by Greil Marcus
Debord’s claim that his film—Hurlements en faveur de Sade (Howls for de Sade)—represented a superseding of cinéma discrépant paid off when the film was finally made and finally screened. It contained no images at all.
Guy-Ernest Debord, Ion, April 1952
IT WAS
It was first unspooled at the Musée de l’Homme, on 30 June 1952; the plug was pulled after twenty minutes. Several members of the lettrist group quit in protest over Isou’s endorsement of the atrocity. A second screening, three months later, made it to the end thanks mostly to a guard of radical lettrists. In London, where Hurlements was first presented in 1957, at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, the program carried a warning: “OUTRAGE? The film . . . caused riots when shown in Paris. The Institute is screening this film in the belief that members should be given a chance to make up their own minds about it, though the Institute wishes to be understood that it cannot be held responsible for the indignation of members who attend.” The ICA couldn’t have sold more tickets with a sex film starring Princess Margaret.
The art historian Guy Atkins describes a 1960 ICA screening:
When the lights went up there was an immediate babble of protest. People stood around and some made angry speeches. One man threatened to resign from the ICA unless the money for his ticket was refunded. Another complained that he and his wife had come all the way from Wimbeldon and had paid for a babysitter, because neither of them wanted to miss the film. These protests were so odd that it was as if Guy Debord himself were present, in his role of Mephistopheles, hypnotizing these ordinary English people into making fools of themselves.
Atkins went on:
The noise from the lecture room was so loud that it reached the next audience, queueing on the stairs for the second house. Those who had just seen the film came out of the auditorium and tried to persuade their friends on the stairs to go home, instead of wasting their time and money. But the atmosphere was so charged with excitement that this well-intentioned advice had the opposite effect. The newcomers were all the more anxious to see the film, since nobody imagined that the show would be a complete blank!
Afterwards one realized that Debord’s use of emptiness and silence had played on the nerves of the spectators, finally causing them to let out “howls in favor of de Sade.”
The slightest familiarity with the history of the avant-garde makes it obvious that nothing is easier than the provocation of a riot by a putative art statement. (When Hurlements ran at the Musée de l’Homme, there was some real violence and destruction.) All you have to do is lead an audience to expect one thing and give it something else—or, as Alfred Jarry proved in Paris in 1896, opening the first performance of Ubu Roi with the only formally disguised obscenity “Merdre” (Shittr, more or less), that you violate a taboo everyone can recognize as such. By 1952 audiences no less than artists had long since learned the game—and Debord began from that premise.
The format of his full-length movie was a black screen when the soundtrack was silent, a white screen when there was dialogue between the five speakers: Wolman, Debord, Berna, one Barbara Rosenthal, and Isou, all of whom read their lines in monotone. The film presented fragments of the lettrist milieu and surrounded them with the detritus of the dominant world the lettrists meant to replace; its real subject matter was Debord’s first attempt to claim a set of metaphors through which he might identify a new terrain and place himself upon it. He chased his themes in a disconnected fashion—but what little there was to hear (twenty minutes of sound out of eighty minutes of celluloid) was hardly the random verbiage described by those few who have written about the film. In its way, Hurlements was as shaped as anything from Hollywood. It begins with a few minutes of white screen/dialogue:
Berna: Article 115. When a person has ceased to appear at his residence or domicile, and when after four years no information has been received concerning said person, interested parties may lodge an appeal with the local court in order to make such absence known.
Wolman: Love is only valid in a pre-revolutionary period.
Debord: You’re lying—no one loves you! Art begins, grows, and fades because dissatisfied men transcend the world of official expression and the displays of its poverty.
Rosenthal: Say, did you sleep with Françoise?
Isou declaims on the death of the cinema; Berna jokes about the Youth Front attack on the Auteuil orphanage. There is a key line from Wolman that Isou must have missed (“And their revolts were turning into acts of conformity”); blind quotes from John Ford’s Rio Grande and from Saint-Just (“Happiness is a new idea in Europe”). Topping Isou’s implied self-insertion into the cinematic pantheon, there is a rundown of film-history highlights, from 1902, the year of Georges Méliès’s A Trip to the Moon, through 1931, noted as the year of both Charlie Chaplin’s City Lights and the “birth of Guy-Ernest Debord,” then a leap over two decades of posited dead time to Isou’s Treatise, Wolman’s L’Anticoncept, and Hurlements itself. And there is the line around which the rest of Debord’s life would turn—“The art of the future will be the overthrow of situations, or nothing”—followed by an anticlimax from Berna—“In the cafes of Saint-Germain-des-Prés!”
The soundtrack stopped and the screen turned black. After two minutes the screen turned white and the dialogue resumed. The sequencing continued, the alternating passages varying in length, the dialogue becoming more disassociated. New motifs appeared: sexual frenzy, the suicide of a twelve-year-old radio actress, the suicide of surrealist hero Jacques Vaché, the suicide of dada hero Arthur Cravan, the presumed suicide of Jack the Ripper, a summation of the theme (“The perfection of suicide is in equivocation”), and a nice homage to the assault on Notre-Dame (“More than one cathedral was built in memory of Serge Berna”).
