We Spin Around the Night Consumed by the Fire

From an artistic standpoint, this feels like a failure. Obviously, Debord didn't try too much and maybe that's the point he wanted to make. In any case, reading aloud a text more akin to the medium of book than to cinema and complementing it with very loosely connected pictures and extracts from other films is far from captivating and, ultimately, unjust to the actual material. Ideologically, I agreed with some of his points, disagreed with others - still, the "film" remains food for thought.

While still rather bombastic and defensive, like a general who needs to convince the world or himself that he was right to lead his troops into a failed campaign, this is probably Debord's most well-rounded film, at its best when it comes across as a melancholy cry from the heart at the loss of a world. Still, his insistence that everything must be destroyed (in order to be rebuilt, of course) does have a whiff of the nihilist's satisfaction in seeing the whole world burn. Guess what...

A cinematic tour de force, ideologically sharp and astute.