Voice 1 (male professional announcer type) This neighborhood(1) was made for the wretched dignity of the petty bourgeoisie, for respectable occupations and intellectual tourism       The sedentary population of the upper floors was sheltered from the influences of the street       This neighborhood has remained the same       It was the strange setting of our story, where a systematic questioning of all the diversions and works of a society, a total critique of its idea of happiness, was expressed in acts      　　These people also scorned subjective profundity       They were interested in nothing but an adequate and concrete expression of themselves      　　Voice 2 (Debord, monotone) Human beings are not fully conscious of their real life - usually groping in the dark; overwhelmed by the consequences of their acts; at every moment groups and individuals find themselves confronted with results they have not wished      　　Voice 1 They said that oblivion was their ruling passion       They wanted to reinvent everything each day; to become the masters and possessors of their own lives      　　Just as one does not judge a man according to the conception he has of himself, one cannot judge such periods of transition according to their own consciousness; on the contrary, one must explain the consciousness through the contradictions of material life, through the conflict between social conditions and the forces of social production      　　The progress achieved in the domination of nature was not yet matched by a corresponding liberation of everyday life       Youth passed away among the various controls of resignation      　　Our camera has captured for you a few aspects of a provisional microsociety      　　The knowledge of empirical facts remains abstract and superficial as long as it is not concretized by its integration into the whole ” which alone permits the supersession of partial and abstract problems so as to arrive at their concrete essence, and implicitly at their meaning      　　This group was on the margins of the economy       It tended toward a role of pure consumption, and first of all the free consumption of its time       It thus found itself directly engaged in qualitative variations of everyday life but deprived of any means to intervene in them      　　The group ranged over a very small area       The same times brought them back to the same places       No one went to bed early       Discussion on the meaning of all this continued                  　　Voice 2 Our life is a journey ” In the winter and the night       ” We seek our passage                  �　　Voice 1 The abandoned literature nevertheless exerted a delaying action on new affective formulations      　　Voice 2 There was the fatigue and the cold of the morning in this much-traversed labyrinth, like an enigma that we had to resolve       It was a looking-glass reality through which we had to discover the potential richness of reality      　　On the bank of the river evening began once again; and caresses; and the importance of a world without importance       Just as the eyes have a blurred vision of many things and can see only one clearly, so the will can strive only incompletely toward diverse objects and can completely love only one at a time      　　Voice 3 (young girl) No one counted on the future       It would never be possible to be together later, or anywhere else       There would never be a greater freedom      　　Voice 1 The refusal of time and of growing old automatically limited encounters in this narrow, contingent zone, where what was lacking was felt as irreparable       The extreme precariousness of the means of getting by without working was at the root of this impatience which made excesses necessary and breaks definitive      　　Voice 2 One never really contests an organization of existence without contesting all of that organization's forms of language      　　Voice 1 When freedom is practiced in a closed circle, it fades into a dream, becomes a mere representation of itself       The ambiance of play is by nature unstable       At any moment ordinary life� can prevail once again       The geographical limitation of play is even more striking than its temporal limitation       Any game takes place within the contours of its spatial domain       Around the neighborhood, around its fleeting and threatened immobility, stretched a half-known city where people met only by chance, losing their way forever      　　The girls who found their way there, because they were legally under the control of their families until the age of eighteen, were often recaptured by the defenders of that detestable institution       They were generally confined under the guard of those creatures who among all the bad products of a bad society are the most ugly and repugnant nuns      　　What usually makes documentaries so easy to understand is the arbitrary limitation of their subject matter       They describe the atomization of social functions and the isolation of their products       One can, in contrast, envisage the entire complexity of a moment which is not resolved into a work, a moment whose movement indissolubly contains facts and values and whose meaning does not yet appear       The subject matter of the documentary would then be this confused totality      　　Voice 2 The era had arrived at a level of knowledge and technical means that made possible, and increasingly necessary, a direct construction of all aspects of a liberated affective and practical existence       The appearance of these superior means of action, still unused because of the delays in the project of liquidating