Critical correctness.

In my article "Return of the Supressed" [Artforum, February 2006], I pointed out a number of errors in the then recently released first edition of Gaumont's DVD box set Guy Debord: Oeuvres cinematographiques completes. I'm happy to report that Gaumont has issued a second edition in which it has quietly corrected nearly all of them.

Film by film, these are the issues:

1. The seven missing minutes at the end of Hurlements en faveur de Sade (1952) have been restored. A minuscule doubt remains since we don't actually see the tail leader, but no one will henceforth be denied the full twenty-four minutes of silence and darkness that now follow the last voice-over: "Nous vivons en enfants perdus nos aventure incompletes." Oddly, at 25 fps it should be only twenty-three minutes. Oh well.

2. Sur le passage de quelques personnes a travers une assez courte unite de temps (1959): One problem I failed to notice in the first edition remains in the second--the "script" published in Debord's Oeuvres cinematographiques completes, 1952-1978 (Champ Libre, 1978) specifies that the screen should remain white for twenty seconds after the last word of the voice-over. In both editions, the white leader lasts just over five seconds. When the screen goes black, the background hiss and snap crack pop typical of an optical sound track completely disappear, suggesting the film was cut short. This error is predictable for someone unfamiliar with Debord, but consistent with industry practice: A white screen with background noise and low pops on the track means you're watching tail leader, so you stop. Too bad. This is just the ambiguity Debord was exploiting.

3. Critique de la separation (1961) remains the most difficult to evaluate. The issue is the placement of Debord's superimposed titles. The problem is that the original titles and the logs indicating their placement are lost. To determine where the titles should go, Olivier Assayas, who oversaw the project, consulted the best existing print. In the first edition, the titles just didn't seem to fall correctly to me, so I checked them against the published script and found numerous discrepancies. I sent detailed notes to Assayas, who checked them against the logs he had had prepared and against the DVDs. The logs had somehow been misapplied when the first edition of the DVD was created. To judge by Debord's text and my own sense of his filmic tactics, in the second edition most if not absolutely all of the errors in the placement of the titles have been corrected.

4. In La Societe du spectacle (1973) the errors in the superimposed titles have all been corrected, and the titles appear to have been carefully correlated with prints made by Debord. One painful exception comes at the very end of the film where a long quote from Clausewitz scrolls up the screen. It should scroll completely off the screen. Instead, as in the previous edition, this scrolling title is cut a few seconds short.

5. In Refutation de tous les jugements, tant elogieux qu'hostiles, qui ont ete jusqu'ici portes sur le film <<La Societe du spectacle>> (1975) the spelling errors of the last edition were corrected.

6. In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni (1978): The small glitch in the title section was corrected and sync restored.

7. Guy Debord, son art et son temps (1995) was fine in the first edition.

Finally, Gaumont has continued the somewhat questionable though common practice in Europe of transferring the films at 25 fps (PAL video speed), instead of 24 fps (sound-film speed). This 4 percent speed increase accelerates motion slightly, but raises the pitch of voices more noticeably. The plus is that it maintains a one-to-one correspondence between film and video frames, making close analysis via DVD more straightforward than with the North American standard (NTSC), which runs at 29.97 fps.

Though I don't expect an edition at 24 fps, I look forward to a third edition with these improvements brought to perfection. Appreciation goes to Gaumont, Assayas, and Alice Debord for their persistence and integrity.