The Realised Situation

The paper focuses on the young Guy-Ernst Debord’s journey to power, by analysing his first film Hurlemants en faveur de Sade (1952), and also by investigating the film’s direct social and political context. Throughout the analysis, the author portrays a detailed image of the post-war underground parisian avant-garde scene, known as Saint-Germaine-des-Prés.
In depicting the cultural atmosphere, the paper summarizes Saint-Germaine’s most notorious movement: Lettrism, and it’s prophetic leader Isidore Isou, the former being the alma mater to Debord, the latter being mentor and soon to be a central rival to the subsequent situationist revolutionary. Within Lettrism, the paper centers primarily on the emergence of lettrist experimental cinema, which introduced an expanded and event-centric understanding of art, provided a solid base and counterpoint to the early articulations of the “science of situations”. Through a comprehensive analysis of the theoretical concepts, and their impact circulating in the early years of Isou’s Lettrism, the study argues that with his film, Debord founded his first movement – the radical-separatist Lettrist International – based on the critical politicization of the lettrist idea of syncinema, and used it’s relation to culture and politics as an aestheticizing counter-example. 
The author suggests, that detourning the aestheticizing logic of how the lettrist concept dismantled the medial barriers of the moving image, incorporating every speculative and living element of everyday life into boundless cinematic séances, Debord countered his predecessors by negating artistic expression and using the screenings of Hurlements to construct a political event instead: a coup d’état of Lettrism as a film premiere. 
The study’s most radical claim states that, Debord’s first film was not just aiming to supersede Isou’s group and establish Debord’s own political avant-garde movement, but that the mentioned are all in fact inseparable direct elements of Hurlements. And that by the critical politicization of the boundless practices of syncinema, Debord’s film should be interpreted as a prefigurative political situation lasting from 1952 to 1957. In additon, the study further claims that even such factors as prior events in the process of organizing against Isou, the formation of Lettrist International and the iconoclastic ideas engendered by the politics of Debord’s movement are also integrally embedded within the expanded borders of the film-situation. Throughout the in-depth examination of the period’s history, the paper sheds light on several theoretical texts from the movement’s periodicals Internationale lettriste (1952-1954) and Potlatch (1954-1957), which support the author’s contribution, and introduces the term political sade-ism to mark the philosophical and political ideas deriving from Hurlements’ legacy.