57000 km Between Us

Sex, lies, camcorders and social embarrassment - Delphine Kreuter’s caustic digital comedy uproariously dissects French family life in the website era.

    * 24 & 25 October

Directed by:    Delphine Kreuter
Written by:    Delphine Kreuter, Mathieu Lis, Emmanuel Finkiel
Cast:    Florence Thomassin, Pascal Bongard, Marie Burgun
Country:    France
Year:    2007
Running time:    82min

Hell is other people – especially family, and especially when they have a camcorder in hand. That’s the message of Delphine Kreuter’s debut 57000 km Between Us, a caustic exercise that uses its rough-edged DV medium to revealing effect, re-tuning French bourgeois comedy for the digital age. Margot and Michel (Thomassin, Bongard) are determined to promote theirs as the ultimate happy family, obsessively documenting their lives on their website. Their teenage daughter Nat (Burgun) takes refuge from her parents’ neurotic narcissism by playing on-line games with Adrien (Bouvier), a teenage boy in hospital with a serious illness; she also indulges in more dubious role-playing with an older man (a brisk, vanity-free cameo from the ubiquitous Mathieu Amalric).

Meanwhile, logging onto Margot and Michel’s website are transsexual Nicole and her North African partner Khaled, who have unlikely history with the couple. So exclusively do these characters communicate with each other on screen that it can come as a shock when they meet in person, sometimes to spectacularly excruciating effect. Director-writer Kreuter shows an idiosyncratic sense of satirical mischief, and the film offers one of the most invigoratingly nervy uses of handheld DV imagery since the dawn of the Dogme movement.

 

The Beaches of Agnès

A kaleidoscopic auto-documentary from the Grandmother of the French New Wave, chronicling her remarkable life and career.

    * 18 & 28 October

Directed by:    Agnès Varda
Country:    France
Year:    2008
Running time:    110min

'If you opened people up, you would find landscapes; if you opened me up, you would find beaches. Many old people wish to tell their life. As an old filmmaker, with the enthusiasm and energy of my youth, I tried to find a style and a form to tell my memories, my encounters, the ups and downs of my life. I shot my film as a kaleidoscope, a collage, a fantasy.’ Agnès Varda

For more than five decades, Varda has been making short and feature films, documentaries and video installations, and even before that she was a photographer. Awarded the sobriquet of Grandmother of the French New Wave, her professional career included such films as Cleo from 5 to 7, Jacquot de Nantes, Vagabonde and The Gleaners and I. Now, in what she says will be her last film, she turns her camera on herself, returning to the beaches which have played such a significant part in her life to create a ‘sort of auto-filmo-documentary’.

Placing herself amongst extracts from her films, and images and interviews recalling her past, she has fashioned a humorous and illuminating account of her creative work, her life with Jacques Demy, her feminism and her family life. Amidst an abundance of rich material one image encapsulates the courage and independence of this remarkable woman: Agnès, single-handedly helming a small sail boat along the Seine, as the Eiffel Tower looms in the background.

La Belle personne

Romantic agony comes to a Parisian high school, in a lively and affecting ensemble drama from director Christophe Honoré.

    * 16 & 17 October

Directed by:    Christophe Honoré
Written by:    Christophe Honoré
Cast:    Louis Garrel, Léa Seydoux, Grégoire Leprince-Ringuet
Country:    France
Year:    2008
Running time:    97min

Madame de Lafayette’s novel, La Princesse de Clèves, is an unlikely favourite for screen adaptation, but after eccentric versions by Andrzei Zulawski (La Fidélité) and Manoel de Oliviera (La Lettre), here’s the third, very free modern-day adaptation, in a decade. Only a year after his musical, Les Chansons d’amour (Love Songs), Christophe Honoré – who’s proving to be almost as industrious as compatriot François Ozon – turns in his simplest and most affecting film to date, a story of amorous intrigue in a Parisian lycée. Enigmatic new girl Junie (Seydoux) is turning the heads of all around, including gauche co-student Otto (Leprince-Ringuet), and teacher Nemours (Garrel), who – although only a little older than his pupils – still has an alarmingly loose view of staff-student relations.

Unfussily shot, this is Honoré’s most straightforwardly realist work to date – up to a point – and his regular lead, Garrel, is kept on his mettle by an ensemble of co-stars younger and, in some cases, prettier than himself. A selection from the Nick Drake repertoire makes effective accompaniment, and, as in Love Songs, some singing is involved – although High School Musical French-style this most certainly ain’t.

