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.
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.
Off-Screen Cinema: Isidore Isou and the Lettrist Avant-Garde
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Off-Screen Cinema: Isidore Isou and the Lettrist Avant-Garde
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Overview
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.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780226174594 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Chicago Press |
| Publication date: | 01/26/2015 |
| Pages: | 192 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.30(d) |
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Off-Screen Cinema
Isidore Isou and the Lettrist Avant-Garde
By Kaira M. Cabañas
The University of Chicago Press
Copyright © 2014 The University of ChicagoAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-17459-4
CHAPTER 1
TO SALIVATE IS NOT TO SPEAK, AS BORING AS WATCHING DUST
IN MID-APRIL 1951, rumors circulated as to whether Isidore Isou would attend the premiere of his first film, Traité de bave et d'éternité (On Venom and Eternity), which was programmed as a fringe event complementing the official Cannes Film Festival. Isou's short-term imprisonment on account of the publication of his book Isou, ou La mécanique des femmes (Isou, or The Mechanics of Women, 1949) had made him somewhat averse to publicity. Moreover, as a Romanian Jew, he feared that he could potentially be deported from France should another scandal ensue. It was thus Marc'O (Marc-Guilbert Guillaumin), the film's producer, and fellow Lettrists Jean-Louis Brau, François Dufrêne, Maurice Lemaître, and Gil J Wolman who transported the film reels to Cannes and there worked to promote Isou's film. A photograph from the time shows a group of young men, including Marc'O and Guy Debord, walking down a street in Cannes with Isou, who had finally arrived from Paris (fig. 14).
Isou's presence in Cannes garnered considerable press attention. In the pages of Combat, one writer noted, "Isidore Isou is not happy, not at all happy that his real presence could be cast in doubt. Correction: Isidore Isou exists. He is there.... As for the film itself, Traité de bave et d'éternité, to whomever wants to see it, Isidore Isou will show a baggage claim ticket with which one may find, he says, the 5,200 meters of film." If Isou's initial nonappearance raised doubts as to his actual attendance, he made sure to provide a preamble to his film, which was published in Le film français (Cinémonde). Here, Isou declares his work's difference from the films of Orson Welles and the Neorealism of Roberto Rossellini and Vittorio De Sica, so popular at the time, and affirms, as noted in the introduction, "I am certain that the Traité de bave et d'éternité will change cinema drastically and push it toward unexpected paths. It requires only that juries lend it an attentive ear."
Traité de bave et d'éternité premiered on Friday, April 20, at the Vox theater in Cannes. The film opens with an intertitle that announces, "Dear spectators / You will see a 'discrepant' film. No complaints will be accepted upon exit. The Management" (fig. 15). This shot is followed by a black sequence during which we hear a Lettrist chorus, before cutting to the opening credits and a rolling dedication to filmmakers "who brought something new or personal to the art of cinema" (D. W. Griffith, Abel Gance, Sergei Eisenstein, Luis Buñuel, Jean Cocteau, et al.). A short sequence introduces the covers of the various books penned by Isou, followed by the intertitle "Chapitre I: LE PRINCIPE" (Chapter 1: The Principle). The shots that follow show Isou and his Lettrist cohort walking in the streets of Saint-Germain-des-Prés (fig. 16). But the sound track does not correspond to the images we see. In line with Isou's theory of montage discrépant (discrepant editing), the film uncouples the semantic unity of sound and image in order to insist on the two tracks' independent development. In this first of Traité 's three chapters, the sound track represents a film club debate; one listens to the protagonist, Daniel, defend his film theories amid the shouts of the public: "Decadent!" "You will piss off the spectators!" A commentator offers external reflection on Daniel. And all the while, the unrelenting rhythm of a Lettrist chorus occupies the acoustic background.
