Totem and Taboo


Presented on 11 February 1952[1] and immediately prohibited by the Censor for motives that remain vague, the first film by Gil J Wolman, THE ANTICONCEPT, hasn't been screened since then, even in a non-commercial venue.

This film, which marks a decisive turning-point in the cinema, is kept from the public by a Commission composed of fathers of families and colonels in the police force.

When one adds the powers of the police to the professional blindness of the [film] critics, the imbeciles prohibit what they do not understand.

In reality, THE ANTICONCEPT is more charged with explosives for the intelligence than the boring trucks in the "WAGES OF CLOUZOT";[2] more offensive than the images of Eisenstein, of which people in Europe were afraid for so long.

But the most overtly threatening side of such a work is its absolute contestation of the criteria and the perishable conventions of the fathers of families and colonels in the police force; the fact that it will remain, at and after the origin of the troubles that will come, when the censor/puppets will be forgotten.

[1] At the cinema club "Avant-Garde 52."

[2] A reference to Henri-Georges Clouzot's Wages of Fear (1953), in which two trucks full of nitrogylcerine explode.

GUY-ERNEST DEBORD

(Published in Internationale Lettriste #3, August 1953. Translated from the French and footnoted by NOT BORED!)




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