Lipstick Traces (46 page)

In
Ion,
in a preface to his filmscript—a preface modestly titled “Prolegomena to Any Future Cinema”—Debord described his then-imaginary movie as a superseding not only of conventional cinema but of cinéma discrépant itself, which according to the mechanics of invention could not be superseded, since it was the breaking down of film into its constituent elements. “All this belongs to an era which is finished,” Debord said, “and which no longer interests me.” He expressed regret that he “lacked the leisure to create a work that would be less than eternal,” a work that would endure no longer than the impulse behind it; the making of a real moment, he was saying, was the hardest work of all. Given the script that followed, this was wildly unconvincing. Split down the page between descriptions of soundtrack and images, Debord’s scenario pitted literary references against intended footage of riots, colonialist military maneuvers, Left Bank hanging-out, and a fair number of shots of Debord himself. There were a few isouienne blank spots and a lot of letter poetry. Stripped of its lettrist conventions, it was a twenty-year-old’s funeral oration on lost youth; the tone was misty and received. (“I have destroyed the cinema,” Debord said, quaintly returning to the simplest surrealist act, “because it was easier than shooting passersby.”) Various surrealist icons and suicides were trotted
out and put through their paces. “You know,” said the narrator as the script ended, handing reviewers a tagline, “none of this matters.” Within the lettrist milieu, or twentieth-century bohemia as such, it was really nothing new.

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.

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 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.