“I think I decided 10 years ago that I was done with filming…that there was no reason for a guy like me to go around capturing [images] Robert Flaherty-style,” maverick Swedish director Göran Hugo Olsson (director of F**k You, F**k You Very Much and The Black Power Mixtape 1967-75) tells BDE of his approach toward his craft. Even before cell phones came along, he was moving away from traditional filmmaking.
Olsson also began to question the cult of the individual auteur-genius doing everything on his or her own. He wanted to collaborate. He was already an admirer of the work of artist Roxy Farhat and leapt at the chance to work with her.
“We got together,” Olson says. “And the rest is history,” Farhat adds.
Their film, a world premiere in CPH:DOX’s New Vision section, looks at the continuing influence of French situationist philosopher Guy Debord’s 1967 Marxist-surrealist manifesto ‘The Society Of The Spectacle.’
“I encountered Debord and the situationists through being an artist, but it wasn’t until I started working with Goran that I really got into the situationists and their texts,” Farhat says of her engagement with the avant-garde movement known for its playful critique of capitalism.
Debord wrote his text in the heady days of the late 60s, an era of strikes and student rebellion. Farhat and Olsson are applying his ideas to the digital age.
Olsson “came of age” during the 1970s punk and disco era and was very attracted to the stunts performed by Sex Pistols manager, Malcolm McLaren. He saw the mischievous McLaren as following in Debord’s tradition in the way he managed to be radical without “erasing” his personality.
“It’s not taboo to drink champagne and enjoy your life,” he says of the McLaren approach.
Farhat and Olsson have recruited some prominent authors and academics from different fields and backgrounds to hold forth on camera on what situationism means today, among them Debord experts like Mikkel Bolt and Andreas Malm; film professor Jyoti Mistry, and others.
“They write about very different topics although they all write about critical theory in some way or another,” Farhat explains what links these contributors. “We thought they would be able to enter the work from different perspectives.”
The two directors film their interviewees in dynamic split-screen. “We had done talking heads previously in a test shoot but once we put it on the time line, we saw it was way too stiff. We felt we needed something that was more alive to make the text more accessible and make it a more interesting watch,” Farhat explains their approach. “It [Debord’s text] is a very dystopic read and so maybe you also need some joy to be able to take it all in.”
Olsson adds that they wanted to make the film “more lush” than the typical culture documentary and to fill it with “bright colours and fantasy.” They also wanted to engage seriously with Debord’s philosophy. “The goal is absolutely to say these ideas are so relevant to today. “
The documentary is comprised of “a lot of different elements from different sources” (as Farhat puts it). These include footage from one of her own art video pieces, ‘Acting Woman,’ which she made with artist and musician Zhala. They’re shown standing together in what seems like a freeze frame for several minutes, staring provocatively at the camera. Suddenly, we see Farhat begin to dribble. “I think it works really well with the concept of the spectacle where it is so much about appearance and trying to uphold the right kind of appearance,” she says of the sequence. “It’s so much hard labour – and for what? I think this piece illustrates that.”
One topic the filmmakers also investigate is the link between the climate crisis and Debord’s theory of the spectacle.
“It’s not sustainable to increase production of whatever goods or services…or of images,” Olsson says. He points out that “the spectacle” is used to ”hide” the problem. For example, when a young climate activist like Greta Thunberg emerges, she becomes such a figure of media fascination that the public ends up being more interested in her as a personality than in her message.
“Literally our planet is on fire, people are depressed, inequalities are rising…and still as Andreas says in the film, there is not a huge uprising and you don’t see people mobilising…I think Guy Debord’s ideas and the ‘Society of the Spectacle’ is a very useful way to understand why not. This passivity is drowning everything out. How is it that we all know that we are consuming […] our planet to death and yet we are still buying new iPhones and jeans and flying?” Farhat asks. “It’s really hard to understand how those things can co-exist. The ideas in the Society of the Spectacle map it out in a way so you can see why we are so passive when our own existence is under threat.”
The slogan issued by Farhat at the end of the film is that we “need to organise.” This is issued partly tongue in cheek. “Maybe it’s hard to say that in a super-serious tone while suddenly breaking the fourth wall, but I definitely mean it. We do think organisation is the only way forward.”
Someone asks in the film “what should I do as an individual?” The only answer, Olsson suggests, is “to stop being an individual.”
