The Lettrist International (LI) was the first breakaway group from Isidore Isou's Lettrist Movement (LM). They would be followed in turn by the Ultra-Lettrists. The LI was formed after the 'left-wing' of the LM disrupted a Charlie Chaplin press conference for Limelight at the Ritz Hotel Paris in October 1952.
During their wanderings in the Summer of 1953, an 'illiterate Kabyle' suggested to them the term Psychogeography. They published an information bulletin called Potlatch. One of their most important texts was Ivan Chtcheglov'sFormula for a New Urbanism which was not published until 1958 in the first issue of the journal Situationniste Internationale. He advocated a new city where everyone would be able to live in their own cathedral. Theory utopianism was accompanied by the derive or drift, whereby they wander like clouds through the urban environment, producing something which they called unitary urbanism. In his Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography (published in the Belgiansurrealist magazine Les Levres Nues, No. 6, 1955) Guy Debord described a colleague wandering through the Harz region of Germany blindly following a map of London. This is still a favourite methodology amongst psychogeographers. They produced a broad range of proposals: the abolition of museums and the placing of art in bars, keeping the Metro open all night, opening the roofs of Paris like pavements with escalators to help gain access.
They also developed detournement as a technique of reutilising previous material for a radical purpose.
The stark simplicity of Lettristart, while still very much abstract, stood in contrast to the sometimes meandering Surrealist movement; but both shared their roots in Dada.
The general ethic of Letterism was eventually applied to film, in Gil J. Wolman's piece "L’Anticoncept", which consisted of a fluctuating ball of light that was screened onto a large balloon.
A split in the movement lead to the formation of the Lettrist International, and to the movements of the Ultra-Lettrists and the Situationists.
Guy Debord (December 28, 1931-November 30, 1994) was a member of the Lettrist International, Socialisme ou Barbarie and a founder and chief essayist of the Situationist International (SI).
The SI initially drew membership from the Lettrists - a post-Surrealist group of writers and poets dedicated to the destruction of bourgeois values by reducing the written word to onomatopoeic syllables.
However, the SI broke with the formal aims of the Lettrists and, after subsuming much of their membership, were fully established in their own right by 1959 after an intense period of theoretical analysis, publications and expulsions of various members.
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