CLASS WARGAMES COMMUNIQUE 7

[Richard Barbrook]

CLASS WARGAMES SUMMER OFFENSIVE

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





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