Hurlements en faveur de Sade
Bambouche
1,484 Posts
[color:white]Has anyone seen this?(English trasnlation: Howls for Sade, or, Howls in Favor of Sade)1952 "anti-film" by Guy Debord. My wife and I went to a viewing of all Debord films yesterday. This was the one I thought would be the most predictable, having read the script and various reviews about it, but I was seriously mistaken.A few near-fights in the beginning, several instances of dudes yelling at each other across the theater, a sort of lively debate about what the fuck we're supposed to be doing (the film alternates between a blank white screen with dialog followed by a black screen and silence, the silence last for several minutes. The last 20 minutes are totally dark/silent), theater broke into song, and finally a theater security guard came in and tried to kick out the guy who was leading the song (in the dark), and everyone started yelling at the guard, my wife, in fact, yelled, "if you kick him out you have to kick us all out" and eventually the guard left.It was fucking surreal. Voice 2: The perfection of suicide lies in its ambiguity. [/color]
Comments
What song were the crowd singing?
The irony was noted.
Voice 2: We were ready to blow up all the bridges, but the bridges let us down.
Indeed. Or as Debord said:
From the very beginning I have devoted myself to overthrowing this society, and I have acted accordingly. I took this position at a time when almost everybody believed that this despicable society (in its bourgeois or bureaucratic version) had the most promising future. And since then I have not, like so many others, changed my views one or several times with the changing of the times; it is rather the times that have changed in accordance with my views. This is one of main reasons I have aroused such animosity on the part of my contemporaries.
Thus, instead of adding one more film to the thousands of commonplace films, I prefer to explain why I shall do nothing of the sort. I am going to replace the frivolous adventures typically recounted by the cinema with the examination of an important subject: myself.
His ostentatiousness and contempt are easy to read in the writing, but what I didn't expect was the amount of wistfulness. In his last film, In girum imus nocte - et consumimur igni, there is some real longing. Like the restless feeling of homesickness from an orphan. Unable to resolve itself. In Debord's case, though, it seems there was quite a reflection on Wolman -- who was dejected from the SI early on and spent years suffering mental illness and institutionalization before his death. It was almost sad.
Debord's uncompromising style (and way of life, really) is pretty untestable when you watch it condensed in film from '52 - '78. From his first assertion ("There is no film. Cinema is dead. No more films are possible. If you wish, we can move on to a discussion" [followed by 20 minutes of blank screen]) to his final line some 26 years later ("...For me there will be no turning back and no reconciliation. No wishing up and no settling down"), the residuum is pretty fucking incredible.
I've sat through thousands of art/experimental/underground films, and while I was pretty aware of what I was about to see I didn't expect what I was going to experience. About 4 hours into viewing I found it typical (suspicious?) that most of the people there were art fags, film buffs, professors, and weirdo bookworms like me. I wondered if this was good?
Then the lights went down and Refutation Of All The Judgments started and it was as if Debord himself was handing out prescient flyers when this hit the screen:
A journalist reviewing my film regrets that a mind of my quality has limited its expression to a ???cinema ghetto??? where the masses will have little chance to see it. This argument does not convince me. I prefer to remain in obscurity with the masses, rather than to consent to harangue them under the artificial floodlights manipulated by their hypnotizers.
It's hard to describe really. I don't think I'm doing a good job. I'm curious to hear from our residential film snobs: bassie, rapedonkey, shig, JRoot, onetet.
I know his films don't show much in the U.S., maybe bassie has seen the original French version?