Why Precisely Cinema? On the Film’s Negative, or Guy Debord’s Cinema without Spectacle

Abstract

Fifteen years prior to his core piece – “La société du spectacle”–, the artist-as-a-young-man Debord Guy makes a(n) (anti-)spectacular entrance into the realms of art, philosophy, cinema and politics: “Hurlements en faveur de Sade” retrieves the pure act of cinema without “a film”. This (sequential) black upon white grid is screening Malevich’s founding Suprematist gesture of the ‘Zero of forms’, across other milestones of Modernity aligning battlefields of luminous rationality vs archaic ‘darkness’ such as Edgar Poe’s “The Raven”, Van Gogh’s death-sign(ature) “Wheatfield with Crows” or Kubrick’s “2001”’s empty signifier, the Monolith. This series of black on white in art at large, redolent of the spectral nature of the primal imago as the shadow or the caput mortuum, is aggravated in that ‘kingdom of shadows’ that both Maxim Gorky, Ingmar Bergman, Nathaniel Dorsky, Laura Mulvey or Garrett Stewart emphasize to be analogical film medium’s innermost dark side, while foregrounded inside out onto the screen. If, according to Schelling, the future of spirit is to incarnate in art rather than in philosophy, and if a corresponding negative aesthetics should witness “the survival of art through its own death” (Adorno), Debord’s ‘black squaring’ has no equal among similar procedures by Godard, Cronenberg, Kubrick, César Monteiro, Haneke or Béla Tarr, including Cage’s contemporary (1952) silent piece 4’33’’. Utmost singular among cineasts and artists, this paper will contend, Debord’s non-philosophy contained in “Hurlements…” will prove as well to be irreducible to all forms of the historically inherited theological and/or philosophical apophases and a-letheias across the prodigal domain of the Negative, from Neoplatonism to modern dialectics. What remains on screen from this determinate negation is indisputably ‘cinema’, when its material intervention has overcome all questions of essence, apparatus, spectatorship or agency. Neither ‘what’ nor ‘when’ is cinema, cinema ‘is’ not: it hurls.