Thursday 3 November 2022

The Society of the Spectacle

 

Spectacle is capital accumulated to such a degree that it becomes an image, and in societies where modern production prevail all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation spectacle.

Spectacle can take on many forms before it reaches its absolute realization. Image as a blissful social unification through consumption. Disillusionment with life is the life-source for the spectacle carrying on. Whether its is a lifestyle, military, capitalistic, or image spectacle. 

Its a mix of a treadmill dynamic and the economic foundation of capitalism created the ideology of the spectacle. Through philosophical speculation and a Marxist politics approach the spectacle has now become a boring dystopia. Philosophically it shows that we lead a boring in-authentic life, just passive phony spectators. From a philosophical stand point it is our alienation, merely observers in a world of objects, to the point that we have become objects. An army of consumers who have become what they have consumed,  similar to the movie Terminal Man.

The French radical theorist Guy Debord wrote about boredom in the 20th century during a pseudo-cyclical time and how time is a marketable commodity, pointing at tourism, theme parks and subscriptions to what he called cultural consumption as examples. How life is kept at a distance as if behind glass, without intimacy and awareness. People congregating with strangers in order to experience the world as a series of mere images. Condemned to a pseudo & hyper reality. The feeling of endless repetition is contradicted by the linear time that defines capitalism production. These constant innovations are not echoed in consumption, which presents nothing but an expanded repetition of the past. Because dead labour continues to dominate living labour in spectacular time, the past continues to dominate the present. Stuck in an eternal present, stuck in an unchanging world. For Debord the material aspects of capitalism is a material realm, but the real of exploitation and production is real and really does move. Innovation occurs in the factory and in studios, in a way that it never occurs in our personal lives. 

Situationist Techniques  

*Dérives -  ''It is an unplanned journey through a landscape, usually urban, in which participants drop their everyday relations and "let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there"  

*Détournement - The cut up, collage, montage, juxtaposition, the refusal of original creation, everything has already been created just put it into new creations 

*Unitari-Urbanism - integrated city creations, games played on urban sites *psycho-geography - play as free and creative activity

Lettrism or ‘letters’ in French was an art movement founded in the 1940’s by Isidore Isou in Paris, influenced by the theories of Dada and Surrealism, Isidore Isou’s aim was to rewrite all of human knowledge. In order to accomplish this rewriting of all human knowledge he believed that transforming the letter and creating a new language to abolish all others would complete this. His idea of a language consisted of letters and symbols, creating a visual art. He aimed his work at all fields of knowledge including theatre, art, cinema, economics and law. His paintings including his self-portrait were covered in a layer of symbols and letters. 

The movement soon expanded by attracting numerous creative people, such as Gabriel Pomerand, Maurice Lemaître and Gil J Wolman.  Isou is argued to have had a connection with ideals of Futurism within his ideas. One of his main areas to deconstruct was poetry. He saw that many aspects of society including poetry, music and painting had been created with a blue print. In the case of poetry, he saw that Homer had created the blue print of poetry and that poets had simply built upon this blue print instead of creating original work. Isou wanted to be the man who radically changed the blue prints of society and become the original. He believed that deconstructing this idea through re-writing poems using symbols and letters would destroy the idea of the poem and therefore create a new Lettrism poem. 

He further tried to deconstruct film and cinema by making his own film ‘Le Traité de bave et d’éternté / Treatise on Venom and Eternity (1951) where Isou destroys the concept of the classical image by using scraps of film found in trash bins, scratching graffiti on these images to make them unrecognizable. He goes even further in radically disassociating the sound and the image, viewed as two totally independent channels.  The Lettrist ideals carried on into the 1990’s until Isou died in 2000. His friend Lemaitre continues to pursue the theories of Lettrism, however these techniques are on a much smaller scale than they were in the 1940’s and 1950’s. 

Hurlements en faveur de Sade (English: Howlings for Sade) is a 1952 French avant-garde film directed by Guy Debord. Devoid of any images, the film was an early work of Lettrist cinema. The image track of Hurlements en faveur de Sade contains no actual images, only solid white or solid black frames. It follows the sound track such that when there is speech the screen is white, and when there is silence the screen is black. The sound track uses text détourned from Isidore Isou's book Esthétique du cinéma, John Ford's film Rio Grande, work by James Joyce, and the French Civil Code. The time between speeches becomes increasingly long throughout the film, and it ends with a 24-minute sequence of silence and darkness. 

