Off-Screen Cinema: Isidore Isou and the Lettrist Avant-Garde

Kaira M. Cabañas

Jan 2014 · University of Chicago Press

About this ebook

The first history in English of Paris s most important avant-garde movement to emerge after WWII: Lettrism. The Lettrists were genuine characters consumed by the relationships between word and image, between literature and performance. They were a bridge between Dada and Surrealism earlier in the century and Conceptual art in the 1960s. The Lettrists invented new strategies for creating "films": for example, linking and unlinking speech and sound, sound and image, and screen and space to produce what they called direct cinema. Gil J. Wolman used a weather balloon instead of a flat screen for projection. Maurice Lemaitre (a feisty old codger still active) expanded the screen to include spectators bodies, a device taken up again in The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Francois Dufrene abandoned the filmstrip, creating a film made entirely of live sound. In this way, the Lettrists set the stage for Situationism and for the French New Wave in film (Godard, Resnais) and the French new novel (Robbe-Grillet). To a degree, the book also examines the movement s overlapping successor, Situationism, led by Guy Debord."

About the author

Kaira M. Cabañas is an art historian and visiting professor in the Departamento de Letras at Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, as well as the author of The Myth of Nouveau Réalisme: Art and the Performative in Postwar France.