by Greil Marcus
Dada floated high-risk bonds on the cheap. The price went up with the dada version of the word on the street, the exemplary act, but the bonds were odds on to be bad paper the next day. Dada paid off on the reversible connecting factor: all or nothing. You could get in on the action for a penny; to get out you had to pay in kind. You might come in out of contempt for history—then you’d fall in love with the idea that you could make it, because history had assumed a debt that had never been paid—because, save in apparently trivial, vanishing moments, the debt had been forgotten, and even the chits had been lost.
The chits had been signed by God. They said that, failing to make good on the promise of the Garden of Eden, of the Kingdom of God on earth, he would give men and women all his fixed assets: all the beasts of the field, all the birds of the air. The catch was that men and women were to be unfixed; as masters of creation they could never be masters of themselves. In the logic of those who understood Notre-Dame not as a momentary scandal but as a breach in stopped time, this meant that God was simply a debtor with a good lawyer: Jesus Christ, Esq.
Those chits not lost had been burned along with those who tried to redeem them. The gnostic revelation that God could be fully manifest in human beings, that human beings could be god, that earth could be heaven, that heaven could be fully manifest on earth, was driven underground. But there this revelation was placed under so much pressure that when it surfaced it could, to some, carry the power to transform a gesture into a sign, a joke into a bomb.
The power principle of the Brethren of the Free Spirit had never been completely suppressed. In the Middle Ages, it was the idea that the authority of the church could be collapsed by an intensification of the mysticism the church carried within itself. In the modern world, it was the idea that a tiny group like the Lettrist International could collapse secular authority by intensifying the mysticism secretly contained in the secular realm—a mysticism, now imprinted in commodities and representations, in money and in art, that had been taken over from the church. In the early 1950s, this was the freedom to prove that society was only a construct and fate only a swindle, that a new world was no less likely than the old—that, given the right weather, the right light, the right words, the right actors, the right theater, all of social life, every institution and habit, might fall to ruin as swiftly and as finally as any empire celebrated in the history books.
The Brethren of the Free Spirit, Norman Cohn wrote in the book the situationists knew as Fanatiques de l’apocalypse,
were not social revolutionaries and did not find their followers amongst the turbulent masses of the urban poor. They were in fact gnostics bent on their own individual salvation; but the gnosis at which they arrived was a quasi-mystical anarchism—an affirmation of freedom so reckless and unqualified that it amounted to a total denial of every kind of restraint and limitation. These people could be regarded as remote precursors of Bakunin and of Nietzsche—or rather of that bohemian intelligentsia which during the last half-century has been living from ideas once expressed by Bakunin and Nietzsche in their wilder moments. But extreme individualists of that kind can easily turn into social revolutionaries—and effective ones at that—if a potential revolutionary situation arises.
In October 1967, in Internationale situationniste no. 11, one could have found a blind quote from Cohn under a photo of a ratty storefront, the photo purposely miscaptioned “ALLEGED MEETING PLACE OF THE INTERNATIONAL SITUATIONISTS IN PARIS”:
Johannes Baader, about 1919
It is characteristic of this kind of movement that its aims and premises are boundless . . . Whatever their individual histories, collectively these people formed a recognizable social stratum—a frustrated and rather low-grade intelligentsia . . . And what followed then was the formation of a group of a peculiar kind
—“a true prototype,” Cohn had continued, in a line the situationists did not quote, “of a modern totalitarian party”—
a restlessly dynamic and utterly ruthless group which, obsessed by the apocalyptic phantasy and filled with the conviction of its own infallibility, set itself infinitely above the rest of humanity and recognized no claims save that of its own supposed mission . . . A boundless, millennial promise made with boundless, prophet-like conviction to a number of rootless and desperate men in the midst of a society where traditional norms and relationships are disintegrating—here, it would seem, lay the source of that peculiar subterranean fanaticism . . .
