Yesterday I travelled to the far-north of London to catch the world premier of the Class Wargames film The Game Of War at the HTTP Gallery, close to Green Lanes. Divided into five segments of five minutes, the individual parts of this movie can be viewed in any order. While appearing to heap extravagant praise on Guy Debord, the film actually undermined his vanguardist positions by massively exaggerating the problematic self-promotional aspects of his film-making and other cultural-cum-politico activities. The spoken word Game of War soundtrack repeatedly exhorted viewers to play Debord’s game in order to make themselves more effective proletarian revolutionaries, and did so using the most blatant techniques of (post)-modern advertising. In their Communique 7 of 27/09/09, the Class Wargames collective put it this way:
“When Debord was working on the film adaptation of The Society of the Spectacle in the early-1970s, making a movie out of movie clips was very difficult. Buying celluloid stock, hiring editing suites and organising cinema screens had required serious money from a generous sponsor. Fortunately, over the past three-and-a-half-decades, digital technology has caught up with this Situationist technique. Class Wargames only needed a small grant from the Arts Council to fund a film constructed on a Mac laptop with Final Cut out of video from our performances and excerpts from our DVD collection. Best of all, we are now able to distribute our cinematic creation to a worldwide audience for free over the Net. Detournement is no longer the privilege of a minority of avant-garde artists. Media communism is now embedded in everyday life. Become a 21st century Debord – a director of remixed movies. Sweep away the anachronistic barrier of intellectual property. Switch on the computer, start up the video editing software, plug in an external drive filled with rendered DVDs and begin making your own film. Everyone is a practical Situationist. Ludic Labour!”
And while on the visual level The Game of War film appeared somewhat retro in its aesthetic (and this was clearly worked at and intended, because it isn’t typical of other pieces by director Ilze Black), the spoken script written by Richard Barbrook and Fabian Tompsett gave it a distinctively contemporary twist. Proletarian post-modern variants on the hoary tradition of mock praise are a groove sensation! “Guy Debord had the total revolutionary critique” (for the benefit of those not familiar with the genre of mock praise, this is a joke)! So look out for this movie once it hits the net, and if you are nearby check out upcoming Class Wargames events in The Hague (10 October), Newcastle (14 November) and Helsinki (14 November).
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!