We Support Everything Since the Dawn of Time That Has Struggled and Still Struggles: Introduction to Lettrist Cinema;

In this pocket-sized book on the history of Lettrist Cinema, F rench historian
and theorist N icole Brenez elucidates the formal innovations of this unique art
form that prefigured breakthroughs in film including the nouvelle vague and the
experiments of expanded cinema in the United States. Key figures and basic
concepts such as the use of jarring dissonant and disassociated soundtracks,
scratched and bleached celluloid and the place of Lettrist Cinema in avant-garde
history are discussed and illustrated with black-and-white stills. F ounded by
Romanian-born F rench poet, film critic and artist Isidore Isou in Paris immediately
after World War II, the Lettrist movement took its inspiration from Dada and
Surrealism. The movement remains active to this day, having lost none of the
aesthetic or ethical radicalism seeded by Isou in 1951 with his revolutionary film
Venom and Eternity, which became the movement s visual manifesto, influencing
such avant-garde filmmakers as Stan Brakage.