Lipstick Traces (47 page)

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!’”

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 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.

The fires of the klieg lights have melted the makeup of the so-called brilliant mime—and exposed the sinister and compromised old man.

Go home, Mister Chaplin.

The Lettrist International:

There was an argument here: the notion that Chaplin’s sentimental art, the art of
City Lights,
any art, was “emotional blackmail”—a diversion of one’s living strength toward an empty heaven, where everything was true and nothing was possible. The argument did not exactly make the papers.
Combat
identified the anti-Chaplin hooligans as “lettrists”; along with Pomerand and Lemaitre, Isou thus disassociated himself from the action, though in the mildest terms. In a letter to
Combat,
Isou noted the “excessive hysteria” that had greeted Chaplin, but rested his case with the argument that Chaplin’s creative work in the cinema rendered him inviolate: a god was a god. Isou did not denounce his four disciples; he merely joined in “the homage everyone has rendered to Chaplin.”

Debord and the others were not about to yield their opportunity. For the first time, they occupied the terrain of public life, and they were happy there. From Belgium, where they had gone to screen Isou’s
Treatise,
they wrote to
Combat:

Following our intervention against the press conference held by Chaplin at the Ritz, and the bits and pieces of the tract “No More Flat Feet” reproduced in the newspapers—a tract which, alone, took a stand against this artist—Isou and his submissive, graying followers have published a note disapproving of our actions (in this specific circumstance) in
Combat.
We have appreciated the significance of Chaplin’s work
in its own time
—but we know that today novelty lies elsewhere, and that “truths which are no longer interesting turn into lies” (Isou).

The members of the Lettrist International staked out their ground:

We believe that the most urgent expression of freedom is the destruction of idols, especially when they claim to represent freedom. The provocative tone of our leaflet was a reaction against a unanimous and servile enthusiasm.
The fact that certain lettrists, and Isou himself, have chosen to disclaim us is proof of the incomprehension which always did, and still does, separate extremists from those who no longer stand close to the edge, and separates us from those who have relinquished “the bitterness of their youth” and “smile” upon established glories—and separates
those over twenty from those under thirty.
We claim sole responsibility for a text we alone have signed. We ourselves disclaim no one. Indignation leaves us utterly indifferent. To be reactionary is not a matter of degree.

We abandon our detractors to the anonymous crowd of the easily offended.

Ignoring the law mandating a right of reply for disputes aired in the press, no doubt because of the ephemerality of the whole affair once Chaplin took his leave of France,
Combat
did not publish the statement. The anti-Chaplin “intervention” was swallowed in the publicity of its moment: two days’ gossip in Saint-Germain-des-Prés. At most it was a small-time replay of the Notre-Dame affair, on the trickier terrain of popular culture. It did not have the same effect: neither Marx nor anyone else had ever suggested that the criticism of popular culture was the prerequisite of all criticism. The new members of the Lettrist International swiftly vanished into their own lives, into their own unformed activities, into the obscurity affirmed in
Hurlements en faveur de Sade.
They did not share Isou’s taste for publicity—and they would not really emerge for almost six years, when the first number of
Internationale situationniste
appeared across Western Europe. “YOUNG GUYS, YOUNG GIRLS,” read its last page, facing a photo of Brigitte Bardot supine on horseback, raising her breasts into the air,

Talent wanted for getting out of this and playing

No special qualifications

Whether you’re beautiful or you’re bright

History could be on your side

WITH THE SITUATIONISTS

No telephone. Write or turn up:

32, rue de la Montagne-Geneviève, Paris, 5e.

Early in 1953 a teenager named Jean-Michel Mension turned himself into a living poster and paraded through the streets of Saint-Germain-des-Prés with cryptic slogans scrawled up and down his pants. Ed van der Elsken, a young Dutch photographer, stopped the boy and posed him with one Fred, a thug. Today you can just make out the inscriptions: “
L
’
INTERNATIONALE LETTRISTE NE PASSERA PAS
” on Mension’s right leg, bits of an advertisement for
Hurlements en faveur de Sade
on his left (“film dynamique,” and something about “lots of girls”). A few days later, Mension and Fred got drunk, streaked their hair with peroxide, and stumbled through the quarter slapping female shoppers and picking fights with businessmen. They were beaten to the pavement, where the police found them and took them to jail.