Society of the Spectacle (a digital remix) | Film 1964

This double bill screening presents two experimental films, both loosely based on philosophical texts. 

Samuel Beckett’s Film 1964, which has no dialogue, takes its inspiration from Irish philosopher George Berkeley’s theory ‘Esse est percepti’ – to be is to be perceived. The film’s central character, played by Buster Keaton, is tormented by the idea that even after all outside perception has been suppressed, self perception remains.

DJRABBI’s Society of the Spectacle (a digital remix)  is also without dialogue. This film, which draws from the writings of Guy Debord, is composed of an accelerated remix of pictures taken from Google searches of Debord’s writing. Each image is trimmed and spliced into Debord’s original collage of black and white stock footage. Thousands of manipulated images are then compiled into a stream of what DJRABBI calls ‘agit-pop iconography’.