GME Presents the Films of Maurice Lemaître

“A major figure in the lettrist movement, Maurice Lemaître revolutionized cinema in 1951 with LE FILM EST DÉJÀ COMMENCÉ? (HAS THE FEATURE STARTED YET?) and invented a new form of performance: “Syncinema.” His many cinematic works, made between the 1960s and the present day, confirm his position as one of the most important avant-garde filmmakers of his generation."  - Christian Lebrat

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 debut, seminal feature entitled LE FILM EST DÉJÀ COMMENCÉ (also from 1951) was more adventuresome than Isou’s movie, and radically departed from previous experimental films in its use of spoken language, in the separation of sound and image, and in its absence of reference to dreams. With this film, Maurice Lemaître emerged as the major proponent of lettrist cinema. It also heralded the rebirth of Dada (CINÉMA DADA), anticipated the auteur cinema that would arise in the late 1950s in France with Alain Resnais, Chris Marker, Jean-Luc Godard (ALPHAVILLE) and Marcel Hanoun, and as a performative projection event, foreshadowed expanded cinema by at least a decade.

FILMMAKER MAURICE LEMAÎTRE

Within this movie, Lemaître created a collage of images, scratched on the film emulsion, and incorporated voiceover narration, all to encourage a performative environment, i.e., the engagement of the spectator with the screen over the course of the film’s projection. In LE FILM EST DÉJÀ COMMENCÉ?, 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 anticipates Bill Morrison’s aesthetics of decay (DECASIA, 2003).

LE FILM EST DÉJÀ COMMENCÉ? 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.”

A companion digital publication entitled FILMS IMAGINAIRES presents a compilation his later short film work which he made between 1965 and 1991. In all these movies, Lemaitre continues his lettrist approach of creating a collage of images, scratching on film, and contrapuntal voiceover sound tracks. In AU-DELA DU DÉCLIC, Lemaître captured the pages of a book on film, reframing them through rephotography on an animation stand, accompanied by one of the filmmaker’s old lettrist poems. For UN NAVET, the filmmaker includes clips from fiction and animation films, excerpts from his own films, and subtitles and intertitles; the sound track is a commentary on how good or bad the films are. The visual form of the film is reminiscent of the later found footage films of Bruce Conner.  FILMS IMAGINAIRES is composed entirely of handwritten texts, suggesting how the spectator can be involved in the performance of the movie. in L’AYANT DROIT, the filmmaker includes found footage from politicians speaking, with his own voiceover commentary. In FIN DE TOURNAGE, he films collages of still images; the audio commentary discusses his hope for the future of film. With this movie, Lemaître posits in paradigmatic fashion the parameters of experimental and expanded cinema.

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