 

Dying or Feeling Better

A moody adolescent boy teams up with outsider twins in Laurence Ferreira-Barbosa's moving but edgy evocation of the small-town teenage blues.

    * 23 & 24 October

Directed by:    Laurence Ferreira Barbosa
Written by:    Laurence Ferreira Barbosa, Nathalie Najem
Cast:    Florence Thomassin, François Civil, Marine Barbosa, Karine Barbosa
Country:    France
Year:    2008
Running time:    113min

The teenage blues have rarely been evoked with the acuteness and idiosyncrasy that Laurence Ferreira Barbosa brings to this story of a lost boy and his new, very non-conformist acquaintances. Moody Martial (Civil) has moved to a new town and a new flat with his mother Sabine (Thomassin), who’s sympathetic but untogether and who sometimes tries just too hard. After his mother makes a disastrous attempt to kick-start his social life, Martial withdraws even further, only to find himself increasingly fascinated by his school’s other outsiders, black identical twins Colette and Ernestine (Marine and Karine Barbosa).

As the teenagers’ relationship becomes a folie à trois, they find themselves drawn into some initially farcical, eventually dangerous situations. Barbosa sensitively juggles registers of comedy, social embarrassment and psychological drama in a story that – even in the crowded field of French adolescent dramas – stands out as an evocation of how it feels to be young, strange and lonely. Remarkable performances by new discoveries Civil and the Barbosa sisters give the film that extra edge of hip-ness and unsettling perversity.

 

A Lake

One of France's absolute cutting-edge directors, Philippe Grandrieux presents a haunting new work, a snowbound landscape drama set in a world of stillness and near-silence.

    * 22 & 23 October

Directed by:    Philippe Grandrieux
Written by:    Philippe Grandrieux
Cast:    Dmitry Kubasov, Natalie Rehorova, Alexei Solonchev
Country:    France
Year:    2008
Running time:    90min

How to sum up Un Lac? It’s no easier than with Sombre or La Vie nouvelle, the two last films by Philippe Grandrieux. Suffice to say that Grandrieux has been hotly acclaimed on both sides of the Atlantic as one of Europe’s most innovative and uncompromising filmmakers, his visionary films testing the very limits of screen language. This minimalist new work is at once Grandrieux’s most accessible film and his most abstract. The vestigial narrative takes place in a frosty Northern landscape of forests and mountains, where young woodchopper Alexis lives with his sister, their blind mother and a younger brother. Then one day a younger man arrives on the scene... Grandrieux doesn’t make events easy for us to follow, often shooting in near-darkness, with sparse dialogue sometimes pitched barely above a whisper.

But narrative apart, the film is distinctive for the unique, self-enclosed world that Grandrieux creates with a palette reduced almost to monochrome: a world of stillness and near-silence, of forbidding yet alluring landscapes whose affinities are as much with the Romantic paintings of Caspar David Friedrich, as with the cinematic ilk of Alexandr Sokurov, Bela Tarr and Fred Kelemen.

 

Louise-Michel

French anarcho-surrealist directors de Ververn and Delépine (Aaltra) return with a wayward odd-couple comedy about a factory worker out for revenge and the inept hitman she bonds with.

    * 21 & 24 October 

Directed by:    Gustave Kervern, Benoît Delépine
Written by:    Gustave Kervern, Benoît Delépine
Cast:    Yolande Moreau, Bouli Lanners, Benoît Poelvoorde
Country:    France-Belgium-Luxemburg
Year:    2008
Running time:    90min

Four years after their outrageous industrial-injury road movie, Aaltra, the absurdist duo of Kervern and Delépine return with a comedy even blacker, sparse and more outrageous. After a children’s clothes factory closes, leaving its female staff jobless, taciturn ex-con worker Louise (Moreau) suggests the workers spend their pooled money on a worthy cause – killing the boss that put them in this mess. She recruits a likely hitman: Michel (Eldorado actor-director Lanners), an inept security specialist who subcontracts the hit to a series of wildly inappropriate stand-in assassins.

