The Situationist International and the Social Space of Film

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by Jennifer Stob

Type

Studies

Subject

Sociology

Keywords

sociology, politics, French cinema, social aspects

Publishing date

2026 (June 15, 2026)

Publisher

Routledge

Collection

Film Culture in Transition

Language

English

Relative size

Physical desc.

Paperback • 246 pages
6 ¼ x 9 ½ inches (16 x 24 cm)

ISBN

978-94-6372-046-5

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Book Presentation:
This book explores the Situationist International’s paradoxical relationship with cinema from 1957 to 1972. The SI was a postwar avant-garde that condemned representation’s erosion of social life. Yet its membership cared deeply for cinema, the epitome of capitalist representation for that era. How did the Situationists reconcile their interest in filmic social space with their hopes to revolutionize social space in city streets?

The Situationist International and the Social Space of Film: With and Against Cinema traces the SI’s attempts throughout the 1960s to work with cinema’s associative power and against its passivity. It follows this project from early encounters with Lettrist cinema to 1968 and beyond, all the while contextualizing Situationist theory with the work of friends and foes like Henri Lefebvre, Marcel Mariën, Alain Resnais, Jean-Luc Godard and Agnès Varda.

Meticulously researched and thoughtfully argued, Stob’s book offers timely lessons for today’s media artists, scholars and activists. Cinema is revealed to be a vital Situationist paradigm for social togetherness as well as for social separation.

About the Author:
Jennifer Stob is a film programmer and associate professor of art history at Texas State University. She is a scholar of media theory, experimental film and transnational cinema. Her contributions to edited volumes include chapters in The Sustainable Legacy of Agnès Varda: Feminist Practice and Pedagogy (2022), On Women’s Films: Across Worlds and Generations (2019) and Architectures of Revolt: The Cinematic City circa 1968 (2018).

Press Reviews:
"The argument is original and a fresh, novel approach, quite necessary to a rather congested field of study. It stands apart in this sense. It is also dazzlingly well researched. Stob is nothing short of totally thorough in her review of and dialogue with the extant literature."

Jaleh Mansoor, University of British Colombia, Vancouver, Canada

"Between denunciation and appropriation, détournement and nostalgic longing, the Situationist International had a famously vexed relationship with the cinema, the twists and turns of which accompanied the group and its key members. Jennifer Stob provides a history of this relationship that is both rigorously researched and a scintillating read."

Daniel Fairfax, Goethe-Universität Frankfurt, Germany

See the publisher website: Routledge