Off-Screen Cinema

Isidore Isou and the Lettrist Avant-Garde

Kaira M. Cabañas

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780226174624
• Topic: Arte
• Subtopic: Arte generale

One of the most important avant-garde movements of postwar Paris was Lettrism, which crucially built an interest in the relationship between writing and image into projects in poetry, painting, and especially cinema. Highly influential, the Lettrists served as a bridge of sorts between the earlier works of the Dadaists and Surrealists and the later Conceptual artists. Off-Screen Cinema  is the first monograph in English of the Lettrists. Offering a full portrait of the avant-garde scene of 1950s Paris, it focuses on the film works of key Lettrist figures like Gil J Wolman, Maurice Lemaître, François Dufrêne, and especially the movement's founder, Isidore Isou, a Romanian immigrant whose "discrepant editing" deliberately uncoupled image and sound. Through Cabañas's history, we see not only the full scope of the Lettrist project, but also its clear influence on Situationism, the French New Wave, the New Realists, as well as American filmmakers such as Stan Brakhage.

NOTES

Unless otherwise noted, all translations from non-English editions are my own. I would like to thank Frédéric Acquaviva for his assistance on aspects of the translations from French. Original emphases are maintained, with any alterations noted. With an eye to consistency, I have opted for the consistent application of American spelling for words such as theater.

INTRODUCTION

1. Isidore Isou, “Préambule à un film,” Le film français (Cinémonde), no. 9–11 (April 1951) (my italics).

2. Antonin Artaud, as cited in Stephen Barber, The Screaming Body/Antonin Artaud: Film Projects, Drawings, and Sound Recordings (London: Creation Books, 1999), 16.

3. In Artaud’s film scenarios, of which only La coquille et le clergyman (The Seashell and the Clergyman, 1926) was produced, noises and screams were to lacerate the flow of visual images, opening onto a cinematic experience that, like the experience described in his subsequent writing on theater, aimed to resist representation. Denis Hollier analyzes Artaud’s discussion of “pure cinema” and his attendant claim that the medium would “always be visual.” Artaud resisted audiovisual suture through his proposals for what Hollier aptly terms “negative synchronization.” Hollier highlights instances in which Artaud continues to write of silent films even when they were to have recourse to sound. The result was Artaud’s paradoxical designation of a “cinéma muet non muet” (nonsilent silent cinema). See Hollier, “The Artaud Case: The Prompter,” in Specters of Artaud: Language and the Arts in the 1950s, ed. Kaira M. Cabañas with Frédéric Acquaviva (Madrid: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, 2012), 51–61. See also Hollier, “The Death of Paper, Part Two: Artaud’s Sound System,” October, no. 80 (Spring 1997), 27–37. Artaud would not live to experience Lettrist experiments in cinema. However, prior to his death he was familiar with at least some of the work of the Lettrists, who are cited in Antonin Artaud, “Chiotte à l’esprit” (March 1947), Tel quel 3 (Fall 1960): 3–8.

4. See Foucault, “The Subject and Power,” afterword in Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, ed. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 208–26, esp. 220–21. “Conduct of conduct” is my translation of the phrase “conduire des conduites” from the original French version of the essay. See Foucault, Dits et écrits, vol. 4, 1980–1988 (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), 237.

5. Among the practices that defined the cinema as governance in occupied France were the following: (1) German newsreels were shown in every theater, with a mandate that the houselights be half on to allow identification of any troublemakers in the cinema; (2) German film policy, primarily instantiated through the German-owned film company Continental Films, promoted French film as a way of demonstrating Germany’s liberalism, expanding the international market for European film, and thereby overcoming US dominance; (3) German-produced French films treated historical and fantastic subjects as a way of providing “reassurance” and “entertainment” to the French population and of tapping into French nationalism; (4) Jews were barred from involvement in any aspect of the film industry, as actors or producers or distributors, thereby securing the Aryanization of the industry. See Evelyn Ehrlich, “The Film Industry and the Jews,” chap. 4 in Cinema of Paradox: French Filmmaking under the German Occupation (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 57–70.

6. For an incisive account of the affinity between the French and American film industries in these years, see Vanessa R. Schwarz, It’s So French! Hollywood, Paris, and the Making of Cosmopolitan Film Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007).