Louise and Michel eventually head to Jersey to close in on their prey, before each fulfils the destiny of his/her unlikely secret past. Dada-esque sight gags abound, political correctness is comprehensively shredded, and cameo appearances include chanteur and Belgian cinema’s bad boy Benoît Poelvoorde as a demented 9/11 conspiracy theorist and Mathieu Kassovitz as an organic hotelier. The lead characters’ names, incidentally, are a tribute to Louise Michel, nineteenth century French anarchist, though she could have barely envisaged the kind of anarchism proposed here.

 

Mia & the Migou

Mia befriends the Migou, creatures who are custodians of a strange tree in a large forest.

    * 26 October

Directed by:    Jacques-Rémy Girerd
Written by:    Jacques-Rémy Girerd
Country:    France-Italy
Year:    2008
Running time:    91min

On a large construction site, in the middle of a vast and beautiful forest, a man is trapped in an underground tunnel. His daughter Mia, a determined and good natured girl, leaves home to travel the long distance required to find him. At the same time, the ruthless industrialist in charge of the project travels with his son to clinch the deal that is going to make him millions. Mia meets a number of creatures called the Migoo. They are custodians of a special tree that resides in a part of the forest and if it should ever be threatened then their lives will be endangered too.

Jaqcques-Remy Girerd (director of Raining Cats and Frogs – LFF 2004) has produced a beautifully made animated film which doesn’t shy away from delivering a strong environmental message but always does so with a good sense of humour and in the context of a story well told.

 

Modern Life

A masterful and uniquely moving portrait in Depardon's continuing series of films documenting the changing face of rural France.

    * 19 & 20 October

Directed by:    Raymond Depardon
Distributor:    Soda Pictures
Country:    France
Year:    2008
Running time:    88min

One of the finest films in Cannes this year came from photographer and film-maker Raymond Depardon, he of the unparalleled reputation as chronicler of French rural life. In Modern Life, he returns to the Haut-Garonne region and to the subjects of his earlier Profils Paysans films: l’approche and le quotidien. The octogenarian Privat brothers are struggling with age and declining health, and with the arrival of an outsider into the family fold; another elderly couple sees their dairy herd dwindle to just one cow; a middle aged man resents his responsibility for the family farm; and an enthusiastic young woman finds herself faced with insurmountable obstacles in her ambition to be a smallholder.

Depardon approaches all of them with empathy, and the relationships he has forged over many years are clearly invaluable and integral to the film. For the most part, these are not people who find it easy to talk about themselves. Even the film-maker’s familiarity and understanding cannot completely remove their discomfort, and the tacit recognition of this speaks volumes. If Depardon’s portraits of the paysans are affectionate and astute, so too is his approach to the landscape, filmed in wide shots to capture its remote beauty. Day turns to night, people grow old, the world changes around them: ineffable facts, but presented here in uniquely moving style.

Nucingen Haus

A tale of the unexpected about ghosts, memory and territorial disputes in an eerie old mansion.

    * 25 & 27 October

 Directed by:    Raoul Ruiz
Written by:    Raoul Ruiz
Cast:    Elsa Zylberstein, Jean-Marc Barr, Audrey Marnay
Country:    France
Year:    2008
Running time:    94min

For several years, French-based Raoul Ruiz was one of world cinema’s foremost exiles in Europe. In recent years, however, he has again been making regular artistic visits to his native Chile, of which the entrancing Nucingen Haus is the latest product. Very much in the vintage mode of Ruizian dream narrative, Nucingen Haus is a tale of the uncanny told in flashback structure. Writer William James (Barr) – not to be confused with Henry James’s philosopher brother – wins a rambling mansion and goes with his wife (Zylberstein) to take up residence. But the eccentric inhabitants of Nucingen Haus – a domain governed by bizarre linguistic and social rules – are none too ready to be displaced.

A story of vampirism, memory and territorial conflict, Nucingen Haus mixes black humour, surreal non-sequitur and a quite delirious beauty: the compositions, both inside and outside the house, echo the haunted perspectives of Welles in his heyday, and Ruiz uses this particular Chilean landscape – part tropical, part Alpine – to disorienting and enthralling effect.

 

Parc

Inventive French adaptation of John Cheever's suburbian-dystopia novel Bullet Park.

