Off-Screen Cinema

Isidore Isou and the Lettrist Avant-Garde

By: Kaira M. CabaÃ±as

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Paperback | 1 January 2015 | Edition Number 1

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192 Pages

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2.54 x 1.77 x 0.11

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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 Lemaître (a feisty old codger still active) expanded the screen to include spectators' bodies, a device taken up again in The Rocky Horror Picture Show." François 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.

Industry Reviews

"Cabanas demonstrates that films such as Debord's Hurlements en faveur de Sade, Wolman's L'anticoncept, and Isou's Traite de bave et d'eternite actually materialize the history of cinema: the flicker of light/dark passages recalling the opening years of filmic rictus, or passages of silence bringing us back to the period before the entrance of synchronized sound. Off-Screen Cinema is magnificently researched and argued, a pleasure to encounter."--Rosalind Krauss, author of The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths
"Cabanas's careful account of the Lettrists gives her readers ample material to consider just what to make of these self-proclaimed and long-heroized bad boys."
-- "Film Quarterly"
"Fantastic. Off-Screen Cinema is an urgently necessary project, and a joy to read. It is an important book which I would gladly recommend to scholars of art and film history, performance history, and postwar French cultural studies. Destined to be widely read and discussed."--Andrew V. Uroskie, author of Between the Black Box and the White Cube
"The study of twentieth-century art is greatly enriched by the sustained attention Cabanas grants to Lettrist cinema's brief flourishing, particularly where she demonstrates its impact on important modes of performative and critical practice to follow. . . . Cabanas's essential study illuminates a vital episode in the longer history of the contemporary post-medium condition."
-- "CAA Reviews"

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