Guy Debord:
His Art and His Time

Upon the publication of Comments on the Society of the Spectacle in 1988, Franz-Olivier Giesbert expresses his strong disapproval of Guy Debord.

Lino Léonardi plays accordion to Aristide Bruant’s song “Lézard.”

“I’ll never work,
Even if I’m hard up.
Never!”

Lino Léonardi’s music for François Villon’s poems.

GUY DEBORD: HIS ART AND HIS TIME

I. HIS ART

View of Pont Neuf.

The Paris of old is there no more (alas, the form of a city changes more rapidly than the heart of a mortal).

Views of Pont Neuf recreated in a film by Leos Carax.

Guy Debord did very little art, but he did it to the extreme.

Photo of Guy Debord.

In 1952 he showed that the cinema could be reduced to this blank white screen.

The screen remains white for ten seconds.

And to this blank black screen.

The screen remains black for one minute and twenty seconds.

Since that time Debord has maintained the same indifference to the tastes and judgments of public opinion. He has also been accused of many other immoralities; notably for not having been very disinterested when it was a matter of easy money, having regularly obeyed the principle: “Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth.”

Page from Mémoires.

Graffiti: “Never work.”

Manuscript of the first page of The Society of the Spectacle.

Directive 1: “Supersession of art.”

Directive 2: “Realization of philosophy.”

The fine bunch of hoodlums whom he constantly hung out with, and who greatly influenced his extravagances.

Photos of Alice Becker-Ho, Ghislain de Marbaix, Jacques Herbute, Ivan Chtcheglov, Gil J Wolman, Asger Jorn, and Toñí López-Pintor.

The music stops.

II. HIS TIME

Pont Neuf wrapped up by Christo.

I am now going to be antitelevisual in form as I have been in content.

The little that remains of the Aral Sea.

Forest fires.

I shall write my thoughts in order, in a plan without confusion. If they are correct, any of them will follow from the others. That is the true order.

Music by Lino Léonardi.

A trapped Colombian girl.

This Andean girl, trapped in a mudslide following a volcanic eruption, provided media operators around the whole world an opportunity to speak in ethical terms about the ethical code they might need to decide on in certain extreme circumstances: Should such images be shown? Or why should the world be deprived of them?

These professionals have all firmly concluded that nothing of the world’s misfortunes should be hidden. No false squeamishness of the public should prevent them from showing what someone had the merit of filming—especially in such rare cases as this when what was filmed actually happened to be true. In this way, the media want to demonstrate that they are everywhere, and always dedicated to truth at any cost. And they are convinced that a closely examined detail is usually an exact and unambiguous model of the truth.

The music stops.

Women wrestling in Japan.

Prospecting for oil under the Paris Basin.

Sometimes, on Sunday . . .

Implosion of housing projects.

What was so poorly constructed must be demolished even more quickly.

Forests withered by acid rain.

Economics was thought to be a science. That was obviously not the case. We now know that it was neither the first nor the last of the enemy’s sciences to reveal its fallaciousness.

Storm Troopers marching before 1934.

1933 was one of the most sinister dates in the history of this century — a century that has scarcely known any good ones.

Assassination of Kennedy in Dallas.

The “democratic” state has become increasingly alien.

Repression of Tienanmen in Beijing, 1989.

The warlord who ruled in Beijing at that time accurately recognized that “the fate of the Party and of the State was at stake in Tienanmen Square.” He acted accordingly; and he’s still in power, utterly indifferent to all the ideologies of recent media fashions.

Tanks in the streets of Moscow.

Tonton Macoute in Haiti.

Gunshots during a demonstration in Algiers.

The unverifiable world.

A Somali woman lynched before the impassive eyes of United Nations forces sent to “restore hope.”

Students in a professional high school. Schools being ransacked. Attacks on teachers. Young people justifying all that.

Music by Lino Léonardi.

The most modern historical developments have accurately illustrated what Thomas Hobbes thought the life of mankind must have been like before it arrived at civilization and the state: “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”

The music stops.

“Radio Paris lies, Radio Paris is German.”

Paris under the Occupation.

Paris today.

Today, Nazi Time encompasses all Europe.

Shift to winter time.

