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On the Passage of a Few PersonsThrough a Rather Brief Unityof Timeby Guy Debord

(film soundtrack)

Voice 1: This neighborhood wasdesigned for the wretched dignity ofthe petty bourgeoisie, for respectableoccupations and intellectual tourism.The sedentary population of the upperfloors was sheltered from theinfluences of the street. Theneighborhood itself has remained the

same. It was the external setting ofour story, where a few people put intopractice a systematic questioning ofall the works and diversions of asociety, a total critique of its notion ofhappiness.

These people also scorned subjectiveprofundity. The only thing thatinterested them was a satisfactoryconcrete expression of their own lives.

Voice 2:Human beings are not fullyconscious of their real lives. Groping

in the dark, overwhelmed by theconsequences of their acts, at everymoment groups and individuals findthemselves faced with outcomes theyhad not intended.

Voice 1: They said that oblivion wastheir ruling passion. They wanted toreinvent everything each day; tobecome the masters of their ownlives.

Just as we do not judge an individualby what he thinks about himself, wecannot judge such a period oftransformation by its ownconsciousness. On the contrary, thisconsciousness must be understood asreflecting the contradictions ofmaterial life, the conflict betweensocial conditions and the forces ofsocial production.

Advances in the harnessing of naturewere not yet matched by a

corresponding liberation of everydaylife. Youth passed away among thevarious controls of resignation.

Our camera has captured for you a

few glimpses of an ephemeralmicrosociety.

Knowledge of empirical facts remainsabstract and superficial as long as it isnot concretized by being related tothe whole situation. This is the onlymethod that enables us to supersedepartial and abstract problems and getto their concrete essence, and thusimplicitly to their meaning.

This group lived on the margins of theeconomy. It tended toward a role ofpure consumption, particularly thefree consumption of its own time. Itthus found itself directly involved inqualitative divergences from ordinarylife, but deprived of any means toinfluence those divergences.

The group ranged over a very smallarea. The same times brought themback to the same places. No onewanted to go to bed early. Discussionscontinued on the meaning of it all. . . .

Voice 2: Our life is a journey, inwinter and night. We seek ourpassage . . .

Voice 1: The literature they hadabandoned nevertheless exerted adelaying influence, expressed in someaffective formulations.

Voice 2: There was the fatigue and

the cold of morning in this much-traversed labyrinth, like an enigmathat we had to resolve. It was atrompe-loeil reality through which wehad to discover the potential richnessof what was really there.

On the bank of the river eveningbegan again; and the caresses; andthe importance of a world withoutimportance. Just as the eyes have ablurred vision of many things and can

clearly see only one, so the will canstrive only imperfectly toward diverse

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objects and can completely love onlyone at a time.

Voice 3: No one counted on thefuture. It would never be possible to

be together later, or anywhere else.There would never be a greaterfreedom.

Voice 1: The refusal of time and ofgrowing old automatically limitedencounters in this narrow andcontingent zone, where what waslacking was felt as irreparable. Theextreme precariousness of theirmethods for getting by withoutworking was at the root of this

impatience which made excessesnecessary and breaks irrevocable.

Voice 2: We can never reallychallenge any form of socialorganization without challenging all ofthat organizations forms of language.

Voice 1: When freedom is practicedin a closed circle, it fades into adream, becomes a mere image ofitself. The ambiance of play is bynature unstable. At any momentordinary life may prevail once again.The geographical limitation of play iseven more striking than its temporallimitation. Every game takes placewithin the boundaries of its ownspatial domain.

Outside the neighborhood, beyond itsfleeting and continually threatenedchangelessness, stretched a half-known city where people met only bychance, losing their way forever.

The girls who found their way there,because they were legally under thecontrol of their family until the age ofeighteen, were often recaptured bythe defenders of that detestableinstitution. They were generally lockedup under the custody of thosecreatures who among all the badproducts of a bad society present themost ugly and repugnant appearance:nuns.

What makes most documentaries soeasy to understand is the arbitrarylimitation of their subject matter. Theyconfine themselves to depictingfragmented social functions and their

isolated products. In contrast, imaginethe full complexity of a moment thatis not resolved into a work, a momentwhose development containsinterrelated facts and values andwhose meaning is not yet apparent.This confused totality could be thesubject matter of such adocumentary.

Voice 2: The era had attained a levelof knowledge and technologies thatmade possible, and increasinglynecessary, a direct construction of allthe aspects of a mentally andmaterially liberated way of life. Theappearance of these superior meansof action, though they remainedunused because of the delays in theproject of abolishing the commodityeconomy, had already revealed theobsolescence of all aesthetic activity,whose ambitions and powers had bothdwindled away. The decay of art andof all the old codes of conduct had

formed our sociological background.The ruling classs monopoly on theinstruments we needed in order toimplement the collective art of ourtime had left us completely outsidethe official cultural production, whichwas devoted to illustrating andrepeating the past. An art film on thisgeneration can only be a film about itslack of real creations.