Debord wrote the original script for Hurlements en faveur de Sade during the winter of 1951–1952. His notes outlined a combination of original scenes and found footage. Debord planned to use newsreel footage, images of himself and other Lettrists, painted film stock, and sequences of solid black. For the film's soundtrack, his notes included Lettrist poetry, text by Guillaume Apollinaire, and music by Antonio Vivaldi. In April 1952 Debord published his original scenario in Ion magazine along with a preface titled "Prolégomènes à tout cinéma futur" (English: "Prolegomena to Any Future Cinema"). Debord abandoned most of his original plan for the film and instead used no images at all. He used speeches delivered by himself, Gil J. Wolman, Isidore Isou, Serge Berna [fr], and Barbara Rosenthal. Hurlements en faveur de Sade premiered 30 June 1952 at the Ciné-Club Avant-Garde 52 in the Musée de l'Homme. The audience became unruly, and the screening was stopped after twenty minutes. The film had its UK premiere in 1957 at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London.

Orson Welles once remarked that “everything that’s been called directing is one big bluff. Editing is the only time when you can be in complete control of a film.” 

Critique of Separation (1961), as should be most obvious, takes this mark as its point of critical departure, and, in more ways that one, Society of the Spectacle picks up where the former had left off, further dissecting “the official language of universal separation”, voiced here (and consequently détourned) by appearances of French government ministers and union bureaucrats integral to the restoration of spectacular order following May ’68. Here, the political leaders of spectacular society attain an unprecedented star status, and their citizenry consequently becomes reduced to passive spectatorship; images of rulers institute a one-way, top-down communicative model wherein the constituent has no autonomous voice, no means of talking back.

The spectacle, Debord argues, thrives on the repetition of commodity form, reinvesting the structure with seemingly new products and images. By compiling image after image of the commodification of life by consumer capitalism (female bodies, political figures, product advertisements, popular films, and so on), his films expose this oppressive repetition and artificial sense of the new, and, as if to help along one of the most problematic concepts in Marx’s work, Society of the Spectacle (1973) ponders the commodity’s “metaphysical subtleties” while sequentially imaging automobile showrooms and naked cover girls.

In 1951, Isou released his first movie, the experimental film Traité de bave et d'éternité (Treatise on Venom And Eternity), whose premiere took place at the Cannes Film Festival. Although the film was not officially entered in the festival, it was widely publicized in the press and its screening constituted one of the festival's fringe events. While threatening to form his own jury to judge the film, Isou went door to door, harassing the administrators of the festival until they agreed to grant him a small, peripheral exhibition. The film consisted of "four and a half hours of 'discordant' images, enhanced with scratches, shaky footage running upside down or in reverse, blank frames, stock shots and a soundtrack consisting of monologues and onomatopoeic poetry". In addition, the celluloid on which the film was recorded was attacked with destructive techniques such as scratches and bleaching.

In one of the film's voiceovers, Isou states his opinion on the medium:  "I believe firstly that the cinema is too rich. It is obese. It has reached its limits, its maximum. With the first movement of widening which it will outline, the cinema will burst! Under the blow of a congestion, this greased pig will tear into a thousand pieces. I announce the destruction of the cinema, the first apocalyptic sign of disjunction, of rupture, of this corpulent and bloated organization which calls itself film."

Following its screening, the work was deemed revolting by many critics present at the premiere. The film was booed and hissed from the start, but after the first section was completed and the screen went completely blank with the audio still going, the audience was furious and the screening had to be stopped. It was, nonetheless, celebrated by Cannes jury member Jean Cocteau, who called it “the most beautiful scandal of the entire festival”and handed Isou a hastily concocted “Prix de spectateurs d’avant-garde”. Including a reflexive discourse on the making of a new cinema, Isou's film became a virtual Lettriste manifesto. Following the scandal after the film's showing at the 1951 Cannes Film Festival, it was later imported into the United States, where it influenced avant-garde film makers such as Stan Brakhage, who corresponded with Isou directly afterward and let it change his approach to the medium and to narrative entirely.  In the early 1950s, one segment of Orson Welles' film journal, which was entitled Le Letrrisme est la Poesie en Vogue, included an interview with Isou and Maurice Lemaître.




Elvis & Colonel Tom Parker: Conman or Genius

 

According to last year's "The Inner Elvis," written by psychologist Peter Whitmer, Presley's problems with Parker were rooted in his desperate mama's-boy relationship with Gladys Presley. According to Whitmer, Parker was "a perfect psychological amalgam of an idealized mother. . . . After Gladys' death in 1958, Tom Parker became Gladys Presley," with whom he shared such physical attributes as a rotund body and a round face with double chin. Whitmer also writes that Gladys and the Colonel were both "masters of passive-aggressive manipulation {who} used subtle set-pieces of controlling behaviour with which they could coax and entice, rather than shout or push, to make their point. . . . Forever supplicant before those he perceived as authoritarian, in this regard Elvis was like a weather vane in a strong wind." My Boy Elvis: The Colonel Tom Parker Story is another great book on Parker.

