HURLEMENTS EN FAVEUR DE SADE
(HOWLINGS IN FAVOR OF DE SADE)
dir. Guy Debord, 1952
France. 64 mins.
In French with English subtitles.

MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 11 – 10 PM
THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 21 – 10 PM

In his first film, Guy Debord abandons the photographic image. Over the course of HURLEMENTS EN FAVEUR DE SADE, Debord along with fellow Lettrists Isou, Gil Wolman, Serge Berna, and Barbara Rosenthal speak over each other in aphorisms. The screen is white when they talk and black whenever there is silence. The film’s refusal to represent foretells Debord’s future critiques of image-culture, most notably the text from which this theater derives its name: SOCIETY OF THE SPECTACLE (1967). Eventually, Debord and Wolman would break away from the Lettrist Movement to carry out new acts of detournement as Situationsists. As such, their goals were more directly aligned with a Communist agenda. Yet, in their early works resides a conceptual spark that they would build upon throughout their careers as artists. This would become clearer in a Lettrist bulletin from 1956, in which Wolman declared their objective to be the creation of “a unitary urbanism” that synthesizes “arts and technology” in accordance “with new values of life.”