Guy Debord - Films

Films

Debord began an interest in (or perhaps a hatred for) film early in his life when he lived in Cannes in the late 1940s. Debord recounted that, during his youth, he was allowed to do very little other than attend films. He said that he would often leave in the middle of a film screening to go home because films often bored him. Debord joined the Lettrists just as Isidore Isou was producing films and the Lettrists attempted to sabotage Charlie Chaplin's trip to Paris through negative criticism. Debord directed his first film, "Hurlements en faveur de Sade" in 1952 with the voices of Michele Bernstein and Gil Holman. The film has no actual images; instead, it shows bright white when there is speaking and black when there is not. Long silences separate speaking parts. The film ends with 24 minutes of black silence. People were reported to have angrily left screenings of this film. The script is composed of quotes appropriated from various sources and made into a montage with a sort of non-linear narrative. Later, through the financial support of Michele Bernstein and Asger Jorn, Debord produced a second film - "Sur le passage de quelques personnes à travers une assez courte unité de temps", which combined scenes with his friends and scenes from mass media culture. This integration of Debord's world with mass media culture became a running motif climaxing with "The Society of the Spectacle". Debord wrote the book The Society of the Spectacle before writing the movie. When asked why he made the book into a movie, Debord said, "I don't understand why this surprised people. The book was already written like a script". Debord's last film, "Son Art et Son Temps", was not produced during his lifetime. It worked as a final statement where Debord recounted his works and a cultural documentary of "his time".

• Hurlements en faveur de Sade (Howls for Sade) 1952
• Sur le passage de quelques personnes à travers une assez courte unité de temps (On the Passage of a Few Persons Through a Rather Brief Unity of Time) 1959 (short film, Dansk-Fransk Experimentalfilmskompagni)
• Critique de la séparation (Critique of Separation) 1961 (short film, Dansk-Fransk Experimentalfilmskompagni)
• La Société du spectacle (Society of the Spectacle) 1973 (Simar Films)
• Réfutation de tous les judgements, tant élogieux qu’hostiles, qui ont été jusqu’ici portés sur le film « La Société du spectacle » (Refutation of All the Judgements, Pro or Con, Thus Far Rendered on the Film "The Society of the Spectacle") 1975 (short film, Simar Films)
• In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni (We Turn in the Night, Consumed by Fire) (Simar Films) 1978 This film was meant to be Debord's last one and is largely autobiographical. The film script was reprinted in 2007 in No: a journal of the arts.
• Guy Debord, son art, son temps (Guy Debord - His Art and His Time) 1994 (a 'sabotage television film' by Guy Debord and Brigitte Cornand, Canal Plus)

Complete Cinematic Works (AK Press, 2003, translated and edited by Ken Knabb) includes the scripts for all six of Debord's films, along with related documents and extensive annotations.