At the end of his 1959 film, On the Passage of a Few Persons Through a Rather Brief Unity of Time, Guy Debord describes the limit that his film has reached, which takes shape as the limit of film as such:
To really describe this era it would no doubt be necessary to show many other things. But what would be the point? The point is to understand what has been done and all that remains to be done, not to add more ruins to the old world of spectacles and memories.
These words are accompanied by a blank, white screen.
This ending would seem to acknowledge that art is not some special case – some altogether other form of image-signal- that can miraculously undo the untruth of spectacle. Rather the art image itself is implicated within the regime of spectacle. It too misdirects and pollutes. It adds to the sum of falsehood – of alienated, disengaged existence. So struggling with this contradiction there is the need for the limit image – blank, self-annulling, under erasure. This is all that is possible – except, of course, for stopping filming altogether – refusing to produce images at all. This latter option makes considerable logical sense within the framework of a vision of resistance that posits a monolithic enemy and an absolute, categorical space of revolutionary difference.
Yet Debord is aware that images return. Actions that were conceived as stepping outside the framework of the spectacle can quickly gain a spectacular dimension. Direct, momentary and ephemeral interventions in the everyday can be recuperated – can develop thick, imagistic skins, can pass away from whatever lent them immediate, animated life. This is the uncertainty (and pathos) of the Situationist venture – the ever present risk that situation be recast as spectacle. For me, the unthought possibility here is that the image, in its distance and intimacy, was always already present within the apparently exterior form of the situation – that spectacle and situation are not so neatly opposed.