Guy Debord bound his first book in sandpaper to wreck its shelf neighbours
Guy Debord's debut film had no pictures at all, just a white screen during speech, black during silence, and a closing 24 minutes of dark nothing. Audiences walked out. Fifteen years later his book The Society of the Spectacle gave the Paris revolt of May 1968 many of its slogans.
Debord was born in Paris in 1931. His father, a pharmacist, died when he was small, and his mother sent him to his grandmother's villa in Italy; during the Second World War the family moved from town to town, and he ended up at high school in Cannes. There, by his own account, he was allowed to do little besides go to the cinema, though he often walked out bored halfway through. He dropped out of law at the University of Paris to throw himself into the avant-garde.
At 18 he joined the Lettrists, led autocratically by Isidore Isou, and after a split he headed a breakaway faction, the Letterist International. In 1957 that group met two others in the Italian village of Cosio d'Arroscia to found the Situationist International with artists such as Asger Jorn. Early stunts targeted the art world, including a 1958 raid on an art conference in Belgium that ended in arrests. Debord's own first book, Memoires, was given a sandpaper cover precisely so that it would scratch whatever stood beside it.
His 1967 masterpiece argued that modern life had been swallowed by images: the spectacle, in his definition, is a social relation between people mediated by pictures, from advertising to mass media. Everything once lived, he wrote, had moved into representation. He criticised Western capitalism and Eastern Bloc communism alike for crushing individual autonomy, and during the 1968 uprising he helped occupy the Sorbonne.
By 1972 he had disbanded the Situationists after members quit or were expelled. He made films with backing from the publisher Gerard Lebovici, whose unexplained killing briefly cast suspicion on Debord, then retreated to a cottage at Champot with his second wife, Alice Becker-Ho, reading Clausewitz and Sun Tzu and designing a war game with her. Troubled by depression and heavy drinking, he died by suicide in November 1994. In 2009 France declared his archive a national treasure to stop Yale from buying it.
Source: Guy Debord
