It uses found footage and détournement in a radical Marxist critique of mass marketing and its role in the alienation of modern society.

[4][5] Throughout the film, there are intertitles consisting of quotations from The Society of the Spectacle, along with Debord (in voice-over) reading texts from Marx, Machiavelli, the 1968 Occupation Committee of the Sorbonne, Tocqueville, Émile Pouget, and Sergey Solovyov and others.

[6] Without citations, these quotes are hard to decipher, especially with the conflicting subtitles (which exist even in the French version): but that is part of Debord's goal to "problematize reception" (Greil and Sanborn) and force the viewer to be active.

[7] Footage of historical events is included, such as the murder of Lee Harvey Oswald (the alleged assassin of U.S. President John F. Kennedy in 1963), the Spanish Civil War of 1936-1939, the 1956 Hungarian Revolution and the Paris riots in May 1968, along with clips of people such as Mao Zedong, Fidel Castro, Richard Nixon and the Spanish anarchist Durruti.

In 1984, Debord withdrew his films from circulation because of the negative press and the assassination of his friend and patron Gerard Lebovici.