Born in Paris in 1931, Debord lived in the south of France until high school. At 19, after being strongly impacted by the Isidore Isou film Venom and Eternity (1951), which screened at Cannes, he participated in the letterist movement in Paris. Under the influence of letterism, which rebelled against surrealism’s stagnation and its incorporation into the system and rejected the existing frames of literature and art, he released his first film Howls for Sade in 1952, aiming to dismantle image and sound, down to the elements of composition.

Gradually distancing himself from the letterist left-wing, with their increasing tendency to mysticism, Debord formed the Letterist International (LI) with Gil J. Wolman. Subsequently, in 1957 he joined with others, including Asger Jorn, a founder of CoBrA (a Scandinavian avant-garde art movement aimed at developing unconscious, free expression), to form the Situationist International (SI), which ultimately dissolved in 1972.

Thoroughly critical of what he termed “spectacle,” or mass consumption in capitalist society, Debord’s attempts to create a political reality throughout all segments of society, to construct a “situation” at the extremes of the “spectacle,” were theoretically realized in his book The Society of the Spectacle (1967), which can be said to have predicted the revolution of May ’68. His activities were not limited to writing and filmmaking, however, and included a range of border-crossing artistic expression, including collections of images and text drawn solely from “détourned” advertisements, maps, novels, comics, and the like, and the collaborative invention of a war game with Alice Becker-Ho.

In 1984, in protest at being questioned about the assassination of the financier of his films, Gérard Lebovici, Debord banned his films from being screened, and retreated to the tiny mountain village of Champot in Auvergne. Suffering a form of polyneuritis brought on by alcohol and refusing all treatment, Debord took his own life at his home in 1994.