Can Dialectics Break Bricks?
With Pai Paiu, Chan Hung Liu, Ingrid Wu, and the voices of Jacques Thebaut, Patrick Dewaere, Michelle Grellier, and Dominique Morin.
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I don’t know much about the situationists, but according to critic Peter Wollen they formed out of a split within an earlier radical artistic and political group, the lettrists, who sort of took over the mantle of the French avant-garde from the surrealists after World War II under the leadership of Isidore Isou. The “dissident Revolutionary Lettrists,” as Wollen called them, were led by two young filmmakers, Guy Debord and Gil Wolman, who went on to become situationists. The only Debord film I’ve seen, The Society of the Spectacle (which was made the same year as Can Dialectics Break Bricks? and can be seen as its theoretical prequel), turned up on video at Chicago Filmmakers last October, also bearing English subtitles by Sanborn and accompanied by Sanborn’s notes. (I associate Sanborn mainly with the 1989 The Deadman, a brilliant narrative short he wrote and directed with Peggy Ahwesh, adapting a Georges Bataille story.) The Society of the Spectacle, adapted from Debord’s 1967 book of the same title, is more slapped together than composed, juxtaposing clips from all sorts of movies with large chunks of recited or printed post-Marxist theoretical text about media and spectacle. Can Dialectics Break Bricks?, which looks only slightly less slapped together, redubs (and probably recuts) a Chinese martial arts movie, The Crush, with more French post-Marxist theory, jokes, and occasional references to what it’s doing technically; roughly speaking, it’s a situationist variation on What’s Up, Tiger Lily?, Woody Allen’s 1966 redubbing of a Japanese James Bond spin-off. (I think it’s still his funniest feature, though whether it qualifies as an Allen movie is an open question. If memory serves, it used to be listed as one in the press books for Allen’s later movies, but a few years back it started being described as a movie written by Allen. The same ambiguity surrounds the credits of Can Dialectics Break Bricks?)
A key concept and technique for the situationists was detournement, which they defined as “the reemployment in a new entity of preexisting artistic elements”–that is, ripping off someone else’s work. The reappropriating and recontextualizing of a work that already exists is the aspect of Can Dialectics Break Bricks? that makes it most interesting and relevant today, aesthetically as well as politically, because it raises the thorny issue of to whom cinema, film criticism, and film history belong. Realistically, they belong to anyone with a VCR, though some would say they belong to the state–and the state today, speaking emblematically rather than literally, is Disney. It is Disney and its client states that set our cultural agendas and rewrite our official film histories and critiques via the mass media. (The claim that “the public” dictates these agendas is merely a multicorporate rationalization for a process that takes place with and without the public’s consent.)
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): film still.
