Friday, August 14, 2026, 7:00 pm, $10, classic-editor
Artists’ Television Access, City Lights, and PM Press present
The Cinema Must Be Destroyed: The Films of Guy Debord
Hosted by Ken Knabb
THE CINEMA MUST BE DESTROYED is four-day Guy Debord film retrospective to celebrate the new edition of Debord’s Complete Cinematic Works, edited and translated by Ken Knabb, along with recent re-releases such as The Society of the Spectacle and Situationist International Anthology, and a collection of Knabb’s own writings, The Joy of Revolution and Related Texts.
Programs:
Friday, August 7, 2026, 7:00 pm: Four early short films
Saturday, August 8, 2026, 7:00 pm: The Society of the Spectacle
Friday, August 14, 2026, 7:00 pm: In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni
Saturday, August 15, 2026, 7:00 pm: Guy Debord: His Art and His Time
Guy Debord, founder of the Situationist International and fomenter of the May 1968 revolt in France, was also the creator of seven tantalizingly inaccessible films. Following the still-unsolved assassination of the films’ producer in 1984, all the films were withdrawn from circulation for nearly twenty years.
In 2001 Debord’s widow Alice began rereleasing the films and she asked Ken Knabb to translate the scripts into English. He agreed and his translation of Debord’s Complete Cinematic Works was published in 2003. A revised and expanded edition of that book has just been published by PM Press.
Technically and aesthetically, Debord’s films are among the most brilliantly innovative works in the history of the cinema. But they are not so much “works of art” as carefully calculated subversive provocations. In each film Debord simultaneously attacks the film medium itself, challenging spectators to wake up and create their own adventures instead of losing themselves in the maze of pseudo-adventures presented for their passive consumption.
Guy Debord’s Complete Cinematic Works includes the soundtracks, descriptions of each image, 62 illustrations, 11 documents, and extensive annotations. All seven of Debord’s films will be shown at Artists’ Television Access (992 Valencia St. in San Francisco) and Ken Knabb will be on hand to introduce each film and answer questions.
Ken Knabb is a writer, translator, and radical theorist, known for his translations of Guy Debord and the Situationist International. His own English-language writings, many of which were anthologized in Public Secrets (1997), have been translated into over a dozen additional languages. He is also a respected authority on the political significance of Kenneth Rexroth.