we had a fabulous feast at Sarlat

After all, there's the political context in France, and there are also personal relations, very complicated stories. The most complicated story arose when [the Situationists] came to my place in the Pyrenees. And we took a wonderful trip: we left Paris in a car and stopped at the Lascaux caves, which were closed not long after that. We were very taken up with the problem of the Lascaux caves. They are buried very deep, with even a well that was inaccessible -- and all this was filled with paintings. How were these paintings made, who were they made for, since they weren't painted in order to see seen? The idea was that painting started as a critique. All the more so in that all the churches in the region have crypts. We stopped at Saint-Savin, where there are frescoes on the church's vaulted dome and a crypt full of paintings, a crypt whose depths are difficult to reach because it is so dark. What are paintings that were not destined to be seen? And how were they made? So, we made our way south; we had a fabulous feast at Sarlat, and I could hardly drive -- I was the one driving. I got a ticket; we were almost arrested because I crossed a village going 120 kilometers per hour. They stayed several days at my place, and, working together, we wrote a programmatic text. At the end of the week they spent at Navarrenx, they kept the text. I said to them, "You type it" (it was handwritten), and afterward they accused me of plagiarism. In reality, it was complete bad faith. The text that was used in writing the book about the [Paris] Commune was a joint text, by them and by me, and only one small part of the Commune book was taken from the joint text.

http://www.notbored.org/lefebvre-interview.html

Henri Lefebvre on the Situationist International

Interview conducted and translated 1983 by Kristin Ross

Printed in October 79, Winter 1997