Film of the American Atomic Energy Commission about a radioactive alert.

Chernobyl, probably never-ending.

Launching of a 24/7 news channel.

Anne Sinclair interviews Georgina Dufoix: responsible but not guilty.

Wage earners have the right to vote.

And you’d evaluate how much each of you would stand to gain?

Wage earners have the right to vote.

Film of Arthur Cravan training for a boxing match. Photo of Cravan.

Music by Lino Léonardi.

At the origin of dadaism we find the poet-boxer Arthur Cravan, who during the First World War was a “deserter from seventeen nations.”

The music stops.

The Buren Columns at the Palais Royal.

Bar codes.

Neo-dadaism is state dadaism, which can produce a small shock effect only by manifesting itself in national palaces.

Nuclear artwork: a flock of fake sheep graze at the foot of the Cattenom nuclear power plant.

Nuclear power likes to be surrounded by images of its totem animal. Magritte might have written: “This is not a sheep.”

Silvio Berlusconi interrupts his vacation in Sardinia.

Funeral of Pierre Bérégovoy.

Long line waiting to get into the Louvre.

Music by Lino Léonardi.

The culture of the entire past is the object of a universal consensus and an egalitarian admiration. But in each of its concrete manifestations, it often ends up being as inauthentic as today’s reconstituted Pont Neuf.

Long line waiting to get into the Musée d’Orsay.

Odor of cancer at Rue Daguerre.

Odor of cancer at Rue de Buci.

Cancer is covered by Social Security.

The music stops.

Chinese protesters sing “The Internationale” at Tienanmen Square in 1989.

The dialectic is still very much alive. Everything is being brought back into play.

Claire Chazal interviews Bernard Tapie.

Whenever Bernard Tapie talks about himself, you wonder what dishonesty the poor victim could possibly have been accused of.

Speech by Yasser Arafat at UNESCO.

Philippe Alexandre, Serge July, and Christine Ockrent on Channel 9’s Front Page program.

Three media barons discuss the news of the world and share it with us in intimate detail.

The new politico-literary salons of Paris.

The excellence of each talking head is confirmed by the admiring looks of the other two.

Cough it up! We’ll see what comes out.

ACT UP demonstration, with a statement by an ACT UP spokesman on World AIDS Day, December 1991.

With the pill, no drinking, no smoking. Are you kidding?

Immunological prevention is a thing of the past.

Live reunion of the Boutboul family.

Same clip with soundtrack from Fantastic Lottery Nights.

Catastrophic floods at Vaison-la-Romaine.

A virtual landscape.

Video ad for the Alsace-Lorraine DRSP (Regional Department of Penitentiary Services).

But where is this leading?

What are they trying to sell us?

You guessed it: prison labor.

This DRSP reveals itself as the most legitimate heir of the factory labor of old.

Mass of corpses during an epidemic in Rwanda.

Music by Lino Léonardi.

Portraits:

Alice Becker-Ho, author of L’Essence du Jargon

Ghislain-Gontran de Saint-Ghislain des Noyers de Marbaix, author of Monsieur Gontran

Jacques Herbute, a.k.a. Barate

Ivan Vladimirovitch Chtcheglov, author of Formulary for a New Urbanism

Gil J Wolman, author of L’Anticoncept

Asger Jorn, author of Pour la Forme

Toñí López-Pintor, a.k.a. l’Andalouse

The music stops.

Mitterrand at the Pantheon after his election in 1981.

Torches lit and waved at a concert.

Opening of a G-7 summit at Naples. Clinton jogs with his entourage.

In summer 1994 the leading democratic powers, who under the label “G-7” are going to collectively decide on all the most important administrative aspects of the new global society, arrive triumphantly at Naples.

Translation by Ken Knabb of the video Guy Debord: His Art and His Time by Guy Debord and Brigitte Cornand (1994). Boldface = Silent text titles. All the other text = descriptions of images, music, video clips, etc.

The complete scripts of all of Debord’s films, with illustrations, detailed descriptions of the images, and extensive annotations, are included in Debord’s Complete Cinematic Works (AK Press, 2003; revised and expanded edition: PM Press, 2026). For further information, see Guy Debord’s Films.