Piero Simondo was an Italian artist, famous for the role he played in the Situationist International.
Tag Archives: Situationism
RIP Anna Karina (1940 – 2019)
Anna Karina was a Danish actress best-known for her work with the French New Wave and Jean-Luc Godard.
She appeared four times in the film On the Passage of a Few Persons Through a Rather Brief Unity of Time (1959) by Marxist/situationist Guy Debord, a much more interesting figure than Godard.
These four appearances were from television commercials. Three fragments are from a Monsavon commercial, a fourth I have been unable to identify.
In the first clip (13:53) Anna stands in front of a mirror in the same bathroom as in which she takes a bath in the third clip.
The voice-over: “What was directly lived reappears frozen in the distance, engraved in the tastes and illustions of an era and carried off with it.”
In the second clip (14:41) she is in the bath and rubs herself with soap.
The voice-over: “There is no more should-be; being has been consumed to the point of ceasing to exist. The details are already lost in the dust of time. “Who was afraid of life, afraid of the night, afraid of being taken, afraid of being kept?”
In the third clip (17:30) she is seen at the wheel of a convertible car, a bird’s eye view, three young people get out of the car.
The voice-over: “In the final analysis, stars are not created by their talent or lack of talent, or even by the film industry or advertising. They are created by the need we have for them.”
The fourth clip (18:09) begins where the first clip left off.
The voice-over: “The advertisements during intermissions are the truest reflection of an intermission from life.”
Translations are from [1].
Some questions on ‘King Mob Echo’ #1
I mentioned King Mob Echo in my previous post on Rita Renoir[1]. It’s the magazine of the English Situationist offshoot wich ran for five issues in the period 1968-70.
Its historiography seems to be incomplete.
The first issue depicts and image of the Fantomas serial which Wikipedia[2] lists as of the Barrabas film.
![[2]](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/77/Barrabas.jpg){kind=link}
However, if you look closely at the image, you will see that the caption reads “77. Feuillade, Fantomas, 1912”. The Barrabas film dates from 1920 so it seems unlikely that the still stems from that film. The film, which lasts more than five hours, is here, I just don’t have time to watch it. Can anyone tell us from where this still is taken? It is also on the cover of Fantomas: The Corpse Who Kills (2008).
Secondly, and here’s a little mystery I solved myself, there is the caption, a citation by Karl Marx:
Most sources researching King Mob attribute this dictum to The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, but it’s not, it’s actually from Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right and reads in the original German: “Ich bin nichts und ich müßte alles sein” and is recently translated as “I am nothing and I should be everything”.
Thirdly, there is the case of the photo of Rosa Luxemburg’s corpse. I’ve known this photo since I read Lipstick Traces, featured in their section on King Mob, but I would very much want to find out where this photo was first published.
Anyone?
I shop therefore I am
It makes little sense to talk about consumerism since consumerism is a pejorative (a third of the -isms are) and implies anti-consumerism.
So all talk of consumerism is talk of anti-consumerism.
Which brings me to the film above, which I suspect to feature strains of anti-consumerism. I speak of a Russian film about the Paris Commune which was titled The New Babylon.
I once[1] posted a lovely still of this film of a woman with a gun and a mannequin.
The New Babylon of the title of this film refers (I just learned) to a shopping mall, with the same title.
Shopping malls are paradises of consumerism.
The earliest shopping malls were arcades, admirably staged by Walter Benjamin in the Arcades Project and exemplified by The Crystal Palace. Window shopping without getting wet! A feast of artificiality! Society of the spectacle!
A full version of The New Babylon is now on YouTube (above).