Maurice Lemaître
Cahier N° 19 : Avant toute nouvelle interview
Author Maurice Lemaître
Year 2005
Language French
Pages 38 pages
Publisher Paris Expérimental
Description
An emblematic figure of Lettrism, Maurice Lemaître looks back here at the historic years of the movement's founding, his encounter with his friend Isidore Isou, and his first works in the fields of poetry, the novel, painting, and cinema.
From his first article, written for Le Corbusier's magazine L'Homme et l'Architecture, to the pages of his metagraphic novel Canailles (1950), by way of the Libertaire survey on Céline, the first issues of his legendary magazine Ur or his newspaper Front de la Jeunesse, Lemaître responds to his interlocutors' questions and also revisits the circumstances surrounding the making of Isou's Traité de Bave et d'éternité and his own film Le Film est déjà commencé ? His relationships with Tristan Tzara and the Surrealists, as well as his advocacy for the Futurist Russolo and the Dada manifestos, round out a collection in which the question of his patronymic is also clarified.
Opening the Cahier is an important text, circulated in the sixties, which synthesizes the successive contributions of his first two films: Le Film est déjà commencé ? (1951) and Un Soir au cinéma, followed by Pour faire un Film (1962-63).
Numerous period photographs and documents, almost all previously unpublished, enrich and illustrate this issue.
An essential work for grasping the historical, aesthetic, and political dimensions of Maurice Lemaître's oeuvre on the one hand, and of Lettrism on the other, as a radical avant-garde movement.