Hurlements, the first film by Guy Debord (1931–1994), was initially conceived in April 1952 with images and a full narrative soundtrack. Two months later, it was drastically reconfigured for its premiere at the Ciné-Club d’Avant-Garde in Paris. Much like the empty film in Zen for Film, this revised version featured no representational images. Over three-quarters of the eighty-minute audio track was dominated by silence, and the sparse dialogue was a collage of nonsensical phrases, excerpts from journals, writings by James Joyce, the French civil code, and Isidore Isou’s Esthétique du cinéma (1952), among other texts. Hurlements unveiled the mechanisms of cinema by juxtaposing mechanics of the projector with the obviously fabricated character of the soundtrack and the darkness of the cinema. Yves Klein conceived Le Vide as a direct response to Hurlements and is, like Paik’s Zen for Film, a direct heir to Debord’s censure of the fetishization of image and spectacle. —CA