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3 ‘There is No Film. Let Us Proceed to the Debates!’: Immanence as ‘Syncinema’ in Maurice Lemaître’s Le film est déjà commencé? (1951) and Guy Debord’s Hurlements en faveur de Sade (1952)Maurice Lemaître’s Le film est déjà commencé
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Published:October 2021
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Abstract
This chapter focuses on the Lettrist experiments in ‘discrepant cinema’ that were a major influence on the ciné-club circuit in Paris in the early 1950s. Triggered by Isidore Isou’s seminal Traité de bave et d’éternité (1951), their main objective was to break the stranglehold of film’s so-called ‘amplic’ phase, where everything, including sound, serves the organizing principle of the dominant narrative image, and to replace it with a ‘chiseling’ phase, where sound exists purely for itself, relegating the image to a marginalized background or blank screen. This was taken to further extremes by Maurice Lemaître’s Le film est déjà commencé (1951) which focused on what he called syncinema or ‘séance de cinema,’ where deliberately staged interruptions and scandals were written into the script to disrupt the screening: e.g. firing bullets at the screen, refusing to show the last reel, and hiring actors dressed as gendarmes to arrest the audience at the end. Debord’s Hurlements takes this to its logical Situationist conclusion, whereby the screen goes black for extended periods between speaking parts (which are themselves accompanied by a blank white screen), tearing holes in the surface of spoken and cinematic language to disclose an alternative ontological layer of endless possibilities.
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