Educational Media Reviews Online

Guy Debord, the Guy to whom this feature-length experimental biographical meditation is devoted, was a writer and filmmaker who has become part of academic curricula and whose The Society of the Spectacle opens with: “In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life represents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation.” Jeremy Todd is an interdisciplinary artist whose work and interests often lead to examinations of cultural memory and thus, as his first film, an ode to Debord appears to be appropriate. Todd acknowledges his nostalgic approach to his meditation on the life and work of Guy Debord. But, as an artist working in a society becoming increasingly more mediated, can his affection for the subject be seen as a personal connection or more of a fragmented dissociation? Can it be a personal reflection on Debord’s influence on Todd’s own work, or must it necessarily be a representation of solipsism and self-reflexivity because of the nature of Debord’s radicality. He undertakes the challenge in a collage of images and sound, some appropriated, some created into a literal multi-layered moving image and sound digital work of art.

The film begins with a quote from Gertrude Stein: “Is there repetition or is there insistence? I am inclined to believe there is no such thing as repetition.” It then proceeds to “insist” on including several montage leitmotifs throughout its narrative while Debord’s words are read from several texts. Todd references other experimental filmmakers like David Rimmer in the way he loops footage from narrative film that changes the image, and possibly its meaning with each go-round. Using extensive footage from films like Francois Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451 and Fellini’s Roma, Todd digitizes the images’ textual quality to add visual and representational layers. One of the more complex compositions included using silent images from John Milius’ Red Dawn and including subtitles that advance the text rather than subtitles that reflect the dialogue. Occasionally there is a moving banner/ticker at the bottom of the frame running text while a montage of images, some with subtitles, are shown in the background. For the viewer the challenge is in the active participation in the creation of meaning. The viewer must decide about taking the images and sound at face value versus finding the subtext within the context of their placement within the film. The film thus becomes its own multi-layered movie with snippets of reality shows like ,em>Project Runway Canada, or game shows like Deal or No Deal, iconic images like those of Judge Judy, Johnny Depp in Pirates of the Caribbean and Charlie Chaplin in The Great Dictator and in Modern Times. It also mimics the typical environment of watching television when we see a film with a radio soundtrack in the background and someone talking in the foreground.

Dear Guy is an energetic response and thoughtful companion piece to Guy Debord’s work. Jeremy Todd provides the written scripts used in the film as well as references and links to Debord-related materials on the Internet at this Dear Guy blog. This film is highly recommended and, quite frankly, often more interesting to watch than its source of original inspiration.