Guy Debord (1931–1994), one of the founders of the Situationist International (SI) group and arguably its most influential member, articulated a series of key concepts for the Situationist movement, particularly that of urban dérive or drifting as a form of experiencing and interpreting the city. Debord’s view of history was defined in the earlier years of the SI by the role revolutions had in the dynamics of historical change, using the image of fires as bursts of energy and destruction to express the impact of revolutions. As a filmmaker and visual artist, Debord often coupled abstract concepts developed in his writings with concrete images, in a way that a unique meaning would result from such juxtapositions. In his later works, however, this view shifted to an interest in translating the spatial dérive into a historical sense of flow, best expressed through the metaphor of water and drifting.

Debord, previously a member of another group, the Lettrist International, had embraced the Lettrist term ‘unitary urbanism’, which defined the potential of urban space as a radical political practice based on the construction of ‘situations’, a project in which all members of society had to be involved collectively. The Lettrists produced texts such as the Formulary for a New Urbanism by Gilles Ivain (Ivan Chtchegloff’s pseudonym), first published in 1953 (Internationale Lettriste 1958). This text introduced for the first time the notion of dérive as a form of urban experience. In the dérive, space, time and the subject’s passions enter in a new interrelation dominated by the unconscious and, to some extent, by chance. In the emotional disorientiation of the dérive, the Situationists experienced a distancing, an estrangement of their environment – termed as a ‘psychogeographic’ experience; that is, one in which passions dominate over the sense of spatial orientation.

In Debord’s ‘Theory of the dérive’ of 1956, one can find reminiscences of the nineteenth-century flâneur, as well as of surrealist experiences of random urban trajectories proposed in the 1920s. As he stated, ‘the dérive entails playful-constructive behavior and awareness of psychogeographical effects, which completely distinguishes it from the classical notions of the journey and the stroll’ (Debord Reference Debord1956). In this essay, Debord described the experience of abandonment of the productive-consumerist activity of modern society by disorientation, indetermination and chance, guided by the historic depth of urban space.

In Reference Debord1957, two months after the foundation of the Situationist International group, Debord wrote the essay ‘Psychogeographical Venice’, intended as the preface to a book on the Italian city by Ralph Rumney, which the latter however never completed. In this brief text, Debord introduced his interest in the city of Venice as the object of what would have constituted the first exhaustive psychogeographical work. In his text, Debord defined psychogeography as ‘one of the aspects of the conscious arrangement of ambiance that one begins to call situationist’. He referred to Thomas de Quincey, who used the term terrae incognitae to express nineteenth-century London as an ‘immense labyrinth of alleys’ impossible to map. Similarly, Debord saw Venice as an urban maze that led to experimental disorientation and spatial drifting, intensified by its ‘sentimental resonance’ (Internationale Lettriste 1958).

At that point, Debord had produced several maps of Paris based on the urban expeditions that the members of the Situationist group termed as dérives or driftings. For instance, in his celebrated ‘The Naked City collage’, Debord pasted several cut-outs of a Paris map, rearranging them in a seemingly arbitrary fashion, connected by red arrows that defined psychogeographic links between those sections of the city, as an alternative to the existing Cartesian mapping and in favour of a cartography based on subjective and emotional experience, more akin to the space of a labyrinth (Constant Reference Constant, Andreotti and Costa1996).

As the SI movement scholar Tom McDonough has appropriately summarized, the dérive was ‘the search for an encounter with otherness, spurred on in equal parts by the exploration of pockets of class, ethnic and racial difference in the postwar city.’ Dérives thus become a strategy to explore the condition of the city as a profoundly historical landscape – ‘the city assumes the guise of a vast storehouse of slumbering memories awaiting potential awakening’ (McDonough Reference McDonough2009, 11). In contrast to the stable order of the classical city, based on a centralized geometry and a firm social hierarchy, the modern metropolis is to be experienced in movement, as aimless flow through its linear spaces. The example of Venice was appropriate for Debord because of its experience through navigation and literal drifting, as he would make explicit in one of his last films, In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni, which came out in 1978.

For Debord, his written work finds a visual analogy in his filmmaking. Films such as La société du spectacle (1973) and In girum imus… consist of an editing of multiple cinematic fragments, mostly already existing, as a collage of images. The soundtrack is a reading of Debord’s script, a text that does not always keep a direct relationship with the images simultaneously projected, yet the meaning of the film results from this special combination of image and text.

