This site-of-production would like to simulate a [[détournement]]: >==*the plagiarizing, hijacking, seducing, detouring, of past texts, images, forms, practices, into others.*== --- ------------ ---  --- **‘Skunkworks’ Art-tech Shop**_: The designation "_**_skunk works_**_" or "_**_skunkworks_**_" is widely used in business, engineering, and technical fields to describe a group within an organization given a high degree of autonomy and unhampered by bureaucracy, with the task of_ **_working_** _on advanced or secret projects._ --- A Post-Situationist Screenplay None of these are my words.* Even if they are*, I don't really take credit for their utterance. It's the act of curation that interests me. They are like blocks of affect, potential feeling that can be retrieved from the cinematic inversion and “put back on their feet,” as the vehicles via which to make one’s own meaning, one’s own sense. It is a Radical Plagiarism to create something new; - through montage – develop ideas rather than pretend to "show reality" or reveal "the truth" in an objective manner. But how do ideas develop? Only if the filmmaker-essayist puts his or her [[subjectivity]] on the line, allows for conceptual jump cuts that may not,strictly speaking, be justifiable. - This circulationism is not about the art of making an image, but of post producing, launching, and accelerating it. While written in another context, these lines from Becker-Ho seem to apply: ==“Time and again in all the works dealing with the same subjects and sharing the same sources, one finds the same bits of information paraphrased more or less successfully, often with the same words endlessly repeated. Other people’s findings, acknowledged in underhand fashion, re-emerge as so many new discoveries, stripped of quotation marks and references, and more often than not adding nothing to what is already known on the subject.== But what this does is allow the whole field of information going unchallenged to be enlarged quantitatively, and on the cheap...” Culture is nothing if not what the Situationists called ==détournement : the plagiarizing, hijacking, seducing, detouring, of past texts, images, forms, practices, into others.== **The trick is to realize in the process the undermining of the whole idea of the author as owner, of culture as property, that détournement always implies.** Thus this study makes no claims to originality. Rather, in its act of inflating the whole field of information on the cheap, it seeks only to encourage others in this far from fine art of cultural inflation. The Situationist archive is there to be plundered. Unlike BeckerHo, The Spectacle of Disintegration makes no proprietary claims, but it does set out to be a version of these materials of use to us now.^14 It’s the past we need for the critique of this present. Many of the fragments Debord détourned from various films have a particular quality, a distinctive emotional tone that corresponds to a situation in which an irreversible action is beginning. Johnny and his old flame Vienna warily reunite in very different times. A general commits troops to battle just as he learns that the enemy knows of the attack, dooming it from the start. Sailors gather under threat of a firing squad and in an instant coalesce in mutiny. But where cinema under both the concentrated and diffuse spectacle seeks to neutralize these moments, ==strapping them down to predictable narrative arcs and the expectations borne of genre conventions, for Debord they can serve as proxies for a quite different kind of sense. The appropriated images are still only proxies, blocks of sense mobilized to open up a possibility outside of themselves.== It is an image that is not without its problems, caught as it is in hierarchies of gender, and can only have tactical value. Debord uses it for what it is worth, expends it, and moves on. Debord’s insolence toward cinema does not devalue all of it. Rather, he claims his desire to make of it what is needed. It doesn’t always matter which war or which love is portrayed. It’s the diagram of forces, the picturing of the game of time, that matters. But cinema, like any art, represents the world too well. Lived time disappears in art, and art at best can only mourn its passing. Cinema is a kind of memory, an abstract memory, not of particular events, particular people, but a memory of the possibility of life before it. >“Some cinematic value might be acknowledged in this film if the present rhythm were to continue, but it will not.” --- ![[--SCRIPT FINAL COPY--]]