At approximately ten minutes, Daniel declares, "I want to separate the ear from its cinematic master: the eye." At twenty-three minutes, he asserts, "I want a film which will really hurt your eyes.... We should leave the cinema with a headache!" He shouts his proposal for a new cinema as best he can over the cantankerous public's hisses and boos. The audience interruptions propel Daniel to advance his argument, in which he explains how photographic images will be destroyed par la parole (by speech). As if taking Daniel's words to their logical conclusion, for the screening at Cannes, Isou projected two-thirds of Traité's without images, thereby failing to provide viewers with the purportedly most basic and constitutive element of a film: the image track. Only chapter 1 of the image track was completed at the time of the film's premiere; for chapters 2 and 3, the Vox was plunged into darkness, as the sound track voices were emitted from loudspeakers and acoustically filled the room. Isou's plea for an "attentive ear" thus proved to be a literal demand for the film's first audience. The public and press were decidedly furious, while Jean Cocteau allegedly conveyed to Isou that the film was the "the most beautiful scandal of the entire festival." To be sure, what the initial screening at Cannes put in relief was Isou's deprivileging of the image track in his pursuit of montage discrépant.
MOVEMENT OF SPEECH
Isou's theory of montage discrépant in part explains his lack of concern, or flagrant bravado, when choosing to present the final chapters of Traité without an image track. In doing so, he explicitly violated the consolidation of film's technical apparatus in the service of the continuity of movement, illusion, and narrative absorption. But let us recall: "discrepant montage ... diverts the tracks and makes them indifferent to one another." In line with this assertion, the sound track was conceived as an independent entity and thereby complete even in the absence of the corresponding image track. During the film's second chapter, in the darkness of the Vox, one would hear the banal details of a love story involving Daniel, a woman named Eve, and another woman named Denise, and then in the final chapter be told that he and Eve attended a Lettrist recital. A voice-over defends Lettrist poetry, claiming that it is "more popular than Surrealist poetry." In the minutes that follow, Daniel concludes his theoretical defense of a new type of cinema. Daniel's inquiry in chapter 1—"Whoever said that the cinema, whose meaning is movement, must be absolutely the movement of the photograph and not the movement of the speech [parole]?"—underscores Isou's indifference to reproducing movement on the screen. To this end, I would like to suggest the extent to which the screening at Cannes foregrounded how Isou imagined the sound track as a site for recovering the phonetic substance of speech and the materiality of words.
Daniel's declarations were later echoed and formalized in Isou's "Esthétique du cinéma" (Aesthetic of Cinema, 1952) in a section dedicated to "la bande-paroles" (speech tracks). In this context, Isou describes how image-sound relations within montage practices had explored all possible subjects but how it remained for cinema to explore "the secret chances of speech and the nuances of sound combinations." "Sound cinema," he declared, "was a printing press for speech." Isou frames sound cinema as a recording technology but one that, like the printing press, results in language's codification and representation. With sound cinema or the talking film, speech is assimilated to the conceptual content of language, rather than harnessed toward phonation and revealing the process of enunciation. As a corrective, Isou argues for bringing the art of rhetoric to the sound track in cinema. For Isou, rhetoric does not necessarily mean an art of persuasion tied exclusively to the communicative content of known words, but rather a means by which to "offer cinema speeches [discours] of a new kind [genre inédit]."
This brings me to a consideration of Traité's concluding sound track, which presents experiments in Lettrist poetry as an alternative to speech-on-film. The first recorded performance of Lettrist poetry presented in Traité's third chapter is of "Marche" (March) by Dufrêne. The poem's rhythmic delivery is punctuated by shifts in volume. One can only imagine that with no visual image, in the darkness of the Vox, spectators were left with little semantic security to hold on to. While the poem's sounds conjure the orders and execution of military routine (a reading undoubtedly inflected by its "march" title), the audience would nevertheless have been confronted with a voice whose source they could not see or place in relation to the screen. Such a purely "acousmatic" situation goes against the grain of a cinema that attempts to fit sights to sounds in order to produce a visualized listening. Traité's first spectators were in a doubly paradoxical situation: listening to a recorded voice that insisted on speech's material source, the very body that was negated by the absence of a visual image.
