Lipstick Traces

by Greil Marcus

  Davidson, Steef. The Penguin Book of Political Comcis, trans. Hester and Marianne Velmans. New York: Penguin, 1982. Includes numerous situationist, King Mob Echo, and situationist-influenced comics and cartoons.

  Debord, Guy (-Ernest). Considérations sur l’assassinat de Gérard Lebovici (1985). Paris: Gallimard, 1993. Trans. Robert Greene as Considerations on the Assassination of Gérard Lebovici. Los Angeles: Tim Tam, 2001. “Debord’s patron and friend Gérard Lebovici—a French film producer whom [Debord] met in 1971—not only supported Debord’s work by financing what was effectively a Situationist press, Editions Champ Libre, he also bought a cinema—the Studio Cujas in St. Germain—which projected Debord’s cinematographic production on a continuous and exclusive basis. This lasted only through 1984, however, when following the mysterious and still unsolved murder of Lebovici in a parking garage off the Champs Elysées, Debord withdrew his films in a gesture of protest and mourning classically situationist in its decisiveness. Incensed by the murder of his friend and by the manner in which the press reported it [in effect, blaming it on Debord as “bad company” and spuriously linking Debord to the French terrorist group Action directe—accusations over which Debord sued L’Humanité, the Communist Party daily, Minute, a rightist daily, and the national Journal du Dimanche for libel, and won], he then wrote [a book] in which he announced that ‘the outrageous manner in which the newspapers have discussed [Lebovici’s] assassination has led me to decide that none of my films will ever be shown again in France. This absence will be the most fitting homage’ ”—Thomas Y. Levin, “Dismantling the Spectacle: The Cinema of Guy Debord”; in McDonough and Sussman.

  Debord’s last book completed before his suicide on 30 November 1994 was Les Contrats, Cognac: Les Temps qu’il fait, 1995. “Published a few weeks after his death . . . The book consists only of three contracts passed between Debord and [Lebovici] . . . They are remarkable because they are totally unbalanced, Lebovici owing everything to Debord (especially money), whereas Debord had almost no obligations. The last contract is actually for a film about Spain for which Debord was already paid, though he had never made and probably never even intended to make it. The purpose of this strange book was on the one hand to acknowledge Lebovici’s generosity, which goes beyond any form of contract . . . And on the other hand, its purpose is to show that until the end and beyond Debord remained free of any duty, obligation, or debt, free to transmit nothing (not even a film). It is even possible to consider this little book the last chapter of Debord’s much more famous Oeuvres cinématographiques complètes. Debord’s first step as a filmmaker in 1952 was a movie without pictures . . . But this last step is even more radical: it is not only a film without pictures but a film that has never been realized, which has only a strange contractual or more exactly a noncontractual existence, a film replaced, so to speak, by friendship”—Vincent Kaufmann, “The Lessons of Guy Debord,” October, no. 115 (Winter 2006).

  In a letter to Levin in 1987, Debord replied to the question of whether his films might still be screened outside France: “Never again, and nowhere.” But see below.

  ______Contre le cinéma. Aarhaus, Denmark: Institute scandinave de vandalisme comparé, 1964. Scripts of Debord’s first three films with visual descriptions and technical notes, plus Asger Jorn’s startling introduction, “Guy Debord et le problème de maudit.”

  ______Correspondance, vols. 1–7. Paris: Fayard, 1999–2008. Vol. 1 trans. by Stuart Kendall and John McHale as Correspondence: The Foundation of the Situationist International (June 1957–August 1960). Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2009.

  ______Le marquis de Sade a des yeux de fille. Paris: 2004, Fayard. Color facsimiles of art letters—experiments in collage, deconstruction, word-magic—from Debord to his friend Hervé Falcou, from 1949 to 1953, and in 1953 to Ivan Chtcheglov: the self-invention of a teenage dadaist. Courtesy Alice Debord.

  ______Oeuvres, ed. and annotated by Jean-Louis Rancon with Alice Debord. Paris: Gallimard, 2006. A 1,902-page volume collecting all of Debord’s books (other than Fin de Copenhague, and with Mémoires in black and white), including several not noted here, screenplays, virtually all published and unpublished essays (including “Histoire de l’Internationale lettriste,” 1956), all originally unsigned contributions to Internationale situationniste, letters dating to 1950, countless autobiographical and illustrative photographs (including one, from Cannes in 1951, with Debord as part of a crowd of eager boys gathered around Elvis Presley, aka Isidore Isou, who radiates glamour from head to foot), collages, detourned maps, historical photographs, and more.