There was a buried reference to the low-life heroes of Les Enfants du paradis—those who, by the end of the picture, have become celebrated actors, celebrated courtesans, or celebrated criminals. It was as well a celebration of the five speakers in Hurlements: “They’ll be famous someday—you’ll see!” There were overblown tributes to the terrible sensitivity of youth, cut with passages of real lyricism, borrowed from Joyce; then a fine pun that deflated every easy embrace of suicide: “We were ready to make every bridge jump—but the bridges got their own back.” Cued by the opening reading from “Article 115,” there was more from the French Civil Code: regulations on insanity and on a builder’s responsibility to his client, the latter perhaps to bring in the number of the statute: 1793, the year the revolution, with Saint-Just leading the prosecution, sent Louis XVI to the guillotine. The intermittent dialogue was a groping toward a critique of the ruling morality—Isou’s no less than that of society at large—and it presented itself as a groping.
Because Hurlements is a conceptual piece, one might treat it conceptually. For that matter I have no alternative. Debord published versions of his final scenario in 1955, 1964, and 1978; today the film itself is impossible to see. I can only work from my own reaction to seeing Hurlements on the page.
One can imagine an audience, at first utterly thrown by blankness, but attuned to Left Bank scandale pour la scandale, quickly becoming accustomed—art-socialized—to the new rules perpetrated by the film. Imagining yourself part of the audience, you can imagine soon looking forward to the shifts from black screen/silence to white screen/dialogue, or even vice versa. You can imagine relaxing, accepting this supposedly unacceptable anti-show, this absolute “decomposition of the cinema,” this “displacement of the values of creation toward the spectator” (Debord, in his “Prolegomena”). But as you grasp the form of the negation, grasp that form as such is a negation of negation, an affirmation that creation is possible, the world begins to reform—to comfortably reform.
An hour into the thing, you’d expect at least another tidbit of conversation, another aphorism, another quote to please those in the know and mystify any stray tourists; maybe, you might think, at the end there will even be a picture. If the
purpose of lettrism, as Debord and Wolman summed it up in 1955, was to cause a “fatal inflation in the arts,” then this was truly ultra-lettrism: here a single image, of what it would not matter, would carry more force than all the mushroom-cloud shots closing avant-garde films all over the world in 1952. A penny would truly be a fortune; the dada bank would make the audience rich beyond its dreams. In this setting, the final self-portrait Debord wrote into the Ion version of Hurlements would be the second coming of Christ.
So you can picture an audience giving into the event, recognizing the film’s prescriptions and abiding by its orders—certainly, as I read the final script after a year of reading various accounts of this movie-without-images, that was my imagined response. I caught on; it all began to seem reasonable. That was the reaction Debord wanted—and so, after more than fifty minutes of shifting white screen into black, talk into silence, he pulled the string. “We are living like lost children, our adventures incomplete,” Debord said on the soundtrack. Enfants perdus: the audience would have known that he was referring to the lettrists and to the Auteuil orphans; that he was using French military slang for soldiers sent on almost suicidal reconnaissance missions; that he was parodying then-current sociological jargon for postwar French youth. And the audience would have known that Debord was most of all calling up the “enfants perdus” of Marcel Carné’s 1942 film Les Visiteurs du soir (The Night Visitors), Gilles and Dominique, young emissaries of the devil sent to destroy love on earth, destroyers seduced by earthly love; the audience would have known that in Les Visiteurs du soir the devil is meant to represent Hitler, and that there was no way Debord did not know it. The film would have reached a moment of obviousness, confusion, suspension: “Nous vivons en enfants perdus nos aventures incomplètes.” There followed fully twenty-four minutes of silence, during which the screen remained black. Then, on those rare occasions when audiences or house managers allowed the work to reach its conclusion, the film ran out.
NOW EVEN
Now even allowing that it might have been lack of money or mere laziness that led Debord to scrap the images and much of the soundtrack of his Ion scenario, one can perhaps conjure up Debord’s state of mind as he finally contrived his movie. After convincing an audience that it could accept an acceptable version of nothing, he would insist on the real thing.
John Cage’s silent 4′ 33″, introduced the same year as Hurlements, was a concept—and the audience was given a performer to watch, a man sitting at a piano he did not play. Debord’s film was both less (on the terms of decomposition, every additional minute was a geometric reduction) and more (seventy-five minutes more). Of course it was also a joke, like The Best of Marcel Marceao, an lp released in 1971 on the MGM/Gone-If label by Mike Curb (in 1978 elected lieutenant governor of California, and, for a time, seriously discussed as a Republican candidate for the presidency), which featured two sides of “Silence: 19 min., applause: 1 min.” To experience Hurlements might have been boring beyond description: a provocation staged in the most sterile environment, not even worth fighting over. You could pull the plug or you could leave. To read Debord’s final script so many years later—to read it as an argument, as a manifesto, as a before-the-fact event taking place in the mind of its creator—can be a pure shock, a pure thrill.