By using Lettrist poetry as part of the sound track's experimental conceit, Isou lays claim to bodily intonation and its signifying possibilities for sound in cinema. Such a stance runs counter to how sound recording in relation to speech has, until recently, been framed. If the image track represents the space-time accessible to the camera through, for example, framing and point of view, the sound track has been claimed to reproduce sonic material. Within these terms, and with regard to speech-on-film, Jean-Louis Baudry affirms "that in cinema—as in the case of all talking machines—one does not hear an image of the sounds but the sounds themselves." Such a stance upholds the semiotic incommensurabilty between the iconicity of photography and the indexical trace of sound as means of specifying two recording technologies. Baudry's argument finds further support for the semiotic neutrality of speech recording by turning to the voice's discursive status in other disciplines: "Hence, no doubt, one of the basic reasons for the privileged status of voice in idealist philosophy and in religion: voice does not lend itself to games of illusion ... between the real and its figurativity (because voice cannot be represented figuratively)." Baudry aligns voice with the ideality of meaning and thereby assimilates an understanding of voice to the conceptual content of speech, to what words, independent of their phonation, literally say.
Isou rejects the idealist alignment of speech with pure thought and stresses how the body effects verbal signification and how intonation insists on the materiality of speech through tone, modulation, cadence, and inflection. What is more, Traité foregrounds the materiality (as opposed to transparency) of recording by transferring an unusual, outdated technology of sound recording onto film's more advanced optical sound track. At approximately three and a half minutes, an intertitle explains (fig. 19):
The sound was first recorded on vinyl with the kind help of Robert Beauvais, Gisèle Parry, and Caron, under the direction of M. Farge. The disks when transferred to the film retain certain noises or "crackling," which have been kept because they contribute to the—involuntary—revolutionary character of the film.
With Traité's faulty transfer of sound, Isou uses one type of sound technology to remediate another. Remediation usually describes the condition whereby a medium "appropriates the techniques, forms and social significance of other media and attempts to rival or refashion them in the name of the real." Consequently, it most frequently refers to media that replace older technologies in the service of more accurately reproducing reality. Hence, for example, the conception of television as an advanced form of radio. In contrast to this drive toward technological supersession coupled with realist ambition, Isou engages with a process that Pavle Levi has termed "retrograde remediation." That is, he uses a newer technological medium (optical track) inadequately by transferring an older medium (vinyl) onto it, drawing attention to the material and signifying properties of the original recording: the noise and crackle to which the intertitle refers. His sound track implicates sound recording as a signifying practice and complicates a realist semiotics of listening in which the recording (sign) is taken to be equivalent to its referent (acoustic event). In this way, Isou's purposely flawed sound track counters the dominant practice of self-effacing sound work in commercial cinema, whereby good sound recording "rewards the suspension of disbelief with perceptual fantasy." Here Isou's emphasis on the materiality of recording finds a parallel in his investigation into the material basis of speech. Each contributes to the specificity of his heterodox modernism: he uses Lettrist poetry together with the sound's second-rate transfer to critique the notion of the semiotic transparency of speech-on-film.
Isou and his fellow Lettrists brought their poetic experimentation to the public arena of performed speech at mythic venues such as Le Tabou, where live Lettrist poetry performances displaced the propositional content of language in favor of the physical, organic basis of speech and the immediacy of aural sensation (fig. 20). Traité's impure and less than technically precise sound recording instead responds to Isou's perhaps surprising interest in the productive (not just reproductive) possibilities of sound and speech technology. My claims with regard to the film's sound track point to an alternative genealogy for postwar European poetry's increasing attention to the body and use of recording technologies. One might then consider Traité's sound track as a possible origin for the insistence on bodily sounds progressively explored by Dufrêne, Wolman, and Brau. With their poésie physique (physical poetry), each abandoned the written poetic score (which was still preserved in the poetic work of Isou and Lemaître) in order to experiment with the aural perspectives offered by the microphone's mediation in the amplification of bodily sounds (I take up this issue in relation to Wolman in chapter 3). Henri Chopin's poésie sonore (sound poetry) would go further, exploring the productive possibilities of the magnetophone.
