Class Wargames Communique 7

Comrades! Raise your glasses of champagne to mark Class Wargames' decisive victory on the cultural front: the launch of our film on Guy Debord's The Game of War. For the first time, the Situationist politics of this military simulation are carefully explained in sound and vision. After watching this movie, opponents of spectacular capitalism will understand the importance of studying The Game of War. By playfully competing against each other over its board, they are learning the strategic and tactical skills required for success in the deadly struggle against the global bourgeoisie. In our film of Debord's game, Class Wargames has divided these teachings from the battlefield into five sections: terrain, combat, cavalry, arsenals and lines of communication. Analyse their insights with great care, fellow workers. As the crisis of neo-liberalism intensifies, you will need this military knowledge to thwart the wicked schemes of bankers and bureaucrats. Remember well the lessons of socialist history: clever tactics and smart strategy are our most powerful weapons.

In the early-1970s, Debord created his film adaptation of The Society of the Spectacle by splicing together clips taken from other people's movies and then adding his own soundtrack. When social relations between individuals are mediated through images, this avant-garde technique of détournement acts as the proletarian antidote to capitalist monopolisation of historical memory. Quoting from the products of commercial cinema involves much more than recruiting glamourous movie stars and expensive special effects for audiovisual subversion. As Debord emphasised, these borrowed film excerpts are transformed in the editing process into a revolutionary critique of the spectacular misrepresentation of the human adventure. Torn out of its original context and carefully placed in a new juxtaposition, the cinematic propaganda of the class enemy can be turned against itself. The imagery of bourgeois ideology must be metamorphosed into the elucidation of Situationist theory. Expropriating the media expropriators is the premonition of cybernetic communism in the present.

When Debord was working on the film adaptation of The Society of the Spectacle in the early-1970s, making a movie out of movie clips was very difficult. Buying celluloid stock, hiring editing suites and organising cinema screenings had required serious money from a generous sponsor. Fortunately, over the past three-and-a-half decades, digital technology has caught up with this Situationist technique. Class Wargames only needed a small grant from the Arts Council to fund a film constructed on a Mac laptop with i-Movie out of video from our performances and excerpts from our DVD collection. Best of all, we are now able to distribute our cinematic creation to a worldwide audience for free over the Net. Détournement is no longer the privilege of a minority of avant-garde artists. Media communism is now embedded in everyday life. Become a 21st century Debord - a director of remixed movies. Sweep away the anachronistic barriers of intellectual property. Switch on the computer, start up the video editing software, plug in an external drive filled with rendered DVDs and begin making your own film. Everyone is a practical Situationist.

Ludic Labour!

============================= CLASS WARGAMES FILM LAUNCH 27th September 2009 12.00-17.00 HTTP Gallery Unit A2, Arena Design Centre 71 Ashfield Road London N4 1LD Click here for map and location details http://www.http.uk.net/docs/gettingto.shtml