“A film that is not only essential in terms of the history of cinema, but also the history of art, of reflection, and of radicality” (Olivier Assayas). At last, a subtitled 35mm print of Guy Debord’s notorious and oft-pirated cult classic, which has circulated in its own covert circles over the years, back and forth, mimicking its palindromic title. A key work of Situationist International art, In Girum Imus Nocte et Consumimur Igni, Medieval Latin for “we turn in the night and are consumed by fire,” is a Hegelian manifesto in which fiery eruptions of youthful rebellion and free love tear up the streets – Saint Germain-des-Prés, in this case. The film, Debord’s last, begins with an excoriating attack on the viewer, an indictment extended to the cinema at large, and the world, in keeping with his “Society of the Spectacle.” The narration is sustained throughout the film, underpinning a relentless montage of static images and film clips culled from various sources – exemplifying the Situationist practice of “détournement,” whereby images are subversively repositioned to critique consumerist society. In Girum is dense and heady, but also idiosyncratic and tinged with the melancholy of lost youth, and its legendary anarchistic spirit betrays a certain sentimentality – woe for somnambulist middle-class life and passive consumption, the commercial pursuits of the cinema, the circularity of history, and our ultimate “enslavement to death.” This paradoxical expression, in part, is what makes the film one of Debord’s greatest achievements and an enduring text. "'From the very beginning, I have devoted myself to overthrowing this society,'" Debord states, and so profoundly does In Girum believe in the possibilities of revolution (even as it mourns a post-'68 Paris whose revolutionary embers had apparently burned out) that it seems to me impossible not to get caught up in