MOST REVOLTING FILM IN THE HISTORY OF CINEMA
From Cannes, Isou returned to Paris, where he completed Traité on May 23, 1951. As in the previously completed first chapter, he refrained from producing the visualized listening situation typical of image-sound relations in cinema. Instead he provoked a dismantling of realist expectations with regard to the images one sees. The final film with image track includes three chapters, "Le principe," "Le développement," and "La preuve." The first, as described above, includes shots of Isou and other Lettrists walking around Saint-Germaindes-Prés, while the sound track represents a film club debate. In the remainder of the film, Isou experiments with the ciselure (chiseling) of the visual image through the manipulation of the celluloid by writing on the film, presenting sequences in negative, and inverting shots to suggest 180-degree camera rotation. Chapter 2 includes a rendezvous with a woman and found footage culled from the trash bins of specialized film labs, among them the Services Cinématographiques du Ministère des Armées, while the previously mentioned love story unfolds on the sound track (fig. 21). Chapter 3 features Lettrists such as Dufrêne and Marc'O; cameos by avant-garde figures such as Jean Cocteau, Marcel Achard, and Armand Salacrou; and the use of clear and countdown leader—all in conjunction with a sound track that concludes the film club debate and features the aforementioned Lettrist poetry recordings, which are paired with black-and-white abstract sequences to suggest a structural parallel between the whittling of semantic reference in speech (Lettrist poetry) and the abstract (chiseled) images projected on the screen (fig. 22).
The very day of its completion Traité de bave et d'éternité was screened at the Ciné-Club Avant-Garde 52, which was directed by Armand Cauliez at the Musée de l'Homme, a key location for early screenings of Lettrist films. Due to its last-minute programming, the showing went unannounced in the ciné-club's listing, published earlier that month in the pages of Cinéma 51. At this time, the film's reception was lukewarm at best. Eight months later, however, the debates surrounding Isou's film again escalated. From January 25 to February 7, 1952, Traité de bave et d'éternité was officially released at the Studio de l'Etoile, the onetime home of Henri Langlois's Cercle du Cinéma, the precursor to the Cinémathèque Française. Various emerging filmmakers and artists attended Traité's screenings, among them Jean-Luc Godard and Yves Klein, who each informally participated in the Lettrist milieu. Klein's exposure to Lettrist film in part explains his abandonment of painting's conventional support, a subject I return to in the epilogue.
Traité's progamming was accompanied by the usual publicity, including a poster designed by Jean Cocteau (fig. 23). On the poster one could read the actors' names as well as a list of prizes the film had received: the "Prix en marge du Festival de Cannes," "Prix des Spectateurs d'avant-garde 1951," and "Prix St. Germain des Prés 1951." At the bottom of the poster are two additional taglines: "The film that the conformist press want to suppress" and "The film that the youth and avant-garde exalt." Isou and his friends also posted fliers and handed out leaflets to people waiting in line at nearby cinemas, declaring that Traité was "the most revolting film in the history of cinema." On account of their aggressive campaign, Isou and one of his cohort were taken to the police station, more than likely for disturbing the public order. The strategy is one Isou would advocate again four months later when he wrote, "We must have an effect on the theater managers and their public, either by leaflets or by direct communication."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Off-Screen Cinema by Kaira M. Cabañas. Copyright © 2014 The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press.
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction 1
1 To Salivate Is Not to Speak, as Boring as Watching Dust 21
2 French Cinema Dies of Suffocation 49
3 Spasmodic Spurts of White Light on a Sphere 75
4 Eroticism Should Occur in the Audience 97
Epilogue 123
Appendix: Letters from Stan Brakhage 135
Notes 141
Selected Bibliography 167
Illustration Credits 173
Index 175