The Society of the Spectacle

Guy Debord was born 1931 in Paris; since the early 1950s, Debord spearheaded radical critiques of life in modern society. For the French radicalization processes of May 1968, he was crucially involved with the Situationist International. His handful of films are meanwhile considered the earliest attempts at a radical use of the medium; as early as 1952, using an extremely formal and content-related skeletal structure, his films waged an organized attack on cinema as the medium of the ruling class. More important, however, was the concept of the “Construction of the Situation” introduced by Debord in the mid-1950s, in the context of discussing artistic means, and later used only formally but while allowing for meaningful reassessments of the Situationists. From the mid-1970s onward, Debord led a secluded life. He committed suicide in Paris in 1994 and had his remains cremated in order to avoid his grave becoming another spectacle for tourists to come visit.