ISIDORE ISOU

Members of LI

Michele Bernstein

Ivan Chtcheglov

The position of the Lettrist International

After our intervention at the press conference held at the Ritz by [Charlie] Chaplin, and the partial reproduction in the newspapers of the tract entitled No More Flat Feet, which revolted against the cult that one communely rendered to this director, Jean-Isidore Isou and two of his followers who grow old underneath the harness have published in Combat a note disapproving of our action in this precise circumstance.

We have appreciated the importance of the works of Chaplin in their time, but we know that today novelty is elsewhere and that "truths that are no longer amusing become lies" (Isou).

We believe that the most urgent exercise of freedom is the destruction of idols, especially when they represent freedom.

The provocative tone of our tract reacts against unanimous and servile enthusiasm. The distance that certain Lettrists, and Isou himself, have been led to take in this case only betrays the always renewed incomprehension between extremists and those who are no longer extremists; between us and those who renounce "the bitterness of their youth" so as to "smile" along with the established glories; between those more than twenty years old and those less than thirty years old.

We only claim responsibility for a text that only we have signed. We have not disavowed anyone.

The diverse expressions of indignation are indifferent to us. There aren't degrees among reactionaries.

We abandon them to the anonymous and shocked crowd.

On 2 November 1952, this text was refused by Combat, in violation of the terms of Article 13 of the Law of 29 July 1881. Eventually published in Internationale Lettriste #1, December 1952

Open letter to Jean-Isidore Isou

Brussels, 3 November 1952.

Our demonstration has only been confused by your ridiculously pragmatic attitude.

Allied to you, as you say, on the basis of new principles of knowledge, I deplore the pettiness and the cowardly puerility that characterize you.

The nullity of your social personality was compensated for by your works, but your discreet route towards an initiate's mysticism and the profound imbecility of certain of your disciplines have a nauseating odor that sickens me.

If you still carry within yourself a message, I will hear it. Because your presence isn't necessary. . . .

Thus please remove me from the list of your friends.

Select feelings,

P.S. In your letter to Combat, you say that you were "opposed to our act from the beginning." What then was the meaning of your verbal congratulations, made scarcely an hour after the launching of the tracts?

(Published in Internationale Lettriste #1, December 1952

No More Flat Feet

Sub-Mack Sennett filmmaker,[1] sub-Max Linder actor,[2] Stavisky[3] of weeping unwed mothers and little orphans of Auteil, hail Chaplin, swindler of emotions, master-singer of suffering.

The cinematograph needed its Dellys. You have given it your works -- and your good works.

Since you claimed to stand for the weak and oppressed, attacking you seemed like attacking the weak and oppressed; but some have discerned the cop's nightstick behind the rattan cane.

You are "he who turns the other cheek and the other ass cheek," but we are young and good-looking, and when we hear suffering we reply Revolution.

You are a Max du Veuzit with flat feet, and we don't believe in the "absurd persecutions" you say you are the victim of.[4] The French for immigration service is advertizing agency. The kind of press conference you gave at Cherbourg would turn a complete dud into a sensation, so you needn't worry about the success ofLimelight.[5]

Go to bed, you budding fascist. Make lots of money. Mingle with high society (bravo for the groveling before little [Queen] Elizabeth.) Die soon: we can guarantee you a first-class funeral.

May your latest film be your last.[6]

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.

The Lettrist International:
SERGE BERNA
JEAN-L. BRAU
GUY-ERNEST DEBORD
GIL J WOLMAN

The Lettrists disavow the insulters of Chaplin

The members of the Lettrist movement are united on the basis of new principles of knowledge and each keeps his independence as far as the details of the application of these principles. We all know that [Charles] Chaplin was been "a great creator in the history of the cinema" but "the total (and baroque) hysteria" that has surrounded his arrival in France has embarassed us, as does the expression of all mental instability. We are ashamed that the world today lacks more profound values than these, which are secondary and "isolatrous" of the "artist." Only the Lettrists who signed the tract against Chaplin are responsible for the extreme and confused content of their manifesto. As nothing has been resolved in this world, "Charlot" receives, along with applause, the splashes [eclaboussures] of this non-resolution.

We, the Lettrists who were opposed to this tract of our comrades from the beginning, smile at the maladroit expression of the bitterness of their youth.

If "Charlot" must receive mud, it won't be us who throw it at him. There are others, who paid to do it (the Attorney General, for example).

We thus revoke our solidarity from the tract of our friends and we associate ourselves with the homage rendered to Chaplin by the entire populace.

In their turn, the other Lettrists can explain themselves, in their own journals or in the press.

But "Charlot" and all this only constitutes a simple nuance.

JEAN-ISIDORE ISOU, MAURICE LEMAITRE, GABRIEL POMERAND

Published in Combat on 1 November 1952 and reprinted in Internationale Lettriste #1, December 1952

Charles Chaplin in Europe

In 1952 Charlie Chaplin, whose City Lights had been part of Debord's crib-list, visited Europe to promote his new film Limelight. Debord had admired Chaplin for the same reason as Barthes did : because “he shows the public its blindness by presenting at the same time a man who is blind and what is in front of him. To see someone who does not see is the best way to be intensely aware of what he does not see.” Chaplin’s sophisticated portrayal of the pre-proletarian, pre-class-conscious worker had earned him a blacklisting from the United States, where he had recently been denounced as a traitor.

But in Europe, Chaplin basked in the glory of still being worshipped. He accepted an audience with the United Kingdom’s new queen, and the prestigious Légion d’Honneur in France. After a press conference in the Paris Ritz on 29 October 1952, Chaplin walked out of the hotel to face an adoring crowd, plus four men called Serge Berna, Jean-Louis Brau, Guy Debord and Gil Wolman, Lettrists all. They hurled abuse at Chaplin and scattered splenetic leaflets which suggested to Chaplin he might not be so welcome among all Parisians :

The point of this stunt was threefold : to turn in an easy target, to destabilise the position of Isou (who played no part in it) as leader of the Lettrists, and to signal the end of Lettrism itsekf. For the Chaplin stunt (and the ICA screening of Hurlements) had both gone beyond Lettrist theories. Isou himself sympathised with his colleagues at the time, but disapproved of attacking Chaplin, who he regarded as untouchable. Debord was unrepentant : “the most compelling exercise of freedom,” he said in the first issue of the Internationale Lettriste, the splinter group formed by Debord after his brutal rupture with Isou, “is the destruction of idols, especially when they speak in the name of freedom.”

Isou and Lettrism were withering, they had become “submissive and graying.” Debord, ever the frosty strategist. was in the ascendant, and the seeds of Situationism had been sown