    * 16 & 18 October

  Directed by:    Arnaud des Pallières
Written by:    Arnaud des Pallières
Cast:    Sergi Lopez, Jean-Marc Barr, Nathalie Richard
Country:    France
Year:    2008
Running time:    109min

This unsettling feature by Arnaud des Pallières may be – along with Philippe Grandrieux’s A Lake – the most love-it-or-hate-it film in this Festival’s French selection, but like the Grandrieux, it demands to be seen by anyone with an interest in contemporary cinema’s outer limits. Based on John Cheever’s 1969 novel Bullet Park, des Pallières’ film is set in the South of France, in an exclusive gated community for the super-rich, where life would seem idyllic for Georges and Helen Nail (Lopez, Richard) – if not for the traumas that their teenage son is going through.

Meanwhile, in an unsettlingly fragmented narrative, we see a wealthy newcomer (Barr) arrive in the community, laden with a troubled past and a troubling future. Long takes and glacially stylish photography by Emmanuel Machuel, plus music and sound design (Martin Wheeler) that gets deep under your skin, make for a troubling and enigmatic ambience not a million miles from the dystopian chic evoked by J.G. Ballard’s Côte d’Azur-set Super-Cannes. A strong cast includes New Wave veterans Jean-Pierre Kalfon and László Szabó, plus Geraldine Chaplin at her very eeriest. Parc may perplex you, but it’s likely to haunt your sleepless moments.

 

Possibility of an Island

An eerie vision of cloning, religion and the (questionable) future of humanity.

    * 19 & 22 October

 Directed by:    Michel Houellebecq
Written by:    Michel Houellebecq
Cast:    Benoît Magimel, Patrick Bauchau, Ramata Koite
Country:    France
Year:    2008
Running time:    95min
After screen adaptations of his novels Whatever (bracingly caustic) and Atomised (way off-target), it’s now the turn of French literature’s No. 1 controversialist Michel Houellebecq to get behind the camera. This eerily distinctive feature is inspired by his futuristic novel of 2005, but it isn’t an adaptation as such, more a radically-reduced contemplation of its key themes: belief systems, cloning, humanity’s precarious future, and Houellebecq’s enduring obsession, the probably futile pursuit of happiness. Magimel plays Daniel, the son of a prophet (a creepily confident Bauchau), who goes round seedy conference halls peddling a snake-oil gospel of eternal salvation.

A few years on, the prophet is a powerful figure, working hand in hand with a team of cloning scientists. Many, many more years down the line, Daniel – or his distant cloned descendant – may be the last man on earth, combing a desolate landscape (the Canaries, at their bleakest) for remnants of the human apocalypse. Veering unsettlingly between poker-faced social satire, cartoonish farce (in Houellebecq’s tilts at the follies of tourism) and eerie futurism, The Possibility of an Island is a surprisingly introspective offering from one of contemporary literature’s arch-provocateurs. It won’t infuriate in the way that his novels do, but with its echoes of Kubrick, Resnais and Alphaville, this is a haunting, stylish and confident contribution to the field of art-house meta-sci-fi. 

A Simple Heart

Sandrine Bonnaire is at her best as a servant in a nineteenth-century household, in a spare, evocative adaptation of Flaubert's classic story.

    * 17 October

Directed by:    Marion Laine
Written by:    Marion Laine
Cast:    Sandrine Bonnaire, Marina Foïs, Pascal Elbé
Country:    France
Year:    2007

Marion Laine offers a literary adaptation in a classic mould – that is, in the classic and spare French mould (cf. Pascale Ferran’s recent Lady Chatterley), rather than the over-opulent heritage-fest we’re used to in Britain. This is a thoughtful, evocative expansion of the Flaubert short story – the one that famously inspired Julian Barnes’s novel Flaubert’s Parrot – about the travails of a maid in a Normandy household. Sandrine Bonnaire, in one of her best performances of late, plays Félicité, who is disappointed by love and finds service in the house of a severe employer, Madame Aubain (Marina Foïs).

Bonnaire is excellent as the resilient but emotionally vulnerable protagonist, her radiant features rarely used to more eloquent effect. Meticulously observed period detail, both in production design and in daily customs, fills out a complex, thoughtful picture of Flaubert’s rural world. The result is a document of nineteenth-century class relations and a picture of two very different kinds of female existence; Laine’s attention to mistress as much as servant, making A Simple Heart very much the story of two women. And, of course, a parrot.

La Vie d'artiste

A writer, an actor and a would-be chanteuse pursue elusive glory in Marc Fitoussi's brittle comedy about artistic disappointment.