  ______Oeuvres cinématographiques complètes, 1952–1978 (1978). Paris: Gallimard, 1994. Scripts of Debord’s first five films with visual descriptions. Trans. as Complete Cinematic Works: Scripts, Stills, Documents by Ken Knabb. Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2003.

  ______Oeuvres cinématographiques complètes (Gaumont Video, 2005). DVD set of all of Debord’s films: Hurlements en faveur de Sade (1952); Sur le passage de quelques personnes à traverse une assez courte unité des temps (1959); Critique de la séparation (1961); La Société du Spectacle (1973); Réfutation de tous les jugements, tant élogieux qu’hostile, qui ont été jusqu’ici portés sur le film “La Société du Spectacle” (1975); In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni (1978); with Brigitte Cornand, Guy Debord, son art et son temps (1995, screened for the first time shortly after Debord’s suicide). The accompanying book includes “L’oeuvre cachée,” an interview with Olivier Assasyas, the filmmaker who supervised the project. For a vivid report on the audience-supplied soundtrack—that is, shouts, curses, cheers, arguments—at a 2009 screening of Hurlements at Lincoln Center in New York, see Zack Winestine, “Howls for Guy Debord,” Film Quarterly (Summer 2009); for comment on Sur le passage and In girum, see my “A Brief Affair,” Artforum (February 2006). See also Debord, In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni: Edition critique agumentée de notes diverse de l’auteur, suivi Ordures et Décombres. Paris: Gallimard, 1999.

  ______Panégyrique (1989). Paris: Gallimard, 1993. Trans. as Panegyric by James Brook. New York and London: Verso, 1991. A critical autobiography in fragments, with a chapter on drunkenness as part of Debord’s life work (on the loss of taste imposed on alcohol by mass production: “No one had ever imagined that he would see drink pass away before the drinker”). Later published in a redundant edition with a second volume of photographs as Panegyric Volumes 1 & 2, trans. James Brook and John McHale. New York and London: Verso, 2004. “You Could Catch It,” a review from the London Review of Books, 25 March 1993, is collected in my The Dustbin of History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard, and London: Picador, 1995. For biographies, see Apostolidès, Bourseiller, Bracken, Hussey, Jappe, Kaufmann, and Merrifield.

  ______Préface à la quatrième édition italienne de “La Société du Spectacle.” Paris: Champ Libre, 1979. Trans. Frances Parker and Michael Forsyth as Preface to the Fourth Italian Edition of “Society of the Spectacle.” London: Chronos, 1979. An elegy to Saint-Germain-des-Prés in the early fifties, so full of longing the pages seem to fly away as they’re read.

  ______“The Situationists and the New Action Forms in Politics and Art,” in Internationale situationniste, Danger Official Secret Destruktion AF RSG 6. Odense, Denmark: Galerie EXI, 1963. Exhibition catalogue in French, Danish, and English. Included in McDonough and Sussman, but translated from the French, not in the original English. The catalogue also included Michèle Bernstein’s Victory of the commune of Paris, Victory of the Spanish republicans, and Victory of the great jacquerie of 1358. Bernstein and Debord had gone to Denmark for the RSG exhibit, inspired by the exposure by British activists of secret sites to which the British government was to be relocated in the event of nuclear war; it included word paintings by Debord, nuclear holocaust paintings by situationist J. V. Martin, and was to have included paintings by situationist Jan Stijbosch. Bernstein, 2009: “But Stijbosch didn’t arrive—I don’t know what happened to him, if he got drunk, fell in love along the way, if he got stuck
in the snow—but he didn’t show up, and we needed his work for the exhibit. So Guy and Martin said to me, ‘Art should be made by everyone! Not just by specialists! Michèle, you will do the paintings!’ ‘I am not a painter!’ I said. I am not a painter! So I did the paintings—not really paintings [they were relief-maps with toy soldiers and other figures arrayed across their terrain, according to Debord “a renewal of the battle painting . . . it corrects the revolving of history we arrive at here, this time to the better”]—and sent Guy and Martin out to the store to buy the toys and used the plaster Martin had. The idea of turning the great proletarian defeats into victories—that was all mine.”

  ______La Société du Spectacle (1967). Paris: Gallimard, 1993. Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith as The Society of the Spectacle. New York: Zone, 1993.

  ______with Asger Jorn. Mémoires. Paris: Internationale situationniste, 1959, constructed 1957. Facsimile edition Paris: Jean-Jacques Pauvert aux Belles Lettres, 1993. “I wanted to speak the beautiful language of my century,” Debord quoted the last line of his book (itself a quote from Baudelaire) in a new preface. “I wasn’t so concerned with being heard.” An inferior edition was published in 2004 by Allia, Paris. See Boris Donné’s illuminating Pour mémoires: un essai d’élucidation des Mémoires de Guy Debord. Paris: Allia, 2004. See Jorn.

