Publisher's Synopsis
Late in life, Guy Debord worried that his first film, Howls for Sade, had been misunderstood. He attested his most notable revolt was "not the May 1968 revolt" but "what he'd done in 1952," Howls for Sade. This article conducts a literary analysis of Howls for Sade that sees the film as deeply embedded in traditional allegories of the apocalyptic and enlightenmet. Like traditional stories of epiphany and enlightenment, Howls for Sade presents a four-dimensional experience where white light encompasses the audience. Voices drone from an unspecified location, filling the theatre with an authoritative, godly presence. However, instead of giving way to conclusive knowledge through epiphany, Howls for Sade concludes in the black emptiness of infinite time and the infinite universe, demonstrating a fleeting nature of epiphanic truisms, as well as the fleeting nature of life and thought. The clearest definition of the film Howls for Sade is that it is imageless, and that the script is a montage of various poetic texts, Debord's ideas, and legal texts. However, most likely, the film originally was intended to include images. Before shooting Howls for Sade, Guy Debord compiled descriptions of a series of photographs to accompany the script. When the script was published in Ion, the film's voice-over ("bande sonore") and the descriptions of the images were placed side-by-side in juxtaposed columns. The described images were planned to be scenes of war, eroticism, and photographs of Debord himself. They were also planned to be a montage of panoramas, still-frames, and close-ups, similar to the montages in Debord's later films. Shortly after the Ion publication, Debord reworked the script of Howls for Sade to exclude all images. The reworked version appeared in the Lettrist magazine The Naked Lips (Les Lèvres Nues). There, directions for the screen to change from all white to all black in Howls for Sade were indicated.
