» Experimental Narratives & Avant-Garde Shorts

MAURICE LEMAÎTRE - LE FILM EST DÉJÀ COMMENCÉ ? (HAS THE FEATURE STARTED YET?)

In the 1940s, the ‘letterist’ movement was born in Paris by Isodore Isou (TRAITÉ DE BAVE ET D'ETERNITÉ, 1951), which aimed to renew all the arts by focusing not on words, sentences or art movements, but on letters, sounds, and signs, the simplest elements of human expression. Maurice Lemaître was Isou’s assistant and editor on this film. Lemaître’s ensuing movie LE FILM EST DÉJÀ COMMENCÉ (also from 1951) was more adventuresome than Isou’s film, and radically departed from previous experimental movies in its absence of reference to dreams, in its use of spoken language, and in the separation of sound and image.

It also anticipated the auteur cinema that would arise in the late 1950s with Alain Resnais, Chris Marker, Jean-Luc Godard (ALPHAVILLE) and Marcel Hanoun. As a performative proection event, this cinematic experience also foreshadowed expanded cinema by a decade. LE FILM EST DÉJÀ COMMENCÉ was one of the most striking early manifestations of the rebirth of Dada (CINÉMA DADA). In Lemaître’s film, scratches, gashes, traces of paint, perforations, and hand-coloring produce abstract surfaces that resemble the work of Stan Brakhage (ANTICIPATION OF THE NIGHT, 1958). The physical result of scratched, drawn, chemically attacked, and shots overloaded with text and various signs, foreshadows Bill Morrison’s aesthetics of decay (DECASIA, 2003).

LE FILM EST DÉJÀ COMMENCÉ ? (HAS THE FEATURE STARTED YET?) became a major event during its first screenings in Paris in 1951. According to Lemaître himself, “This film must be projected under special conditions: on a screen of new shapes and material and with spectacular goings-on in the cinema lobby and theatre (disruptions, forced jostling, dialogues spoken aloud, confetti and gunshots aimed at the screen...). This is not just a projection, but a true film show, the style of which Maurice Lemaître is the creator.”

Restoration of this title was done by Light Cone.

Also by Maurice Lemaître