Others unthinkingly followed the pathslearned once and for all, to their work

and their home, to their predictablefuture. For them duty had alreadybecome a habit, and habit a duty.They did not see the deficiency oftheir city. They thought the deficiencyof their life was natural. We wanted tobreak out of this conditioning, insearch of different uses of the urbanlandscape, in search of new passions.The atmosphere of a few places gaveus intimations of the future powers ofan architecture that it would benecessary to create in order toprovide the setting for less mediocre

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games. We could expect nothing ofanything that we ourselves had notaltered. The urban environmentproclaimed the orders and tastes ofthe ruling society just as violently as

the newspapers. Man unifies theworld, but man has extended himselfeverywhere. People can see nothingaround them that is not their ownimage; everything speaks to them ofthemselves. Their very landscape isanimated. Obstacles wereeverywhere. And they were allinterrelated, maintaining a unifiedreign of poverty. Since everything wasconnected, it was necessary tochange everything through a unitarystruggle, or nothing. It was necessary

to link up with the masses, but sleepwas all around us.

Voice 3: The dictatorship of theproletariat is a relentless struggle,bloody and bloodless, violent andpeaceful, military and economic,educative and administrative, againstthe forces and traditions of the oldsociety.

Voice 1: But in this country it is once

again the men of order who haverebelled and reinforced their power.They have been allowed to aggravatethe grotesqueness of the rulingconditions according to their will,embellishing their system with thefunereal ceremonies of the past.

Voice 2: Years, like a single instantprolonged to this moment, come to anend.

Voice 1:What was directly livedreappears frozen in the distance,

engraved in the tastes and illusions ofan era and carried off with it.

Voice 2: The appearance of eventsthat we have not created, of eventsthat others have in fact createdagainst us, now obliges us to beaware of the passage of time and itsresults, to assess the transformationof our own desires into events. Whatdifferentiates the past from the

present is precisely its out-of-reach

objectivity. There is no more should-be; being has been consumed to thepoint of ceasing to exist. The detailsare already lost in the dust of time.Who was afraid of life, afraid of the

night, afraid of being taken, afraid ofbeing kept?

Voice 3: What should be abolishedcontinues, and we continue to wearaway with it. We are engulfed.Separated from each other. The yearspass and we havent changedanything.

Voice 2: Once again, morning in thesame streets. Once again the fatigue

of so many similarly passed nights. Itis a walk that has lasted a long time.

Voice 1: Really hard to drink more.

Voice 2: Of course one might make afilm about it. But even if such a filmsucceeded in being as fundamentallyincoherent and unsatisfying as thereality it dealt with, it could never bemore than a re-creation asimpoverished and false as thisbotched tracking shot.

Voice 3: There are now people whopride themselves on being authors offilms, as others were authors ofnovels. They are even more backwardthan the novelists because they areunaware of the decomposition andexhaustion of individual expression inour time, unaware that the arts ofpassivity are over and done. They aresometimes praised for their sinceritysince they dramatize with more

personal depth the conventions ofwhich their life consists. There is talkabout liberating the cinema. Butwhat does it matter to us if one moreart is liberated to the point that Tom,Dick or Harry can use it tocomplacently express their servilesentiments? The only interestingventure is the liberation of everydaylife, not only in a historicalperspective, but for us, right now. Thisproject implies the withering away ofall the alienated forms of

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communication. The cinema, too,must be destroyed.

Voice 2: In the final analysis, starsare not created by their talent or lack

of talent, or even by the film industryor advertising. They are created bythe need we have for them. A patheticneed, arising out of a dismal andanonymous life that would like toenlarge itself to the dimensions ofcinematic life. The imaginary life onthe screen is the product of this realneed. The star is the projection of thisneed.

The advertisements during

intermissions are the truest reflectionof an intermission from life.

To really describe this era it would nodoubt be necessary to show manyother things. But what would be thepoint?

The point is to understand what hasbeen done and all that remains to bedone, not to add more ruins to the oldworld of spectacles and memories.

New translation by Ken Knabb of thevoice-over soundtrack of GuyDebords second film, Sur le passagede quelques personnes travers une

assez courte unit de temps (1959).

The complete script of this film, withillustrations, detailed descriptions ofthe images, and extensiveannotations, is included in DebordsComplete Cinematic Works (AK Press,2003). For further information, seeGuy Debords Films.

Translation copyright 2003 by KenKnabb. (This copyright will not be

enforced against personal ornoncommercial use.)

http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/debord.films/index.htmhttp://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/debord.films/index.htm