SITUATIONISM EMERGED as a movement in the mid 1950s and rapidly went into decline after 1968. Members were expelled almost as fast as they joined and never amounted to more than a few dozen. Its artistic roots lay in surrealism, its philosophical ones in existentialism, even though Debord spat on both. He had little patience with Sartre and other intellectuals who adopted anti-establishment poses while enjoying the perks of fame. He dismissed a top film maker, Jean-Luc Godard, as an "offspring of Mao and Coca Cola".