent,
they could make the form correspond to the content of their slogans; and in this
at least they have succeeded. All this serves to clarify what must not be done.
What we have to do is link up the theoretical critique of modern society with
the critique of it in acts. By detourning the very propositions of the
spectacle, we can directly reveal the implications of present and future
revolts.
I propose that we pursue:
1. Experimentation in the détournement of photo-romances and "pornographic"
photos, and that we bluntly impose their real truth by restoring real dialogues
[by adding or altering speech bubbles]. This operation will bring to the surface
the subversive bubbles that are spontaneously, but only fleetingly and
half-consciously, formed and then dissolved in the imaginations of those who
look at these images. In the same spirit, it is also possible to detourn any
advertising billboards - particularly those in subway corridors, which form
remarkable sequences - by pasting pre-prepared placards onto them.
2. The promotion of guerrilla tactics in the mass media - an important form of
contestation, not only at the urban guerrilla stage, but even before it. The
trail was blazed by those Argentinians who took over the control station of an
electronic bulletin board and used it to transmit their own directives and
slogans. It is still possible to take advantage of the fact that radio and
television stations are not yet guarded by troops. On a more modest level, it is
known that any amateur radio operator can at little expense broadcast, or at
least jam, on a local level; and that the small size of the necessary equipment
permits a great mobility, enabling one to slip away before one's position is
trigonometrically located. A group of Communist Party dissidents in Denmark had
their own pirate radio station a few years ago. Counterfeit issues of one or
another periodical can add to the enemy's confusion. This list of examples is
vague and limited for obvious reasons.
The illegality of such actions makes a sustained engagement on this terrain
impossible for any organization that has not chosen to go underground, because
it would require the formation within it of a specialized subgroup - a division
of tasks which cannot be effectual without compartmentalization and thus
hierarchy, etc. Without, in a word, finding oneself on the slippery path toward
terrorism. We can more appropriately recall the notion of propaganda by deed,
which is a very different matter. Our ideas are in everybody's mind, as is well
known, and any group without any relation to us, or even a few individuals
coming together for a specific purpose, can improvise and improve on tactics
experimented with elsewhere by others. This type of unconcerted action cannot be
expected to bring about any decisive upheaval, but it can usefully serve to
accentuate the coming awakening of consciousness. In any case, there's no need
to get hung up on the idea of illegality. Most actions in this domain can be
done without breaking any existing law. But the fear of such interventions will
make newspaper editors paranoid about their typesetters, radio managers paranoid
about their technicians, etc., at least until more specific repressive
legislation has been worked out and enacted.
3. The development of situationist comics. Comic strips are the only truly
popular literature of our century. Even cretins marked by years at school have
not been able to resist writing dissertations on them; but they'll get little
pleasure out of reading ours. No doubt they'll buy them just to burn them. In
our task of "making shame more shameful still," it is easy to see how easy it
would be, for example, to transform "13 rue de l'Espoir [hope]" into " 1 blvd.
du Désespoir [despair]" merely by adding a few elements; or balloons can simply
be changed. In contrast to Pop Art, which breaks comics up into fragments, this
method aims at restoring to comics their content and importance.
4. The production of situationist films. The cinema, which is the newest and
undoubtedly most utilizable means of expression of our time, has stagnated for
nearly three quarters of a century. To sum it up, we can say that it indeed
became the "seventh art" so dear to film buffs, film clubs and PTAs. For our
purposes this age is over (Ince, Stroheim, the one and only L'Age d'or, Citizen
Kane and Mr. Arkadin, the lettrist films), even if there remain a few
traditional narrative masterpieces to be unearthed in the film archives or on
the shelves of foreign distributors. We should appropriate the first stammerings
of this new language - in particular its most consummate and modern examples,
those which have escaped artistic ideology even more than American "B" movies:
newsreels, previews and, above all, filmed ads.
Although filmed advertising has obviously been in the service of the commodity
and the spectacle, its extreme technical freedom has laid the foundations for
what Eisenstein had an inkling of when he talked of filming The Critique of
Political Economy or The German Ideology.
I am confident that I could film The Decline and Fall of the Spectacle-Commodity
Economy in a way that would be immediately understandable to the proletarians of
Watts who are unaware of the concepts implied in that title. Such adaptations to
new forms will at the same time undoubtedly contribute to deepening and
intensifying the "written" expression of the same problems; which we could
verify, for example, by making a film called Incitement to Murder and Debauchery
before drafting its equivalent in the journal, Correctives to the Consciousness
of a Class That Will Be the Last. Among other possibilities, the cinema lends
itself particularly well to studying the present as a historical problem, to
dismantling the processes of reification. To be sure, historical reality can be
apprehended, known and filmed only in the course of a complicated process of
mediations enabling consciousness to recognize one moment in another, its goal
and its action in destiny, its destiny in its goal and action, and its own
essence in this necessity. This mediation would be difficult if the empirical
existence of the facts themselves was not already a mediated existence, which
only takes on an appearance of immediateness because and to the extent that
consciousness of the mediation is lacking and that the facts have been uprooted
from the network of their determining circumstances, placed in an artificial
isolation, and poorly strung together again in the montage of classical cinema.
It is precisely this mediation which has been lacking, and inevitably so, in
presituationist cinema, which has limited itself to "objective" forms or
re-presentation of politico-moral concepts, whenever it has not been merely
academic-type narrative with all its hypocrisies. If what I have just written
were filmed, it would become much less complicated - it's all really just
banalities. But Godard, the most famous Swiss Maoist, will never be able to
understand them. He might well, as is his usual practice, coopt the above - lift
a word from it or an idea like that concerning filmed advertisements - but he
will never be capable of anything but brandishing little novelties picked up
elsewhere: images or star words of the era, which definitely have a resonance,
but one he can't grasp (Bonnot, worker, Marx, made in USA, Pierrot le Fou,
Debord, poetry, etc.). He really is a child of Mao and Coca-Cola.
The cinema enables one to express anything, just like an article, a book, a
leaflet or a poster. This is why we should henceforth require that each
situationist be as capable of making a film as of writing an article (cf. the
"Anti-Public Relations Notice" in Internationale Situationniste #8). Nothing is
too beautiful for the blacks of Watts.
Internationale Situationniste #11 (October 1967)
Translated by Ken Knabb
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