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

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 Lema?tre, Fran?ois Dufr?ne, and especially the movement's founder, Isidore Isou, a Romanian immigrant whose discrepant editing deliberately uncoupled image and sound. Through Caba?as'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.

Kaira M. Caba?asis an art historian and visiting professor in the Departamento de Letras at Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, as well as the author ofThe Myth of Nouveau R?alisme: Art and the Performative in Postwar France.

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1 To Salivate Is Not to Speak, as Boring as Watching Dust
2 French Cinema Dies of Suffocation
3 Spasmodic Spurts of White Light on a Sphere
4 Eroticism Should Occur in the Audience

Epilogue

Appendix: Letters from Stan Brakhage

Notes

Selected Bibliography

Index

“Provides a richly analyzed and rewarding context for critical films and film theory from subsequent decades. Invaluable for those interested in avant-garde film and art. . . .  Highly recommended."

Caba?as demonstrates that films such as Debords?Hurlements en faveur de Sade, Wolmans?Lanticonceptlóx