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Some Notes on Conjuring Away Art: Radical Disruptions of Image and Text in Avant-Garde Film Allen S. Weiss AT THE AGE OF FOUR I had my first active, indeed experimental, experience with film. It was the Christmas of 1957 at the country home of friends of die family. After a slide show, I was entrusted with the fascinating task of casting the unsuccessful slides into the fireplace, creating a brief but fascinating pyrotechnical display. Needless to say, I was totally unaware that this act prefigured several classic trajectories of avant-garde cinema. For there exists an avant-garde which would have art self-destruct and fade into oblivion. This is precisely what would constitute a true aesthetic utopia, in both senses of the term: a perfect instantiation of the artwork, and, more literally, a place that does not exist. This essay is a study of several such Utopian gestures, and the works that remain as their trace. It is difficult to say whether Lettrism is merely organized neo-Dada, or the manifestation of an exacerbated solipsism, or yet one more quest for a totalizing Gesamtkunstwerk. Conceived in 1942 by Isidore Isou, Lettrism was given its first polemical and theoretical statement in Isou's 1947 manifesto, Introduction à une nouvelle poésie et une nouvelle musique. Consider Lettrism 's poetic genealogy, proposed by Isou: Baudelaire destroyed the anecdote for the sake of the poem; Verlaine destroyed the poem for the sake of verse; Rimbaud destroyed verse for the sake of the word; Mallarmé arranged and perfected the word; Tzara destroyed the word for nothing; Isou arranged the letter, to create the anecdote. Lettrism proffers two aporias typical of the avant-garde. Artwork versus Gesamtkunstwerk: Lettrist formalism entailed the creation of discrete works in all media, yet, ultimately, Lettrism was as much a way of life as it was an art movement. Formalism versus militancy: the reduction of poetry to its lettric and phonetic basis authorized all permutations and combinations of letters and sounds, yet all the while the use value of this linguistic decomposition was put to militant and socially liberatory ends. Consequently, Lettrism is as much a history of its theoretical texts, slogans , manifestos, and scandals as it is the history of its poetic works, and, as was typical of many avant-garde political aspirations, Lettrism fashioned itself as an art of the masses, at the origins of a revolutionary youth movement , prefiguring the polemic of May '68. 82 Winter 1998 Weiss It is in this context, and through these aporias, that Lettrist cinema, almost totally neglected in the histories of experimental cinema, must be considered. Lettrist cinema was inaugurated in scandal: Isou, announcing the destruction of the cinema, created his first film, Traité de bave et d'éternité (1951). The Lettrists pressured the organizers of the 1951 Cannes Film Festival to give Isou's film a screening; ultimately, only the soundtrack was "screened," shocking many of the critics, yet Isou was awarded the "Prix de Γ AvantGarde ," created on the spot, due to the graces of Cocteau. Isou's film utilized numerous experimental techniques, discussed in his Manifeste du cinéma discrepant (1951) and Esthétique du cinéma (1952): radically disjunctive or "discrepant" editing, which separates image and sound-tracks; "impoverishment " of the cinematic image by means of direct work on the film strip (scratching and writing); creation of a coherent word-track, such that the sound track no longer reinforces the images, but becomes an independent entity. The second Lettrist film, Maurice Lemaître 's Le film est déjà commenc é? (1951) further increased the experimentation, saturating the filmstrip with written signs, utilizing single-frame subliminal editing, flicker effects, and an unsynchronized sound-track which, in its heterogeneous linguistic, poetic and rhetorical play, creates a self-reflexive and theoretical "narrative," implicating the spectator in the filmic work. Such performative extremes result in two contradictory impulses. The creation of a new cinema: this creativity was not only inherent in formal Lettrist filmic innovations, but even more so in the radical rethinking of cinematic production, distribution and presentation, creating new possibilities for the reception of cinema. The destruction of cinema: pushed to the extreme, such "performances" shattered cinema's structural...

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