In 1951-52, Isou and Guy Debord, who had recently joined the Lettrist movement (and who would later resign and form his own Lettrist International) made two films which would completely disrupt all classical notions of what a film should include : Traité de bave et d'éternité and Hurlements en faveur de Sade.
The Lettrists recognised that even Dadaist films such as Rene Clair’s Entr’acte, which did away with the demand that cinema should follow a narrative path and somehow “make sense”, had not provoked the kinds of riots that the Dadaists intended, and had become almost reified into the artistic canon – the opposite outcome to the anti-art proposed by the manifesto writers of the movement. If this sort of revolutionary cinema could not be the hammer which would shape a new reality, it was clear that something far more radical had to be done.
The history of cinema in both of its phases is outlined very early in Hurlements, when Debord gives us his cinematic crib sheet :
1902: Voyage dans la lune
1920: Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari
1924: Entr’acte
1926: Battleship Potyomkin
1928: Un chien andalou
1931: City Lights. Birth of Guy-Ernest Debord.
1951: Traité de bave et d'éternité
1952: L’Anticoncept. Hurlements en faveur de Sade.
The films of the very early twentieth century set the template for cinema and Expressionists,. Dadaists, Bolsheviks, surrealists and American social comics have played with the style. Now, in 1951/52, is the time for chiselling to begin. Indeed, the protagonist of Isou’s Traité de bave et d'éternité famously states the Lettrist manifesto :
I believe firstly that the cinema is too rich. It is obese. It's reached its limits, its maximum. With the first movement of widening which it will outline, the cinema will burst! Under the blow of a congestion, this pig filled with grease will tear into a thousand pieces. I announce the destruction of the cinema, the first apocalyptic sign of disjunction, rupture, of this corpulent and bloated organization which is called film.
The chiselling techniques of which Isou speaks and which feature prominently in his film - discontinuity of sound and image, the scratching and tearing of celluloid, the use of flicker and negative sequences - are taken to their logical conclusion in Hurlements, a film with no images, no soundtrack, just voices uttering and repeating legal articles, declarations of love, gnomic edicts (“There is no film. Cinema is dead. No more films are possible. If you wish, we can move on to a discussion”) and surrealist elegies (“Death is like steak tartare”), as if from a disordered script. The film concludes with 24 minutes of imageless silence.
Debord had been attracted to Isou in part because of the way he had taken his film to the Cannes Film Festival in 1951and disrupted every board meeting until his film was shown (or rather heard – only the soundtrack to the film, and not the images, were ready for broadcasting). The Lettrists’ troublemaking had angered and excited people in equal measure, but it certainly attracted attention. With the first showing of Hurlements, Debord took this to its logical conclusion.
During a final silence of twenty-four minutes, when the only sound in the room was the turning of the reel, a member of the audience got up, thanked Mrs Dorothy Morland for an interesting evening and apologised for having to leave early. Everyone else stayed to the end, hoping that a sensational tidbit might still be coming. 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 funded. Another complained that he and his wife had come all the way from Wimbledon and had paid for a babysitter, because neither of them wanted to miss the film...
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 became all the more anxious to see the film, since nobody imagined that the show would be a complete blank!
- Guy Atkins (with Troels Andersen), Asger Jorn : The Crucial Years, 1954-1964
The second film here is the full version of Hurlements. Sit down and watch it now, in its entirety. Unlike the original audience, you will have the option to pause or stop or fast-forward the film on your laptop. Resist this temptation and watch the whole film.
By its very nothingness, Hurlements fixes the audience’s attention onto nothing but the medium itself – the projector, the screen, the monitor. It is awesomely boring and utterly infuriating, and as such represents the last stage of the chiselling phase. It killed off cinema, just as Finnegans Wake had killed off the novel, and in doing so it all but killed off Lettrism.
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