the commodity economy, had already condemned aesthetic activity, whose ambitions and powers were both outdated       The decay of art and of all the values of former mores had formed our sociological background       The ruling class's monopoly over the instruments we needed to control in order to realize the collective art of our time had excluded us from a cultural production officially devoted to illustrating and repeating the past       An art film on this generation can only be a film on its absence of real creations      　　Everyone unthinkingly followed the paths learned once and for all, to their work and their home, to their predictable future       For them duty had already become a habit, and habit a duty       They did not see the deficiency of their city       They thought the deficiency of their life was natural       We wanted to break out of this conditioning, in quest of another use of the urban landscape, in quest of new passions       The atmosphere of a few places gave us intimations of the future powers of an architecture it would be necessary to create to be the support and framework for less mediocre games       We could expect nothing of anything we had not ourselves altered       The urban environment proclaimed the orders and tastes of the ruling society just as violently as the newspapers       It is man who makes the unity of the world, but man has extended himself everywhere       People can see nothing around them that is not their own image; everything speaks to them of themselves       Their very landscape is alive       There were obstacles everywhere       There was a cohesion in the obstacles of all types       They maintained the coherent reign of poverty       Everything being connected, it was necessary to change everything by a unitary struggle, or nothing       It was necessary to link up with the masses, but we were surrounded by sleep      　　Voice 3 The dictatorship of the proletariat is a desperate struggle, bloody and bloodless, violent and peaceful, military and economic, educational and administrative, against the forces and traditions of the old world      　　Voice 1 In this country it is once again the men of order who have rebelled       They have reinforced their power       They have been able to aggravate the grotesqueness of the ruling conditions according to their will       They have embellished their system with the funereal ceremonies of the past      　　Voice 2 Years, like a single instant prolonged to this point, come to an end      　　Voice 1 What was directly lived reappears frozen in the distance, fit into the tastes and illusions of an era, carried away with it      　　Voice 2 The appearance of events that we have not made, that others have made against us, now obliges us to be aware of the passage of time, its results, the transformation of our own desires into events       What differentiates the past from the present is precisely its out-of-reach objectivity; there is no more should-be; being is so consumed that it has ceased 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　　Voice 3 What should be abolished continues, and we continue to wear away with it       We are engulfed       We are separated       The years pass and we haven't changed anything      　　Voice 2 Once again morning in the same streets       Once again the fatigue of so many similarly passed nights       It is a walk that has lasted a long time      　　Voice 1 Really hard to drink more      　　Voice 2 Of course one might make a film of it       But even if such a film succeeds in being as fundamentally disconnected and unsatisfying as the reality it deals with, it will never be more than a re-creation ” poor and false like this botched traveling shot      　　Voice 3 There are now people who pride themselves on being authors of films, as others were authors of novels       They are even more backward than the novelists because they are unaware of the decomposition and exhaustion of individual expression in our time, ignorant of the end of the arts of passivity       They are praised for their sincerity since they dramatize, with more personal depth, the conventions of which their life consists       There is talk of the liberation of the cinema       But what does it matter to us if one more art is liberated through which Tom, Dick or Harry can joyously express their slavish sentiments The only interesting venture is the liberation of everyday life, not only in the perspectives of history but for us and right away       This entails the withering away of alienated forms of communication       The cinema, too, has to be destroyed      　　Voice 2 In the final analysis, stars are created by the need we have for them, and not by their talent or lack of talent or even by the film industry or advertising       Miserable need, dismal, anonymous life that would like to expand itself to the dimensions of cinema life       The imaginary life on the screen is the product of this real need       The star is the projection of this need      　　The images of the advertisements during the intermissions are more suited than any others for evoking an intermission of life      　　To really describe this era it would no doubt be necessary to show many other things       But what would be the point　　Better to grasp the totality of what has been done and what remains to be done than to add more ruins to the old world of the spectacle and of memories      　　1       This film, which evokes the lettrist experiences at the origin of the situationist movement, opens with shots of the Paris district frequented by the lettrists in the early 1950s