  The Decline . . . of Western Civilization. Directed by Penelope Spheeris. 1980. Includes performance by Darby Crash and the Germs.

  De Quincey, Thomas. Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1821), ed. Alethea Hayter. Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1981.

  Dils (Los Angeles). “I Hate the Rich”/“You’re Not Blank” (What, 1977). “Class War”/“Mr. Big” (Dangerhouse, 1977).

  D.O.A.—A Rite of Passage. Dir. Lech Kowalski. 1980. The Sex Pistols on tour in the U.S.A. Most famous for the closing smack interview in the Chelsea Hotel with Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungeon, but most indelible for the scenes with Terry, of Terry and the Idiots, a talentless punk performer humiliating himself in front of middle-aged pub-goers, all bets placed on the notion that the freedom punk granted him to speak in public would actually lead him to discover something to say. See Sid & Nancy.

  Drabble, Margaret. The Ice Age. New York: Knopf, 1977.

  Dufrêne, François, ed. L’Autonomatopek 1 (Opus International, 1973, France). Includes recordings by Jean-Lous Brau, “Turn Back Nightingale,” Isidore Isou, “Lance rompues pour la dame gothique” (1945), and Gil J Wolman, “Ralentissez les cadences, mégapneume.” Courtesy Larry Wendt. See Brau, Wolman.

  Les Enfants du Paradis. dir. Marcel Carné, screenplay by Jacques Prévert. 1944.

  Essential Logic (London). “Wake Up” (Virgin, 1979, U.K.). Fanfare in the Garden: An Essential Logic Collection (Kill Rock Stars) collects recordings 1978–1979 (minus the original “Wake Up”; see Lipstick Traces) and Lora Logic solo recordings through 1997, plus the 1980 Red Crayola/Art & Language single “Born in Flames,” the title song from Lizzie Borden’s film about feminist revolution. Singing in her highest, most unstable register, Lora steps across the lines of the tune as if she’s tip-toeing over bodies—daintily, and a little crazily. “We are born in flames,” she trills—and then the last word is taken even higher, floating away like a balloon. She turns around—you can hear her reverse position, as if in the studio there’s a mike in front of her and a mike in back—and begins to shout. “Of America’s mysteries, none remain,” she insists, but the mystery of who owns this voice is unsolvable. Words jump in the throat—“brutality,” “we broke the hidden tyranny,” “for which we stand,” “brings us to our knees”—but they fly off the body. Notes by GM. See The Roxy, X-ray Spex.

  Fairport Convention. “Tale in Hard Time,” on What We Did on Our Holidays (Island, 1969). See also Meet on the Ledge: The Classic Years (A&M, 1999).

  Firesign Theatre. Don’t Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me the Pliers (Columbia, 1970).

  Five Million Years to Earth (U.S.), Quatermass and the Pit (U.K.). Directed by Roy Ward Baker, screenplay by Nigel Kneale. 1967. In 1994 director Paul Tickell and scenarist Jon Savage contrived the Arena/BBC television film Quatermass•Punk and the Pistols•The Pit—the most corrosive punk performance footage imaginable intercut with uncanny rejoinders and prophecies from the original 1958 BBC version of Quatermass and the Pit. Courtesy Michèle Bernstein.

  Foster, Stephen C., ed. Lettrisme: Into the Present, special issue of Visible Language (Cleveland), 17 (Summer 1983).

  Fraser, Ronald, ed. 1968: A Student Generation in Revolt—An International Oral History. New York: Pantheon, 1988. For May ’68, the most stirring, quotidian testimony. Donald Nicholson-Smith is among the speakers.

  Front de la jeunesse. See Brau, Jean-Louis.

  Gang of Four (Leeds). “At Home He’s a Tourist”/“It’s Her Factory” (EMI, 1979, U.K.). Entertainment! (EMI, 1979, U.K.). Collected on the anthology 100 Flowers Bloom, with notes by Jon Savage (Rhino, 1998).

  Gillett, Charlie. The Sound of the City: The Rise of Rock and Roll (1970), rev. ed. New York: Pantheon, 1983.

  God and the State (Los Angeles). The Complete Works of God and the State (Independent Project, 1985, recorded 1983).

  Gordon, Kim. “ ‘I’m Really Scared When I Kill in My Dreams.’ ” Artforum (January 1983).

  Gray, Christopher, ed. and trans. Leaving the 20th Century: The Incomplete Work of the Situationist International. U.K.: Free Fall, 1974. Redesigned edition, London: Rebel Press, 1998.