And Tom Parker was a hurricane, one who first touched down on American shores in Hoboken, N.J., in 1927, after having stowed away on a ship. Soon after, Andres Cornelius van Kuijk became Thomas Parker and joined the Army ("Colonel" was an honorary title bestowed many years later by Louisiana Gov. Jimmie Davis, writer and first singer of "You Are My Sunshine").  After the Army, Parker gravitated to Florida, America's circus capital, and began honing the skills that would serve him so well with Presley. For a while he was an advance man for a traveling circus, slipping into a town to slap up posters, goad the local media and generally stir things up. It was a process he never abandoned, and sometimes you could find traces of that, as when Parker hired a troupe of midgets to parade around Los Angeles, provoking boat loads of copy about the Elvis Presley Midget Fan Club. Even at the height of Presley's fame, Parker himself would sometimes hawk programs, photos and buttons to fans waiting to get into a venue.  That aggressive attitude was a metaphor for the Colonel's stance after Aug. 15, 1955, when Presley signed a usurious contract naming Parker his "sole and exclusive adviser, personal representative and manager." The standard manager's fee then (as now) was 10 to 15 percent, but Parker started at 25 percent. In 1966, he jacked it up to an unheard-of 50 percent.

When Col. Tom Parker passed away Tuesday at the age of 87, it marked the death of a super-salesman whose one and only product -- Elvis Presley -- became the catalyst for a worldwide cultural revolution. Parker, a onetime carnival barker, never had a clue about Presley's sociological impact, didn't particularly care for rock-and-roll, and certainly didn't care for the fans. They were just marks. He couldn't have cared much for Presley, either. When the singer died in August 1977, the first thing Parker told an associate was: "This won't change anything." And even as Presley was undergoing an autopsy in Memphis, Parker was putting the finishing touches on a souvenir merchandise deal, the final chapter in his client's transformation from cultural oddity to commercial commodity. Parker and Presley represent the convergence of two characters from carnival culture: the poor country boy who grabs the brass ring and the mysterious stranger who fleeces the innocent. The Colonel was often described as a cross between P.T. Barnum and W.C. Fields; in the King's court, he was combination court jester, Svengali and Robin Hood. For Parker, success was never measured by creative achievement, only by financial payoff, understandable since the bigger the pot, the bigger his portion. When million-dollar offers would come in for a concert or some other project, Parker would smile and say, "That's plenty for me, but what about my boy?" And he wasn't joking. 

Everything had its price, including Parker, who offered himself for interviews at $25,000 for small talk, $100,000 for long conversation. Neither situation promised anything resembling truth, of course. Admittedly, the Colonel was a character -- fat, oblivious to fashion, possessed of a strange, unexplained accent. But he was a cipher, as well. It wasn't until Albert Goldman's 1981 Presley biography that the world learned Col. Tom Parker was really Andres van Kuijk of the Netherlands. By that time, he'd been an illegal alien here for half a century, as well as an inadvertent cultural revolutionary by proxy. And just as Presley's greatest fear was that everything would suddenly disappear, fear of discovery and deportation kept Parker from ever fully enjoying the fruits of his client's labors. Parker was the world's highest-paid manager. And since he demanded additional payments as adviser, consultant, technical director and so on, he actually made more in commissions and consultancies on some films than Presley did.

About the same time as the RCA deal, Parker formed Boxcar Enterprises to handle Elvis merchandising, with Presley getting only 15 percent.  Eventually, of course, the dancing chickens came home to roost. During an estate hearing in 1980, an alert Memphis judge questioned Parker's 50-percent commission as well as other elements of his contract and appointed a lawyer to represent and defend the interests of Lisa Marie Presley, then 13. The court subsequently declared Parker "guilty of self-dealing and overreaching" and said he had "handled affairs not in Elvis's but his own interest." Calling Elvis "naive, shy and unassertive" and Parker "aggressive, shrewd and tough," it closed the book on any further dealings between him and the estate.  After being exposed in Goldman's Presley book and sued by the Presley estate, the Colonel proved wily as ever. He filed legal papers suggesting that since he'd served in the U.S. Army without permission from the Dutch government, he had automatically forfeited his citizenship there. Since he had never applied for U.S. citizenship, he was essentially a man without a country and no one had jurisdiction over him. Such tactics delayed resolution so long that the Presley estate finally settled with Parker, and he received a $2 million settlement from RCA Records. That was the last money he made from Elvis. 


