Guy Debord was born in Paris on December 28, 1931. He spent his childhood years in Paris – a time overshadowed by the early death of his father Martial Debord as well as by the economic misfortune of the family. With the outbreak of WWII, Guy entered a period of peregrinations between the Île de France and the southern regions of France, mostly the Côte-d’Azur. It was only in the spring of 1945 that, upon the second marriage of Guy’s mother Paulette with the notary Charles Labaste, the family would finally settle down in Cannes.

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In April 1951, during the Cannes Film Festival, Debord assisted the premiere of Isidore Isou’s first film Traité de bave et d’éternité (Venom and Eternity), which marked the inaugural moment of Lettrism’s cinéma cisélant. In the immediate aftermath of the scandal accompanying the screening of the piece, Debord joined the Lettrist Movement, ruled by Isidore Isou with a rod of iron. Intent on starting his own artistic career under the egis of Lettrism, Debord moved to Paris, where he was soon to become witness to another instant of indignation and public protest against the Lettrist désinvolture – notably in the context of the presentation of Gil J. Wolman’s film L’Anticoncept in February 1952.

Debord’s debut in the artistic circles of postwar Paris coincided with the conception and production of his first film Hurlements en faveur de Sade (Howls for Sade), premiering in June 1952. Transgressing the Lettrist anti-tradition of Isidore Isou’s Traité and Maurice Lemaître’s Le film est déjà commencé, this oeuvre not only broke up the conjunction of image-track and soundtrack, but – similar to Wolman’s Anticoncept – it also sought to push the subversion of the image to its climax.

Suppressing the epitome of the cinematographic convention, which is the moving image, Hurlements en faveur de Sade presented the spectator with an alternation of black and white sequences. While the black sequences of the film were entirely silent, the white sequences were accompanied by a soundtrack, made up of literary quotes, quotes from the French Code civil and a Lettrist impromptu performed by Wolman.

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What, too, coincided with Debord’s artistic debut was his expeditiously maturating discontent with the rather doctrinal Lettrism of Isidore Isou – an avant-gardism that, for Debord, was lacking not so much in theoretical radicalism, as he understood it to lack in a radical, provocative praxis. I

n June 1952, during a stay in Brussels, Debord and Wolman founded the Internationale Lettriste (Lettrist International), which was meant to represent the intellectual stance of the leftist members of the Lettrist Movement. Yet, it was only in the aftermath of the Chaplin affair in the fall of 1952 that this rupture with Isou was publicly manifested and consecrated by the declaration Finis les pieds plats (No More Flat Feet). In clear contradistinction with Isouian Lettrism, the Lettrist International advocated an artistic praxis that was to foster the dépassement (surpassing, going beyond) of the arts, and that was thus ultimately aimed at dissolving itself.

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With the foundation of the Lettrist International, Debord realized the transition from an aesthetic vision of art to a more politicized vision, based on the creation of ephemeral, and continuously changing situations. This refocusing of the Lettrist stance was reflected in publications such as Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography (1955), A User’s Guide to Détournement (1956) and Theory of the Dérive (1956).

In these articles and declarations – co-authored, oftentimes, by other members of the Lettrist International – were developed the essential themes, which would later come to determine the thought and the activities of the Situationist International. These were, among others, the practice of détournement, the dérive set in urban space, psychogeography and the ludic construction of situations and ambiances.

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On July 28, 1957, the Lettrist International fused with the International Movement for an Imaginist Bauhaus, founded by Asger Jorn, Guiseppe Pinot-Gallizio and Piero Simondo, and the London Psychogeographical Association. The fusion of these independent groups resulted in the formation of the Situationist International.

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To be continued ...