The French theorist and filmmaker Guy Debord died just over fifteen years ago, in November 1994, but his public life had ended more than twenty years before. Debord was the founder of the Situationist International and the author of the influential The Society of the Spectacle published in 1967. As ageing Marxists know, Debord, the SI and The Society... were all important elements for the ideas behind les evénéments of May 1968 in Paris. But following the failure of the revolution, Debord retreated into occasional filmmaking (there's a detailed essay about his films here), rural seclusion, drink and the design of a board game. Debord's The Game of War has been realised by the group Class Wargames who have been giving public demonstrations of this ludic lesson in the overthrow of capitalism. Now they have released an immensely engaging web film.

This is not, I fear, the context for a crash course in Situationism (if you're searching for this, start with the links in the paragraph above) but it is worth celebrating what seems a hugely unlikely but provocative conjunction of wargames, revolutionary theory, classic movie clips 'turned' against themselves and leftist politics leavened with dry humour. Directed by Ilze Black and written by two of the game players, Dr Richard Barbrook and Fabian Tompsett, the 25-minute film of the Game of War, can be found in five chunks at the Class Wargames site and on Vimeo. This is the first section:

The Game of War, Chapter 1 - Terrain from ClassWargames on Vimeo.

What I wasn't clear about before watching the film was the status of the board game -- whether, crudely, it was more of a thought experiment than a satisfying game. But the explanation of the rules and strategies places it convincingly in a tradition that stretches from chess to World of Warcraft. Except that here the purpose is not only to crush your opponent but to learn the lessons by which the proletariat can triumph over their bourgeois oppressors. Beneath the cobbles, the gameboard.

Also threaded through the film are quotations from Debord's writings and from military tacticians including another of the project's inspirations, the Prussian military thinker Carl von Clausewitz. But the major element is a sequence of neatly edited collisions of (mostly) battle scenes from movies. There's a full list of the sources in the credits at the end of part 5, but you'll probably spot fragments of Sergei Bondarchuk's Waterloo, 1970; Tony Richardson's The Charge of the Light Brigade, 1968; Ken Loach's Land and Freedom, 1995; and Olivier's 1944 Henry V.

Class Wargames offer a lucid explanation for their use of extracts...

In the early-1970s, Debord created his film adaptation of The Society of the Spectacle by splicing together clips taken from other people's movies and then adding his own soundtrack. When social relations between individuals are mediated through images, this avantgarde technique of détournement acts as the proletarian antidote to capitalist monopolisation of historical memory. Quoting from the products of commercial cinema involves much more than recruiting glamourous movie stars and expensive special effects for audiovisual subversion. As Debord emphasised, these borrowed film excerpts are transformed in the editing process into a revolutionary critique of the spectacular misrepresentation of the human adventure. Torn out of its original context and carefully placed in a new juxtaposition, the cinematic propaganda of the class enemy can be turned against itself...

... which is followed by a heartening exhortation to the digital barricades:

When Debord was working on the film adaptation of The Society of the Spectacle in the early-1970s, making a movie out of movie clips was very difficult... Fortunately, over the past three-and-ahalf decades, digital technology has caught up with this Situationist technique. Class Wargames only needed a small grant from the Arts Council to fund a film constructed on a Mac laptop with Final Cut out of video from our performances and excerpts from our DVD collection. Best of all, we are now able to distribute our cinematic creation to a worldwide audience for free over the Net.

Détournement is no longer the privilege of a minority of avant-garde artists. Media communism is now embedded in everyday life. Become a 21st century Debord - a director of remixed movies. Sweep away the anachronistic barriers of intellectual property. Switch on the computer, start up the video editing software, plug in an external drive filled with rendered DVDs and begin making your own film. Everyone is a practical Situationist.

Throw away your weapons, comrades, and take the class struggle to Vimeo. See what I mean about the dry humour?