7. Exhibitions dedicated to the projected image in modern and contemporary art include Into the Light: The Projected Image in American Art, 1964–1977 (Whitney Museum of American Art, 2001); X-Screen: Film Installations and Actions in the 1960s and 1970s (Vienna: Mumok, 2004); Slide Show: Projected Images in Contemporary Art (Tate Modern/Baltimore Museum, 2005); and Le mouvement des images (Centre Pompidou, 2006–2007). In addition, anthologies such as Screen/Space: The Projected Image in Contemporary Art, ed. Tamara Trodd (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011); Expanded Cinema: Art, Performance, Film, ed. A. L. Rees, Duncan White, Steven Ball, and David Curtis (London: Tate Publishing, 2011); and Art and the Moving Image: A Critical Reader, ed. Tanya Leighton (London: Tate Publishing, 2008), also cover historical and contemporary work but do not mention Lettrist film. The front matter in Expanded Cinema includes, over two spreads, a chart that tracks various expanded cinema practices and includes a box on “Lettrist and Situationist Cinema,” but the volume contains no essay that covers this work.

8. While I was writing this book, the papers of Gil J Wolman and Maurice Lemaître were acquired by the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University. Around the same time, Guy Debord’s papers entered the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, although the collection contains only scant material related to his Lettrist years.

9. The following articles are among the few that discuss Lettrist film: Andrew Uroskie, “Beyond the Black Box: The Lettrist Cinema of Disjunction,” October, no. 135 (Winter 2011), 21–48; Rochelle Fack, “Bazin’s Chaplin Myth and the Corrosive Lettrists,” in Opening Bazin: Postwar Film Theory and Its Afterlife, ed. Dudley Andrew with Hervé Joubert-Laurencin (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); Nicole Brenez, “Improvised Notes on French Expanded Cinema,” Millennium Film Journal, nos. 43/44 (Summer 2005), 112–29; and Thomas Y. Levin, “Dismantling the Spectacle: The Cinema of Guy Debord,” in Guy Debord and the Situationist International, ed. Tom McDonough (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 321–453, originally published in On the Passage of a Few People through a Rather Brief Moment in Time: The Situationist International, 1957–1972 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press; Boston: Institute of Contemporary Art, 1989), 72–123. Greil Marcus touches on the Lettrists’ film production in Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 323–43. Isou, Lemaître, and Dufrêne receive small mention in an entry on sound in Hans Scheugl and Ernst Schmidt Jr., Eine Subgeschichte des Films: Lexikon des Avantgarde-, Experimental-und Undergroundfilms, 2 vols. (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1974), 2:931, 942, and in A. L. Rees, A History of Experimental Film and Video (London: BFI Publishing, 1999). Lettrism is not, however, included within general histories of avant-garde and experimental film, such as David Curtis, Experimental Cinema (New York: Universe Books, 1971), or Malcolm Le Grice, Abstract Film and Beyond (London: Studio Vista, 1977). More recently, Hannah Feldman and Pavle Levi have each included analysis of Lettrist cinema in their books. See Feldman, From a Nation Torn: Decolonizing Art and Representation in France, 1945–1962 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), chap. 3; and Levi, Cinema by Other Means (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), chap. 4.

10. In French, only Frédérique Devaux’s Le cinéma lettriste: 1951–1991 (Paris: Éditions Paris Expérimental, 1992) offers a comprehensive overview of Lettrist cinema. While her book is rich with descriptive and factual details, Devaux (also a practicing Lettrist filmmaker) does not offer an external analytic perspective through which to assess the historical specificity of Lettrist film. Other French books offer brief analyses of Lettrist film in the context of broader studies on experimental film. See Dominique Noguez, Eloge du cinéma expérimental: Définitions, jalons, perspectives (Paris: Musée national d’art moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, 1979; rev. ed., Paris: Éditions Paris Expérimental, 2010); Jeune, dure et pure! Une histoire du cinéma d’avant-garde et expérimental en France, ed. Nicole Brenez and Christian Lebrat (Paris: Cinémathèque Française; Milan: Mazzotta, 2001); and Jean-Michel Bouhours, Quel cinéma, vol. 5 of Documents—Documents sur l’art, ed. Lionel Bovier and Xavier Douroux (Zurich: JRP Ringier; Dijon: Les Presses du réel, 2010), esp. 156–203.

11. Dufrêne’s Tambours du jugement premier premiered in Cannes on May 4, 1952. In the darkened theater, an individual—whom Dufrêne calls “diseur” (pronouncer/sayer)—stood in each corner, carrying only a flashlight and a script. Wolm...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• One. To Salivate Is Not to Speak, as Boring as Watching Dust
• Two. French Cinema Dies of Suffocation
• Three. Spasmodic Spurts of White Light on a Sphere
• Four. Eroticism Should Occur in the Audience
• Epilogue
• Appendix. Letters from Stan Brakhage
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Illustration Credits
• Index