the cinema lends itself particularly well to studying the present as an historical problem, to dismantling processes of reification. Historical reality can, of course, be apprehended, known and filmed only in the course of a complicated process of mediations […] This mediation would be difficult if the empirical existence of facts themselves was not already a mediated existence, which only takes on an appearance of immediateness because of and to the extent that, on the one hand, consciousness of the mediation is lacking and, on the other hand, the facts have been uprooted from the network of their determinations, placed in an artificial isolation and poorly linked together again by the montage of classical cinema. It is precisely this mediation, which has been lacking, and inevitably so, in pre- Situationist cinema, which has limited itself to so called objective forms or representation of politico-moral concepts, whenever it has not been a merely academic type of narrative with all its hypocrisies.» [19]

5. The Visual-acoustic détournement

Viénet´s conception of an SI film practice enlists the

specific capacities of the medium (above all, photographic documentation, voice-over, and analytic montage) to expose the always already mediated status of the seemingly immediate and «natural» world constructed in classical, or pre-Situationist, cinema. The present is studied as a historical problem, history is recast as a problem of representation, and, above all, the practice of representation itself is continuously subjected to critical interrogation. This staging of mediation takes the form of a work on other mediations, primarily by means of cinema´s elective affinity to the important strategy of citation and reinscription referred to as détournement. Indeed, in a programmatic essay, the editorial collective of IS goes so far as to say that «the signature of the movement, the trace of its presence and its contestation in contemporary cultural reality…is first and foremost the employment of détournement.» [20]

It is in this capacity for visual-acoustic détournement that cinema finds its single most important justification as an instrument of SI activity. As Debord and Gil J Wolman confirm in their user´s guide to this hallmark SI activity, among the various