La Société du spectacle, et Histoire(s) du Cinema

"In the world - which is in reality turned upside down - the true is a moment of false."

Guy Debord

The images of the cinema are manipulative. The audience is in pa passive position while watching the screen; the eyes are waiting to follow the imagess passing by frame by frame. In "Psychoanalysis, Film, and Television" text, Sandy Flitterman-Levis questions the position of the spectator as the main difference between cinema and television, the subject of the projection, and by whom the definitions-significations are made. With the help of psychoanalysis, she assumes that the spectators are exposed to watch the cinema in a womb-like ambient, therefore their unconscious minds become the "author" of the fiction in an adversely schema. So, the images which are projected on the screen are the stories told by the moviemaker, by re-written by unconscious mind. With a Lacanian approach, it can be mentioned that unconscious mind is a singular construction of the Big Other. Therefore, cinema has an enormous power to shape the one's mind.

Godard's statements in the Histoire(s) du Cinema has the same approach, in addition he has a criticism on the real history of cinema: he states that cinema did not use its very own strength to give messages to society, rather, it always created a virtual series of realities. The real history of 20th century is not projected on the cinema screens. In Histoire(s) du Cinema, Godard selected several sequences from the movies of 20th century and combined them together in order to write another discourse, another narration. He states that images are more powerful than the arguments, so he separates the images from the past movies and link them with each other to express his ideas about the failure of the real history of cinema.

Guy Debord had almost the same argument with Godard, but he focused on the reception part of the screenings. In his project named "The Society of the Spectacle"(1973), a movie and a book with the same name) he states that the human eye is corrupted by the floods of images. Media shapes the human reception by projecting tons of irrelevant images in sequences, so the viewers start to lose the meanings and significations of the singular images. The link between the argument and the image is broken and the real aspects of the politics, economics, and social problems cannot be received by the society. The society is alienated from the reality, from the meaning and from the real connections of aspects. They are trapped, encapsulated by the power of images. They become a society of the spectacle. In order to explain these arguments, Debord imitates the method of media which he criticizes; in the movie "Society of the Spectacle". In the movie, the viewer encounters a brutal war imagery, just after that scene, an advertising with an erotic pose of a woman, and afterwards, employees working in a factory is projected on the screen. On the back, the voice of Guy Debord continuously explains his arguments and some readings from Karl Marx.

As it can be seen, while Godard tries to use the power of the images in order to create more beneficial discourses to inform the society, Guy Debord states that the society has already lost its ability to recognize the reality.