Off-Screen Cinema
Isidore Isou and the Lettrist Avant-Garde
One of the most important avant-garde movements in postwar Paris was Lettrism, which built an interest in the relations between writing and image in poetry, painting, and especially cinema. Highly influential, the Lettrists served as a bridge between the earlier works of the Dadaists and Surrealists and the later conceptual artists.
"Off-Screen Cinema" is the first monograph in English about the Lettrists. Offering a unique portrait of the avant-garde scene of 1950s Paris, it focuses on the film works of key Lettrist figures such as Gil J. Wolman, Maurice Lemaitre, Francois Dufrene, and especially the movement's founder, Isidore Isou, a Romanian immigrant whose deliberately uncoupled image and sound. Through Cabanas's history, we see not only the full scope of the Lettrist project, but also its clear influence on Situationism, the French New Wave, and the New Realists, as well as American filmmakers such as Stan Brakhage.
About the Author
Kaira M. Cabanas is lecturer and the director of the MA in Modern Art: Critical and Curatorial Studies in the department of art history and archaeology at Columbia University.
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 drives a wedge into our conventional ideas of avant-garde cinema, the relation between postwar modernist art and film, and the origins of the ideological critique of cinema by revealing the neglected, yet essential, role played by Lettrist cinema in Paris in the early 1950s. In finely chiseled prose, she details the revolutionary aspect of the cinematic work of Isidore Isou, Maurice Lemaitre, and Gil J. Wolman, as well as the better-known Guy Debord, transforming our sense of the alternative histories and practices of cinema" – Tom Gunning, author of "The Films of Fritz Lang"
"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"