The Colonel had a bag of tricks that went all the way back to his carny days such as:

  • Selling Elvis to Hollywood ''I dont want to read the script cose I cant read and write but how much are you going to pay me? We'll give you $25k. -That is exactly what I wanted, but how much are you going to pay Elvis?
  • Never letting Elvis play to venues that aren't overflowing with people out onto the street.
  • Telling promoters that they can have Elvis for $12k when other promoters are paying $10k for him.
  • In the circus the Colonel had a dancing chicken act. The chicken danced because it was standing on a hot plate.
  • Only released a limited number of records per year not to saturate the market.
  • Invented an exclusive club called the Snowmens League Of America to keep people loyal. It was free to join but $1k to leave. The club celebrated the art of the con trick. ''We've never lost a member yet.''
  •  He would get his watch out and hypnotise members of the Memphis Mafia and make them pretend to be a dog.
  • He would solicit donations for dogs, and also charge people to bury their dogs, charge grieving people if they wanted flowers, and also providing mini tombstones.
  • To check if Elvis wasnt too fat for his next movie he would have girls hug his waist to see if he'd put in extra weight.
  • Made Elvis pretend to be single so women would think he was available.
  • Used TV commercials with the only word being ELVIS!
  • Threatened the Presley family after Elvis died, that he was gonna build an Elvis museum, complete with a massive parking lot. The Presley family settled in buying the whole of the Colonels memorabilia museum for $1million. The biggest snow job he did.
  • Sold advertising space in his unpublished/unwritten autobiography book 'How Much Does It Cost If It's Free.' 
  • While working at a hotdog booth in Florida, to make extra money he would cut out the middle bit on the foot long hot dog, fill the middle with sauerkraut and just have the meat sticking out at both ends. If someone complained he would say that they must have dropped it. 
  • He made ends meet by painting sparrows yellow and selling them as canaries.
  • If Elvis wore his own clothes in a movie he was entitled to an extra $10k, even if he was only wearing a watch.
  • In 1973 he organized a live world satellite telecast. He got the idea after watching Nixon's live broadcast from China.
  • Sold 'I Hate Elvis' badges.
  • He considered his artists his main passion, ''you're my hobby''.
  • He invented the patent medicine Hadacol drink which included alcohol.
  • Sensing a marketing opportunity that no music manager had every considered before, Colonel Parker signed a deal with a Beverly Hills  movie merchandiser for $40,000. 
  • In just a few months, over 50 different Elvis-themed products were produced, from charm bracelets and necklaces, to scarves, teddy bear perfume, Topps bubble gum cards, and sneakers... to record players, hats, and lipsticks in "Heartbreak Pink" and "Hound Dog Orange" - sold with the slogan, "Keep Me Always On Your Lips."
  •  When asked about the deal between him and Elvis, the Colonel responded: “That’s not true at all. He takes 50 per cent of everything I earn.”
  • He'd say ''this is probably gonna be Elvis' last film so we should double the price.''
  • Even after his death, Parker continued business as usual: 'Elvis didn't die,' he said, 'The body did.' 
  • The Snowmen's League Of America booklet only had two written pages then all the other pages were blank. ''A real Snowman reads between the lines.''
  • He liked to rub peoples curly hair and say ''now you can tell people the Colonel rubbed your head, you're gonna be a star!''
  • Gradually, Parker eased out competition to become the gyrating teen's 'sole and exclusive adviser, personal representative and manager.' So read their ironclad contract. 
  • He used to say, 'You don't have to be nice to people on the way up if you're not coming back down.'
  • He sold 500 spare penmamt sticks as ''Elvis special Pearl Harbour Day special: Teddy Bear Toothpicks'' to the Vegas hotel's Japanese tourists.  
  • One of his fav saying was ''I'll be very happy if you buy something.''
  • To build credit with Las Vegas casino managers he would send someone to borrow $500, he'd than put it in an evelope in his desk, not touch it, and at the end of the Las Vegas residency give it back.
  • He would send his assistant Kenny Wynn on a 4 hour flight from Vegas to Palm Springs to pick up some catfish in his fridge and then fly back to Vegas.
  • He had a very unusual mind. Most people have one voice of inner dialogue. It's our inner thought. We think all the time, words are formulated in our minds. That's our thinking process. Colonel had multi levels of inner dialogue.
  • Parker had total recall. Colonel never made notes. He carried everything in his mind. And when someone would ask him a question about something that occurred maybe six months ago, or 20 years ago, his replay invariably was, 'Let me run my tapes'. And he would sit for a minute, and then he would bring the answer out.
  • He bought 900 pairs of binoculars from Army surplus for 90 cents a pair and sold them at a dollar each (10 cent profit) at the back of the auditorium. 'They had just plain glass in them, but they looked good' he admitted.
  • During his carnival days he gypped rube carnival goers with a quarter glued to the side of his ring.
  • When he was a dog catcher in order to give the dogs new homes he would hild contests for people to win a dog.
  • He also had a Flower Contract and people would pay him to put fresh flowers on peoples graves. Only he would go at night to different florists and get the old flowers for free. When people complained that the flowers didnt look good he would say '' well you should have been here yesteday they looked wonderful.''