    * 20 & 22 October

Directed by:     Marc Fitoussi
Written by:    Marc Fitoussi
Cast:    Sandrine Kiberlain, Emilie Dequenne, Denis Podalydès
Country:    France
Year:    2007
Running time:    107min

Ostensibly a frothily good-natured French social comedy, Marc Fitoussi’s La Vie d’artiste bristles with trenchant observations and sometimes cruel verities about the frustrations of creative pursuit. Interlocking narratives see three characters pursue their solitary aspirations to artistic excellence.

Alice (Kiberlain) has found considerable success providing voice-overs for Japanese anime, but fears that legit recognition in the acting world is slipping out of her grasp. Cora (Dequenne) is a would-be chanteuse working as a karaoke hostess, who reveres the tradition of French chanson, but can’t find her place in the 21st-century pop universe. And Bertrand (a sublimely painful performance by the priceless Denis Podalydès) is a teacher obsessed with completing that elusive second novel, and prepared to compromise himself horribly in the hope of reviving his flagging muse. Disaster, humiliation and bad judgment await all three characters round every corner, but Fitoussi guides his trio to eventual self-knowledge with compassion and satisfying mischief.

 

Le Genou d'Artemide

 

Le Genou d’Artemide presents the passionate exchange of orations by two mature gentlemen in a sun-dappled woody glade. 

       * 16 & 17 October

Directed by:    Jean-Marie Straub
Country:    France
Year:    2007
Running time:    26min

 Le genou d'Artémide is the first film made by Jean-Marie Straub since the sad death of filmmaking partner, Danièle Huillet. Like some of their recent films it is based on the writings of Cesare Pavese. At once delightfully simple and delicately profound, it presents the passionate exchange of orations by two mature gentlemen in a sun-dappled woody glade. Their words, their postures, the setting and the natural movement of the light on the trees blend to create a rich and slightly melancholic apparition.

 

Itineraire de Jean Bricard

 

Itineraire de Jean Bricard, Straub and Huillet show us the Loire in long moving takes of the river in silvery black-and-white.

        * 16 & 17 October 

Directed by: Jean-Marie Straub

Country: France

Year:  2008

Running time: 40min

Based on the book by Jean-Yves Petiteau, Itinéraire de Jean Bricard is the last film that Straub and Huillet made together. In it they show us the Loire in long moving takes of the river in silvery black-and-white. This is where Bricard grew upon on a river island during the German occupation. Observations of the land and the water accompany Bricard's narration (recorded by Petiteau in 1994) of the rich history of the region, from commercial fishing and farming in the 1930s, though the Occupation, the Resistance and its brutal suppression. The film is a commemoration of the lost livelihood of the earth, the lost lives of the War and to the work of two of the cinema's greatest artists.

 

The Class

Palme d'Or winning account of one term in a Parisian high school. Dramatic, funny and wonderfully observed.

        * 18 & 20 October

Directed by:    Laurent Cantet
Written by:    François Bégaudeau, Laurent Cantet, Robin Campillo
Cast:    François Bégaudeau
Distributor:    Artificial Eye
Country:    France
Year:    2008
Running time:    128min

Based on teacher and author François Bégaudeau's book Entre les murs, this fully-wired observational tale of a term in one classroom at a Parisian junior high school came as an exhilirating, board-sweeping exception to more grandiose experiences in Cannes this year, where it was the outstanding candidate for, and winner of, the Palme d'Or. Bégaudeau himself plays a committed teacher of good intentions whose zeal to engage his mixed bag of adolescent pupils (of both sexes and from several races and religions) in language and literature sees him cross taboo boundaries.

In reaction, one of his most promising pupils begins to slide deeper and deeper into trouble. Can the teacher save him from himself? Bégaudeau plays the role as if he'd been an actor of poise and passion all his life, and a winningly vibrant and cheeky cast of non-professional teenagers, drawn from school volunteers, are as sharp and funny and fierce as the script is acute. The film fizzes with so much energy and excitement that the end arrives before you know it, and for once, you really are left wanting more.

 

Let's Talk About the Rain (Parlez-moi de la pluie)

Personal relationships and political ideals come head to head in the witty drama about family, feminism and film making.