The situationists were practicing détournement: all cultural production is held in common, there is no separation between authors and readers, and no sources are cited, because all ideas float free. The situationists were practicing irony, because irony is always a component of détournement. But their irony was of a peculiar kind; it simultaneously alerted the reader to the fact that the situationists understood the ludicrousness of their apocalyptic fantasy, and confirmed that they meant every stolen word. It was this long-cold cauldron under which Isou’s theories and the action of the Notre-Dame four had once again lit a fire.
THE ATTACK ON CHARLIE CHAPLIN
Isou himself was not involved in the Notre-Dame brouhaha. He was busy attracting disciples, repelling enemies, organizing Youth Uprising, and, by the by, decomposing the movies.
In the year after Notre-Dame, Isou made his first film, his Treatise on Slime and Eternity. During the course of a Left Bank love story of almost unbelievable pretentiousness (not to say length—the movie ran four-and-a-half hours), he both pronounced and demonstrated the manifesto of cinéma discrépant, mixing up his images and his soundtrack, negating the filmic aspect of the film with torn and scratched celluloid, intentional flickering, and passages of blank screen. “I believe first of all that the cinema is too rich,” he proclaimed. “It is obese. I announce the destruction of the cinema, the first apocalyptic sign of rupture in this fat organism we call film.” The imperatives of the minimum and the maximum naturally led Isou and his group from the altars of their austere Parisian meeting rooms to the fleshpots of Babylon—to the 1951 Cannes Film Festival, where they disrupted one gathering after another in a crusade to get Isou’s movie shown.
When the attempt was first made, Isou did not show himself. The act of creation made one god; Isou, it was announced, made his film in six days, and thus on the seventh day, purportedly the day the lettrists presented the work, he rested. Post-Cannes screenings of the Treatise in Paris advertised an astonishing cast, including actor Jean-Louis Barrault and cineaste Jean Cocteau. For the time being, Isou settled for dedicating his work to the masters of classic film (D. W. Griffith, Erich von Stroheim, Abel Gance, etc.), thus placing himself in their company.
Soon enough, the lettrists caused enough trouble to win Isou a screening—restricted, at the last minute, to an audition of his soundtrack. The Combat critic was aghast, though he allowed that “between Eve and Isidore there is still a place for true cinema” (Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s All About Eve won the Cannes Special Jury Prize). Critic Maurice Schérer (later better known as director Eric Rohmer) rallied with a rather apologetic defense in Cahiers du cinéma, which caused even a young Jean-Luc Godard to blanch. Through the graces of Cocteau, the festival actually awarded Isou the “Prix de l’Avant-Garde”—which was contrived on the spot.
THE CANNES ACTION
The Cannes action attracted Guy-Ernest Debord, then nineteen, who joined the lettrist group; he soon fell in with Wolman, Berna, Jean-Louis Brau, and Ghislain de Marbaix. In April 1952 he published an elaborate, provisional scenario for a first film in Ion, a thick, one-issue lettrist journal devoted to the cinema—which, since Isou had announced its destruction, was thus ripe for renewal.
Ion is an interesting document—though less for its assembly of tracts and scripts than for the photos of the contributors. Isou, who leads off with “Aesthetics of the Cinema,” appears in his proto-Elvis posture, complete with flowered tie, boyish face, and aged eyes; Wolman is a dandified Jewish intellectual; Marc, O, the editor (under the name
Marc-Gilbert Guillaumin—the lettrists were constantly changing their names, or their spellings, accenting, or pairings, as Debord finally did in about 1960, dropping the “-Ernest”), is a heroic young-man-with-a-movie-camera; sound poet François Dufrêne strikes a bathing-beauty pose on a high rock wall; there are two smiling, clean-cut young women; then there are those who made their portraits into acts.