The manifesto had its obvious clauses. The blank screen suggested that art was a trick; that any real movie one might pay money to see was full of nothing; that the lettrists were invisible to the dominant society, living in its shadows, working in the dark—that no matter how incomprehensible the lettrists’ words and unwords might be to anyone else, the blackness accompanying their silence meant that they alone had a claim on their time. But the center of Hurlements, and the key to its aesthetics, was its assembly of references and metaphors: Les Enfants du paradis, Saint-Just, the Notre-Dame scandal, Les Visiteurs du soir, “enfants perdus,” and the odd exclamation that the art of the future would have nothing to do with the decomposition of the cinema or anything else—that art, and the future, would be a question of “situations.”
“I was there—up in the balcony with Guy, with the bags of flour,” Michèle Bernstein said in 1983, thirty-one years after the first complete screening of Debord’s film: the 13 October 1952 show at the Latin Quarter Film Club. “Below us were all the people we knew—and Isidore Isou, and Marc, O, who’d broken with Isou, and who we’d broken with. Before the film Serge Berna came on stage and delivered a wonderful speech on the cinema—pretending to be a professor. The flour was of course to drop on the people below. And in those days I had a voice—a voice that could break glass. I don’t know where it went—if it’s smoking or drinking. It wasn’t a scream: just a sound I could make. I was to ‘howl’ when people began to make noise, when they began to complain—I was to make a greater noise. And I did.
“I can’t remember if Guy and I even stayed to the finish—you know the last twenty minutes are silence, nothing. But I do know that Serge Berna tried to keep people from leaving. ‘Don’t go!’ he said. ‘At the end there’s something really dirty!’”
Page on the first screenings of Hurlements en faveur de Sade from Guy-Ernest Debord, Mémoires, 1959
HURLEMENTS
Hurlements opened a route to a break with Isou, though not because the master, faced with defections over the film, disavowed his participation. In 1979 he published Contre le cinéma situationiste, néo-nazi (Against Neo-Nazi Situationist Cinema), a pamphlet on Hurlements and Debord’s later films so splenetic that Isou was unable to bring himself to mention Debord by name; in 1952 Isou welcomed Hurlements into the lettrist canon. With screenings of his unmovie Debord “created situations”—and those incidents, riot and outrage, separating a few from a few more, suggested that if the creation of situations could replace art as everyone understood it, then the creation of situations could replace life as everyone accepted it. Dada was a marriage of prank and negation, so was Hurlements—what if one went further? What if, out of art, one created something that could not be returned to art—something that was not a representation of what was or should be, but an event in itself, seeking a moment, and a new language to talk about it? What if one created something that would simply go on creating of its own accord, a set of wishes translated by gestures, an ensemble of desires whose force fields would level all museums, habits, routines, all everyday walk and talk, until every moment had to be a new work of art, or nothing?
This was not “lettrism.” In July 1952, just after the first, abortive screening of Hurlements, Wolman and Debord, two certified artistes maudits, one banned by the government, the other by the public, formed a secret tendency within Isou’s movement: the “Lettrist International.” Without quite knowing that they were about to move into their own territory, they looked for a further breach; a few months later they found it.
THE OCCASION
The occasion was the arrival in Paris of Charlie Chaplin, on tour to promote his new film, Limelight. Upon his departure from the United States (and on the eve of a presidential election during which Richard Nixon, the Republican candidate for vice-president, was accusing the sitting Democratic administration of being soft on communism), Chaplin had been officially cited by the attorney general as a subversive, and barred from reentering the country. Days after, Chaplin was received by the newly-crowned Elizabeth II at the Court of Saint James, where as a British subject he performed the requisite bow. England welcomed him home; on the next leg of the tour, Europe opened its arms. In Paris the newspapers were beside themselves; “Charlot” was front-page day after day. Chaplin was accepted into the Legion of Honor. He granted a round of interviews; on 29 October 1952 he held a final press conference in Paris, at the Ritz, and the Lettrist International announced its existence to the world.
As the crowd outside the hotel chanted without cease for Charlot while Debord and Berna tried to block the doors, Wolman and Brau broke through police barriers, shouting curses and scattering leaflets. The leaflets read:
NO
MORE FLAT FEET
Sub–Mack Sennett director, sub–Max Linder actor, Stavisky of the tears of unwed mothers and the little orphans of Auteuil, you are Chaplin, emotional blackmailer, master-singer of misfortune.
The cameraman needed his Delly. It’s only to him that you’ve given your works, and your good works: your charities.
Because you’ve identified yourself with the weak and the oppressed, to attack you has been to attack the weak and the oppressed—but in the shadow of your rattan cane some could already see the nightstick of a cop.
You are “he-who-turns-the-other-cheek”—the other cheek of the buttock—but for us, the young and beautiful, the only answer to suffering is revolution.
We don’t buy the “absurd persecutions” that make you out as a victim, you flat-footed Max de Veuzit. In France the Immigration Service calls itself the Advertising Agency. The sort of press conference you gave at Cherbourg could offer no more than a piece of tripe. You have nothing to fear from the success of Limelight.
Go to sleep, you fascist insect. Rake in the dough. Make it with high society (we loved it when you crawled on your stomach in front of little Elizabeth). Have a quick death: we promise you a first-class funeral.
We pray that your latest film will truly be your last.