         * 22 & 23 October

Directed by:    Agnès Jaoui
Written by:    Agnès Jaoui, Jean-Pierre Bacri
Cast:    Agnès Jaoui, Jean-Pierre Bacri, Jamel Debbouze
Distributor:    Artificial Eye
Country:    France
Year:    2008
Running time:    100min 

Agathe Villanova (Agnès Jaoui) is a professional woman whose feminist convictions have persuaded her to enter politics. She returns to her childhood home in the South of France to help her sister sort out some family affairs. Agathe doesn't like the region and escaped it as soon as she could, but she's been sent back there to fight the forthcoming election. Karim (Jamel Debbouze), the son of the family's Algerian housekeeper, has aspirations to make a film, and together with his friend Michel (Jean-Pierre Bacri), he persuades Agathe to be the subject of a series of programmes on 'successful women'. It's an unseasonably wet, grey August, but the weather isn't the only thing to cause irritation…

Following from the success of The Taste of Others and Look at Me, director Agnès Jaoui once again pairs with co-writer and fellow actor Jean-Pierre Bacri. In Let's Talk about the Rain, their customary mix of personal relationships and broader social concerns is expertly handled, though this time with a more overtly funny tone. All the characters are satisfyingly multi-layered, non more so than Agathe, whose crusading political beliefs don't seem to be bringing much happiness, either to herself or anyone else.

 

Victoire Terminus

A documentary portrait of female boxers in Kinshasa.

         * 26 & 30 October

Directed by:    Renaud Barret, Florent De La Tullaye
Written by:    Renaud Barret, Florent De La Tullaye
Country:    France-Democratic Republic of Congo
Year:    2008
Running time:    80min

Set in the summer of 2006 in Kinshasa, Congo. Martini, Jeannette, Helene and Rosette are outspoken female boxers from the city's ghetto who spar everyday in Tata Rafael stadium. It is the 'Rumble in the Jungle' stadium where in 1974 Muhammad Ali knocked out George Foreman. Their coach, former boxer Judex, is struggling to organise a tournament with no money to pay his fighters.

But the women box for reasons other than financial gain. For some, it is to defend themselves against abusive partners in a culture of misogyny. For all, boxing is about empowerment. Meanwhile, the fight for the presidency of Congo rages as thousands flock to the stadium for political rallies. The women use the ring to take out their frustrations regarding corrupt presidential candidates. Victoire Terminus is a gripping portrait of a contemporary Congo where hope is still alive for the Kinshasa women who box.

 

A Christmas Tale (Un conte de Noel)

A dark, brilliantly observed and acidly funny depiction of a dysfunctional family reunited in the days before Christmas.

             * 19 October  

Directed by:    Arnaud Desplechin
Written by:    Arnaud Desplechin, Emmanuel Bourdieu
Cast:    Catherine Deneuve, Mathieu Amalric, Anne Consigny
Distributor:    New Wave Films
Country:    France
Year:    2008
Running time:    150min

Don't be fooled by the title: this is no saccharine story of joyful tots gathered round a tree, but something altogether more grown up – dark, brilliantly observed, acidly funny. Desplechin (Kings and Queens) brings an inimitable spin to the home-for-the-holidays story, crafting an enjoyably audacious tale of a family with a troubled past and a painful present. After several years apart the Vuillard family come together for Christmas at the family home in Roubaillard, Northern France. The clan is headed by Junon (Catherine Deneuve) a forthright matriarch who needs a bone marrow transplant to survive her recently diagnosed cancer. But which of the family might provide a suitable and willing donor?

Eldest daughter Elizabeth (Anne Consigny), a depressed playwright with a troubled son, is estranged from her brother Henri (Mathieu Amalric), the hard-drinking black-sheep of the family. Their vulnerable younger brother, Ivan (Melvil Poupaud), already has his own young family, perhaps as a means of escaping the one he was born into. With it's breathtakingly frank dialogue and inventive stylistic devices, this perfectly cast and impeccably acted film is one of the highlights of the festival.

 

In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni

An extremely rare opportunity to see new 35mm prints of films by French writer and theorist Guy Debord, best known for The Society of the Spectacle.

            * 25 October

France 1978

Dir Guy Debord

105min.

I will make no concessions to the public in this film. I believe there are several good reasons for this decision, and I am going to state them.' And state them he does. Debord's final film is a denunciation of cinema and society at large, an unremitting diatribe against consumption. The SI is equated to a military operation (charge of the light brigade, no less) as its members are presented alongside anarchistic images of D-Day landings, Andreas Baader, Zorro, a comic strip Prince Valliant and quotes from Shakespeare, Ecclesiastes and Omar Khayyám. Debord takes no prisoners in this testament to his vision.