Serge Berna contributed an essay called “Down to the Bone”; he looks ready to stare his way down to it. Within a thick, smooth-skinned, utterly expressionless face, his eyes are preternaturally empty. It is a prophetic face: the face of the generic 1950s mass killer. It is nothing one would see on the front pages a few years later (Charley Starkweather always leered); it is the face that appeared in everyone’s bad dreams, the face of a man who didn’t know what he wanted but knew how to get it, a face so blank its only cinematic equivalent is the hockey mask Jason wears in the Friday the 13th movies. In its way Berna’s portrait says more about the motives behind the Notre-Dame incident than anything in the incident itself. Silent, it calls up the most threatening of all Free Spirit maxims: “The perfect man is the motionless Cause.” And, the picture asks, the ruined man? “When you look into the abyss, the abyss also looks into you,” Nietzsche said, and then this is what you look like.
Gabriel Pomerand sits in front of a wall painted in triangles filled with lines; his face is streaked to match the backdrop. He is part shaman, part alchemist, part living metagraphic. Like the sounds Wolman brought forth from his body, there was something impossibly old about the paint on Pomerand’s face. The lettrists liked to use their clothes for letter poetry, painting their coats, trousers, and ties with new alphabets, so this might have been a small jump, except that there were no letters on Pomerand’s face: what he had drawn on himself was more like the blind instinct to communicate, to symbolize, to make a mark. If one goes back to the oldest known symbolic representation, a bone engraving found in a Middle Paleolithic level in the Pech de l’Azé cave in the Dordogne, the markings, dated to about 150,000 B.C., plainly speak the same language Pomerand was using—and body painting is older still, a million years older.
Serge Berna, Ion, April 1952
Gabriel Pomerand, Ion. April 1952
Face-streaking in modern art can be dated at least to the futurists; it has been spreading ever since. In 1968 the lettrist poet Roberto Altman appeared in public with his face obliterated by letters drawn in heavy dark ink, strokes so broad and brutal they looked less like the irreducible constituent elements of language than some horrible new disease; in 1980, in tiny subterranean Los Angeles punk clubs, Darby Crash of the Germs, who killed himself later in the year, caught it. He went beyond the punk gesture of handing the microphone to the crowd, beyond the punk star’s self-abasing demystification of the barrier between performer and spectator; by his time that was already a cliché. Lying on his back with his shirt stripped off, he proffered a magic marker, and let members of the audience write on his body. They made graffiti that in the act came forth as more of a violation than any act of punk self-mutilation, than the sadism of any paying customer approaching a naked performance artist.
The violation took place in the cracks of one’s knowledge of how performance, or any art, is supposed to work. If you pay to see others believe in themselves, as Kim Gordon wrote, as you put your money down you might not quite know that, but you would know that the performer embodies subjectivity, and thus turns those who watch into objects, or dissolves the objectified selves spectators have brought to the performance. But Darby Crash was doing something much more confusing. It was as if he had wired his body for sound, wired it such a way that the circuits made audible noise out of the scrawls on his skin, as if, when he passed the magic marker, which might have been the microphone, into the crowd, the voices of others came out of his mouth—or as if, when he took the marker, the microphone, back, he heard his voice coming out of other mouths. Or was it that, lying on the stage, he destroyed the commodified subjectivity of the performer and became an absolute object, no theoretical objectification, but a thing? You could write on it with no more compunction than you would bring to a wall—FUCK YOU GERRI LOVES TONY THE CRITICISM OF RELIG—until the marker went dry.
One can return to Pomerand’s face and look in vain for a sign of surprise. Altman’s disease, Darby Crash’s violation—Pomerand’s eyes are focused tightly enough to see it all coming, as if he meant his face to bring forth just this future. As with Wolman’s noise, Pomerand’s face was an affirmation of a poetry beyond the ability of language to contain it; as a negation of ordinary language it was a negation of ordinary life. Marx’s poetry was word-magic; his constant inversion of the genitive (“To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions”) was his rhythm, his new way of talking. In microcosm it was also the reversible connecting factor: the “insurrectional style,” Debord called it as he took it as his own (“even the true is a moment of the false”). Magic: as a negation of ordinary life the style was an affirmation that the words used to describe that life could reveal the tune one had to call to make life dance. If lettrism did not excavate this phenomenon its negation of all extant forms of communication cleared the ground for it; the suggestion was almost present that if it was poetry that brought the unsettled debts of history back into play, unsettled debts of history brought forth poetry. The longer one looks at Pomerand’s portrait, the more unstable it becomes; this is why.
