from Guy Debord

To Marcel Marien
1 January 1956
My dear Marien:


Thank you for the copy of Le Soir.[1] I send you the response [see below] that this critique seems to merit. But as the article is obviously favorable for the distribution of Les Levres nues, I leave to you the choice of publishing it or my letter. Only preoccupy yourself with utility.

Also included is an article from today’s L’Humanité-Dimanche that proves that Wurmser[2] has good readers and detourns phrase like you and I do.

Amicably toward you all,
G.-E. Debord

Given your impoverished critique of 23 December (“Another Cinema”),[3] know:

1) that the journal Les Levres nues is completely opposed to current surrealism. If it wasn’t, I wouldn’t publish in it, naturally;

2) that I do not place “a blank screen, empty of all images at the height of art in cinematographical matters,” but at the height of its negation – as everyone except you have thought; [and]

3) that if you “discover a metaphysical meaning” in the end of Clouzot’s Manon or in the entirety of the Western High Noon,[4] you’re a cunt of a quality that begins to become scarce.

G.-E. Debord

[1] “Un autre cinema,” Le Soir, 23 December 1955.

[2] Translator: André Wurmser (1899-1984).

[3] Translator: this essay responded to the publication of materials concerning Guy Debord’s Hurlements en faveur de Sade in Les Levres nues #7, December 1955.

[4] Translator: the French title was Le train sifflera trios fois (“The train will whistle three times”).


(Published in Guy Debord Correspondance, Vol "0": Septembre 1951 - Juillet 1957: Complete des "lettres retrouvees" et d l'index general des noms cites by Librairie Artheme Fayard, October 2010. Translated from the French by NOT BORED! March 2011. Footnotes by the publisher, except where noted.)




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