Screenplay: Hurlements in Favor of de Sade

Overview

Hurlements en faveur de Sade (often translated as Howls for Sade) is Guy Debord's 1952 radical experiment in anti-cinema. It replaces conventional imagery and narration with prolonged fields of black and white screen, disjunctive spoken texts and long silences. The piece functions less as a narrative film than as a deliberate assault on the habits of film spectatorship and the complacency of cinematic representation.

Form and Structure

The screenplay is organized as a series of visual absences interrupted by recorded voices and noises. Large spans of pure black or white hold the screen while a collage of disconnected spoken passages, ranging from recitations to shouted fragments, fills the soundtrack. These auditory episodes do not correspond to pictured action; instead they collide with the emptiness of the image, creating a persistent mismatch between sound and sight.

Sound, Text and Silence

Sound performs the film's primary labor. Spoken texts arrive as fragments, aphorisms and provocations that refuse linear argument or psychological continuity. The soundtrack also uses abrupt silences, which are as important as the vocal material: silence is treated as a tool to unsettle rhythmic expectation and to force active attention. The interplay of speech, noise and absence makes listening an investigative act rather than a passive reception.

Political and Theoretical Intent

The project is a practical application of a political and artistic critique aimed squarely at passive consumption. The title's invocation of de Sade signals a willingness to provoke moral complacency and to foreground transgression as a means of rupture. The formal strategy embodies a theory of détournement and situationist critique: by disabling film's conventional pleasures, the work seeks to wake viewers from habitual modes of perception and to expose mediatic domination.

Historical Context

Emerging from postwar avant-garde circles and the milieu that would become the Situationist International, the screenplay aligns with broader experimental currents that questioned language, image and spectatorship. The piece shares concerns with Lettrist and Surrealist experiments yet pushes further toward negation of cinematic illusion. Its minimalism and confrontation with the audience reflect a world weary of spectacle and anxious to invent new modes of collective awareness.

Reception and Influence

Initially experienced as scandalous and perplexing, the film was polarizing among artists and critics. Over time it attained canonical status within radical film histories as an emblem of anti-cinema. Its insistence on interruption, negative space and the destabilization of representational conventions influenced later generations of experimental filmmakers, conceptual artists and theorists concerned with media critique and the political function of aesthetic form.

Legacy

Hurlements en faveur de Sade endures as a foundational gesture against cinematic seduction and passive spectatorship. It models a method of using absence, fragmentation and provocation to force cognitive and political attention. Contemporary discussions of media resistance, détournement and the relation between form and ideology still return to its uncompromising premise: that art can be weaponized to disrupt habitual perception and to demand a more engaged public.