Even keeping company with Pomerand and Berna, Debord’s portrait stands out—perhaps because it is more obvious, easier to read, less shocking, not shocking at all, but no less demanding. Made on “purposefully damaged film”—a technique borrowed from Isou’s movie—the picture looks like a relic, something scavenged out of the attic of a dead relative. As an argument, the mottled photo was clear: for Debord, “lettrism” is already a memory.
The shot frames Debord against a wall from head to knees. He poses tieless, his head cocked to one side, hands jammed into his pockets. Inside the cracks and spots of the film stock the posture is completely up to date, the essence of postwar cool. One sees a disturbingly casual, confident, smug, seductive young man who promises love or violence, or both, a man who seems to be judging whoever might be judging him. He doesn’t have Berna’s horror or Pomerand’s mystery; what he has, the shot says, is a future. But it was Wolman’s film that had already caused trouble.
WOLMAN’S
Wolman’s 1951 L’Anticoncept combined a seemingly endless “autochronistic” (opposed narrative) script, a lovely motto (“The days of the poets are finished / Today I sleep”), and a visual content entirely restricted to black-framed white spheres. (“Everything round is Wolman,” ran a second, punning motto.) The movie had its debut on 11 February 1952 at the Avant-Garde Film Club in the Musée de l’Homme in Paris, projected on a helium-filled balloon anchored to the floor with a leash.
The government censor, apparently convinced that anything so obscure necessarily carried subversive messages—the lettrists would have naturally agreed—banned the work. Its only hope was a guerrilla screening at Cannes: recognition from the festival might force the censor to back down. The campaign to get it shown did not repeat the triumph of the previous year; though eleven lettrists were arrested for disturbing the peace, Le Figaro dismissed the troublemakers as indistinguishable from autograph hounds. Three decades later L’Anticoncept was shown with honor as part of the “Paris-Paris” exhibition at the Pompidou—an edifice that by then dominated what was left of Wolman’s Marais neighborhood. Debord’s film, as it was ultimately presented, took place on another level.
In Ion, in a preface to his filmscript—a preface modestly titled “Prolegomena to Any Future Cinema”—Debord described his then-imaginary movie as a superseding not only of conventional cinema but of cinéma discrépant itself, which according to the mechanics of invention could not be superseded, since it was the breaking down of film into
its constituent elements. “All this belongs to an era which is finished,” Debord said, “and which no longer interests me.” He expressed regret that he “lacked the leisure to create a work that would be less than eternal,” a work that would endure no longer than the impulse behind it; the making of a real moment, he was saying, was the hardest work of all. Given the script that followed, this was wildly unconvincing. Split down the page between descriptions of soundtrack and images, Debord’s scenario pitted literary references against intended footage of riots, colonialist military maneuvers, Left Bank hanging-out, and a fair number of shots of Debord himself. There were a few isouienne blank spots and a lot of letter poetry. Stripped of its lettrist conventions, it was a twenty-year-old’s funeral oration on lost youth; the tone was misty and received. (“I have destroyed the cinema,” Debord said, quaintly returning to the simplest surrealist act, “because it was easier than shooting passersby.”) Various surrealist icons and suicides were trotted out and put through their paces. “You know,” said the narrator as the script ended, handing reviewers a tagline, “none of this matters.” Within the lettrist milieu, or twentieth-century bohemia as such, it was really nothing new.
