<nettime> Debord's last hour - a short film by David Cox

[dcox@netspace.net.au]

The Last Hour of Guy Debord

A film by David Cox

Camera tracks in on the back of an armchair. A hand reaches for a bottle.  
The clink of glass on glass accompanies the ticking clock.

Ultra close up of revolver, as Debord's finger caresses the trigger.

Guy takes a long drag on his cigarette

A stab of pain in his side and Debord grimaces, doubling over. He sighs a
deep sigh and pours the end of his bottle into his glass. He downs the
drink, and reaches for another bottle from the case at his side. He puts
the gun down long enough to open the new bottle and pours another drink.
He looks up at the painting on the wall.

Cut to Claude Lorraine painting: Pan across the landscape – 18th Century
ships leaving a harbour in late afternoon sunlight.

Debord:

“I’d forgotten the joy of doubt….”

“I’d forgotten the doubt at the center of things”


Close up of a moth bashing itself against the lightbulb. Its wings flap
madly.

"Igni..."

Cut to the cobblestones beneath the feet of trousered leg.

Pierre! You were never as lost as the other children… Michelle, ah
Michelle ….

Debord spins the barrel and pulls the hammer back, feeling its spring
loaded pull dig a hole in his thumb.

Debord:

Thus I decompose… “It was thus with all liberty that I declared to them
how indifferent I was to this kind of activity; and that I despised
decomposing art, in a society that I didn't yet know that was
"decomposing."
 
The theoretical effervescence our own surpassing announced a proletarian
rise at short notice, as could be seen on the poster, "Lease for a take
due to a move urbi et orbi,"

The subjective tendency of the author (which was perhaps imposed on him by
his political position and his past), namely the manner in which he views
and presents to others the ultimate results of the real movement, the real
social process, has no relation to his own actual analysis."

The assertion of the definitive stability of a short period of frozen
historical time is the undeniable basis, proclaimed consciously and
unconsciously, of the present tendency toward a structuralist
systematization. The vantage point from which anti-historical
structuralist thought views the world is that of the eternal presence of a
system which was never created and which will never end. The dream of the
dictatorship of a preexisting unconscious structure over all social praxis
could be erroneously drawn from models of structures elaborated by
linguistics and anthropology (and even the analysis of the functioning of
capitalism)-- models already misunderstood in this context--only because
the academic imagination of minor functionaries, easily overwhelmed and
completely entrenched in the awestruck celebration of the existing system,
flatly reduces all reality to the existence of the system.

When art, become independent, depicts its world in dazzling colors, a
moment of life has grown old and it cannot be rejuvenated with dazzling
colors. It can only be evoked as a memory. The greatness of art begins to
appear only at the dusk of life.


We don't see the gun go off. We only hear its echo.

Through all of time.

End Credits.

David Cox 
 



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