Letterist International

The Letterist International (LI) was a Paris-based collective of radical artists and theorists between 1952 and 1957. It was created by Guy Debord as a from Isidore Isou's Letterist group. The group went on to join others in forming the Situationist International, taking some key techniques and ideas with it.

The spelling 'Lettrist' is also common in English, but 'Letterist' was the form the French group (Internationale Lettriste) themselves preferred, and used in their 1955 sticker: 'If you believe you have genius, or if you think you have only a brilliant intelligence, write the letterist internationale.' With regard to that second word, however, most scholars prefer 'International' to 'Internationale'. Such authors and translators as Donald Nicholson-Smith, Simon Ford, Sadie Plant and Andrew Hussey all agree on the 'Letterist International' spelling.

The group was a motley assortment of novelists, sound poets, painters, film-makers, revolutionaries, bohemians, alcoholics, petty criminals, lunatics, under-age girls and self-proclaimed failures. In the Summer of 1953, their average age was a mere twenty years old, rising to twenty nine and a half in 1957. In their blend of intellectualism, protest and hedonism—though differing in other ways, for instance in their total rejection of spirituality—they might be viewed as French counterparts of the American Beat Generation, particularly in the form it took during exactly the same period, i.e. before anyone from either group achieved any real fame, and were still having the adventures that would inform their later works and ideas.

The LI was the first breakaway faction from Isidore Isou's Letterists. (They would be followed in turn by the Ultra-Letterists). The schism developed when the 'left-wing' of the Letterist group disrupted a Charlie Chaplin press conference for Limelight at the Hôtel Ritz Paris in October 1952. They distributed a polemic entitled "No More Flat Feet", which concluded: "The footlights have melted the make-up of the supposedly brilliant mime. All we can see now is a lugubrious and mercenary old man. Go home Mister Chaplin." Isou was keen to distance himself from his younger acolytes' tract. His own attitude was that Chaplin deserved respect as one of the great creators of the cinematic art. The breakaway group felt that he was no longer relevant, and they turned Isou's own words back against him: "We appreciated the importance of Chaplin's work in its own time, but we know that today novelty lies elsewhere, and 'truths which no longer entertain become lies' (Isou)." As they proceeded to explain, "the most urgent exercise of liberty is the destruction of idols".

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