In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni is titled after an ancient Latin palindrome – ‘we go around in the night, consumed by fire’. It refers to the ephemeral brilliance of fireflies, as well as to his previous view of history where, according to Debord, revolutions are bursts of ‘momentary brilliance’ that consume themselves in their own fire. Having played an important part in the Paris uprisings of May of 1968, and after the dissolution of the SI in 1972, Debord looked back at the social and political developments that followed 1968 with disillusionment and bitterness. In girum imus… Debord echoed this view with images of Venice as seen from a boat that navigates its waters and canals. In a reference to the post-1968 present, Debord explains the palindromic title by saying that ‘nothing expresses this restless and exitless present better than this ancient phrase that turns completely back on itself, being constructed letter by letter like an inescapable labyrinth’ (Debord Reference Debord1999; Knabb Reference Knabb2003, 167; Andreotti and Lahiji Reference Andreotti and Lahiji2017, 107–117).

The film is based on found, scavenged footage of different kinds, where some sequences filmed in Venice are interspersed among other cinematic fragments. The Venice sequences appear and disappear a few times throughout the film, showing a continuous view of the city from a boat navigating its canals, eventually leaving the interior of the island towards the lagoon. The view from the boat expresses a cinematic movement and an urban spatiality that embrace the entire narrative as a visual dérive.

Whereas La société du spectacle uses recurrent images of fire to express a view of history articulated around the flaming ‘bursts’ of revolutions, In girum imus… introduces the theme of water and spatial mobility as a visual metaphor for the ‘flowing of time’, for the ‘evanescence of everything,’ to quote Debord’s script for the film. Whereas the spectacle is ‘the reigning society’s method for paralyzing history and memory … representing a false consciousness of time’ (Knabb Reference Knabb2003, 75, emphasis in original), water, that is the passing of time, ends up drowning the flaming moments of revolutions. Quoting a poem by Li Po, Debord writes ‘Events, people, everything constantly slips away, like the ceaseless waves of the Yangtze that vanish into the sea’ (Debord Reference Debord1999, 153).

With some melancholy, he adds ‘We did not seek the formula for overturning the world in books, but in wandering. Ceaselessly drifting for days on end, none resembling the one before’ (Debord Reference Debord1999, 172). In his later comments, Debord acknowledged that the entire film gravitates around the theme of water as an expression of the evanescence of everything. He also quoted Omar Khayyam, Heraclitus, Bossuet, and Shelley as authors who used water as a metaphor for the flowing of time – ‘the water of time remains, and ultimately overwhelms and extinguishes the fire. Thus the brilliant youth of Saint-Germain-des-Prés … were drowned in the flowing water of their century’ (Knabb Reference Knabb2003, 223).

In the city invoked by the Situationists, one finds notions of nomadism, of fluctuation and redefinition of the perception and spatial experience of the modern metropolis. Following Johan Huizinga in Homo Ludens, Debord connects the ludic (Sub Specie Ludi) condition of human experience with labyrinthian space. As in a maze, the city is defined by trajectories and logics of mobility, by a vectorial ordering of places that reorganizes the foundations of existing cities.

Artist Antoni Muntadas has recently recreated Debord’s filming of Venice in his work In Girum Revisited, first presented at the Venice International Film Festival in 2015. A pioneer of video and installation art, Muntadas has explored in his works the experience of public space through different media, such as video and photography, digital tools, architectural installations, and multidisciplinary research initiatives. In Girum Revisited presents a series of long sequences of the city of Venice seen from its canals, from the water, captured by a camera proceeding in slow movement. Starting with the title, it is a reference to Debord’s similar sequences, included in his original film In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni, which are exactly recreated in today’s Venice. Muntadas has edited and brought together Debord’s fragmentary Venice sequences, to restore a continuous movement through the city. The 1978 black and white images are credited in the film through a small window on the screen, matching the present-day filming of the city. Additionally, in the 1978 film, Debord superimposed his comments on the cinematic collage, without a direct connection between images and spoken words, an element that Muntadas has kept with a different selection of spoken fragments, in the original French language.

In some previous projects, under the common title of ‘Media Sites/Media Monuments’ (1981–2007) (Muntadas Reference Muntadas2009, 130), Muntadas had paired some black-and-white images that corresponded to urban sites at the time they had witnessed or framed relevant political events widely reproduced by media, with present-day colour images of the same sites devoid of their previous media presence. By combining the original black-and-white scenes with present-day footage, In Girum Revisited connects to these former works. At the same time, it projects the duration, movement and drifting experience that Debord’s concept of dérive powerfully introduced in the experience of urban spatiality, precisely choosing Venice as the first site to apply and test the concept of psychogeography.