Can Dialectics Break Bricks?
Veggie Cloud
Los Angeles, CA
October 25, 2018
With nothing less at stake than conquering alienation without alienated means, René Viénet’s Can Dialectics Break Bricks? (La dialectique peut-elle casser des briques?) infamously appropriates a kung-fu movie in it’s entirety, hilariously re-dubbing a completely new dialogue rife with edgy Marxist critique to transform the narrative of a stock martial arts flick into a story of proletarians struggling against capitalists and bureaucrats alike.
Dialectics is perhaps the most fun and raucous film to emerge from the activity of the Situationist International – a cadre of radical intellectuals, artists, and political theoreticians active from 1958 to 1972. Created the year following the group’s dissolution, the film remains a classic and relatable example of détournment - the Situationist technique of re-purposing elements of an existing artwork or cultural product to create a wholly new work with a new, subversive meaning. With Dialectics, Viénet takes aim at a range of favorite Situationist targets – from commodity ideology to the French Communist Party – and agitates for a number of Situationist interests: sexual equality, radical subjectivity, and - of course - détournment itself! Indeed – from the outset – Dialectics touts itself as the “first entirely detourned film in the history of cinema!”
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Description by Tim Leanse