CINEMA IS DEAD

On the 30th of June 1952 the film Hurlements en faveur de Sade by Guy Debord premiered in Ciné-Club d'Avant-Gardes at the Musée de l'Homme in Paris. The lights in the cinema were switched off and the film began. The screen went white from the light of the projectors and an expressionless voice on the soundtrack announced: "The film by Guy-Ernest Debord, Howlings in favour of Sade …" Another voice continued dispassionately, "Howlings in favour of Sade is dedicated to Gil J. Wolman". A third voice recited "Article 115. When a person shall have ceased to appear at his place of abode or home address for four years, and about whom there has been no news whatsoever, the interested parties shall be able to petition the lower courts in order that his or her absence be declared". The three voices continued reading different text fragments out loud, one after the other, for a couple of minutes. The screen remained white; there were still no pictures. After a couple of minutes with a white screen, a voice recited: "Just as the film was about to start, Guy-Ernest Debord would climb on stage to say a few words by way of introduction. He'd say simply: 'There's no film. Cinema is dead. There can't be film anymore. If you want, let's have a discussion". Following this the screen went black, and there was no sound for a couple of minutes. Already at this point the audience was getting restless - several had protested loudly, others had left, and only a few minutes passed before the director of the film club, Jean Gauliez, stopped Hurlements en faveur de Sade. Indeed, this film by Guy Debord, later leader of the Situationists, was also a provocation and an anti-film more than a film. There were no pictures in the film - the screen was either white or black. The soundtrack consisted of nothing but voices expressionlessly reciting the fragmentary sentences taken from bodies of laws, novelettes, modernistic literature and newspaper notices. There was neither music nor real sound in the film; only voices cut through the silence. The discontinuous 'dialogue' of the voices accompanied the white screen, and when the screen was black there was no sound in the film. The film lasted eighty minutes; the soundtrack lasted twenty. So the film consisted of one hour of blackness and total silence, its final twenty-four minutes taking place in black silence. However, the viewers were not interested in spending this amount of time on the premiere, which ended in chaos and scandal, the film being stopped after less than ten minutes.

Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen

P.O.V. No.16 - FILM & POLITICS
Anti-film: Hurlements en faveur de Sade

http://pov.imv.au.dk/Issue_16/section_1/artc5A.html