  The Great Rock ’n’ Roll Swindle. Directed by Julien Temple, screenplay by Malcolm Forger. 1980. With Malcolm McLaren as the man behind the curtain, a deliriously fictionalized account of the rise and fall of the Sex Pistols—opening with the London Gordon Riots in 1780 and ending in a porn theater. In 2000 Temple switched sides with the straight but equally acute The Filth and the Fury, made for the surviving band members, who, Temple said, had been “scarred for life,” with he as much as anyone responsible for dragging them through “the chemotherapy of fame”—and who had by then won rights to their names, stories, and royalties. There are gestures at social contextualization—an opening collapse-of-England montage—but as Johnny Rotten makes clear, he wasn’t fighting unemployment or corruption or racism or Pink Floyd—he was fighting resignation, in all its forms. He thinks he lost: “I can take on England,” he says of himself and Sid Vicious. “But I couldn’t take on one heroin addict.” Eight years later, Temple went back to home ground with There’ll Always Be an England: Sex Pistols Live from Brixton Academy / The Knowledge of London: A Sex Pistols Psychogeography.

  At the show, an original-line-up reunion from 2007, there seems to be almost as much footage of the audience as of the band, and what’s odd is that you see almost no one holding up a cell phone camera, taking a picture of an event instead of living it out, even if a 30th anniversary show is a picture of another show before it is anything else. Instead people are shouting, jumping up and down, shoving, and most of all singing their heads off. Johnny Rotten, Steve Jones, Paul Cook, and Glen Matlock (“You’re a lucky cunt,” Rotten says near the end, “because this is the best band in the world”) find moments they might not have found before. The British tourist song “Beside the Seaside” is sung in full as a lead-in to “Holidays in the Sun”; in the fiercest passages of “God Save the Queen” and “Bodies” a true dada vortex opens up as words lose their meanings and seem capable of generating entirely new ones. But the real fun is in the Psychogeography (“The study of the specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals”—Internationale situationniste, no.1, June 1958, which is to say a matter of inheritors retrieving ancestors after the fact)—which is the band minus Rotten taking us on a tour of its old haunts. Cook and Matlock look the same as they did in 1976, merely older, but Jones is unrecognizable. On stage he looks like his own bodyguard; here, wrapped in a heavy coat, with dark glasses and a cap pulled down, he could be a mob boss or merely a thug with money in his pocket. The three are to
uring Soho: “It’s like a fuckin’ Dickens novel,” Jones says, surveying the sex shops, the dubious hotels, the strip clubs they once played (the El Paradiso, they remember, was so filthy they cleaned the place themselves). “I feel like a bucket of piss is going to come flying out the window.” They visit pubs, search for old performance spaces (“Do you know where Notre Dame Hall is? The Sex Pistols did a show there—ever heard of the Sex Pistols?”), and like spelunkers navigate dank hallways until they reach their old rehearsal space and crash pad off Denmark Street. Rotten’s caricatures of the band members are still on the walls, plus “Nanny Spunger” and “Muggerade” (manager Malcolm McLaren by way of Malcolm Muggeridge). There is the outline of a manifesto, words running down a wall:

  AWFUL

  HEARTACHE

  STUPID

  MISERY

  ILL BOOZE

  END DEPT ILL

  SICK

  DISMAL

  “This is where we began to take it seriously,” Glen Matlock says. “If there was half an idea floating around, we was in a position to do something about it.”

  Grosz, George. A Little Yes and a Big No, trans. Lola Sachs Dorina. New York: Dial, 1946.

  Hausmann, Raoul. “Club Dada Berlin, 1918–1921” (26 July 1966), in Dada Berlin: 1916–1924. Paris: Musée d’art moderne de la ville de Paris. An obscure but invaluable memoir.

  ______Courrier Dada (1958). Paris: Allia, 1992.

  ______“Dadaism and Today’s Avant-Garde.” Times Literary Supplement (London, 3 September 1964).

  ______Poèmes phonetiques complètes (S Press Tapes, West Germany). See Dada•Anti•Merz, Lipstick Traces, and especially Germany-Dada, directed by Helmut Herbst (Museum without Walls/KVC Entertainment, 1986), with performance by Hausmann of letter poetry.

  ______Raoul Hausmann 1886–1971: Der Deustche Spiesser ärgert sich. Ostfildern-Ruit, Germany: Museum für Moderne Kunst Photographie und Architektur/Verlag Gerd Hatje, 1994. Exhibition catalogue, opening with two 1929 portraits of Hausmann by August Sander. See also Benson.