Isou viewed his fellow countryman Tristan Tzara as the greatest creator and rightful leader of the Dada movement, and dismissed most of the others as plagiarists and falsifiers.
[2] Among the Surrealists, André Breton was a significant influence, but Isou was dissatisfied by what he saw as the stagnation and theoretical bankruptcy of the movement as it stood in the 1940s.
Other members to join the lettrism during the seventies : Woody Roehmer, Anne-Catherine Caron, and during the eighties : Frédérique Devaux, Michel Amarger ... Development of excoordism.
Isou first invented these phases through an examination of the history of poetry, but the conceptual apparatus he developed could very easily be applied to most other branches of art and culture.
In poetry, Isou felt that this point was reached with Victor Hugo (and in painting with Eugène Delacroix, in music with Richard Wagner.).
From Charles Baudelaire to Tristan Tzara (as, in painting, from Manet to Kandinsky; or, in music, from Debussy to Luigi Russolo), subsequent poets would deconstruct the grand edifice of poetry that had been developed over the centuries according to the Homeric model.
He would take the rubble that remained after the old forms had been shattered, and lay out a new blueprint for reutilising these most basic elements in a radically new way, utterly unlike the poetry of the preceding amplic phase.
Some precedents may be seen in Cubist, Dada and Futurist (both Italian and Russian) painting and typographical works, such as Marinetti's Zang Tumb Tuum, or in poems such as Apollinaire's Calligrammes but none of them were a full system like hypergraphy.
Notwithstanding the considerably more recent origins of film-making, compared to poetry, painting or music, Isou felt in 1950 that its own first amplic phase had already been completed.
(ii) Discrepant cinema (le cinéma discrépant), where the soundtrack and the image-track would be separated, each one telling a different story or pursuing its own more abstract path.
Recalling the infinitesimals of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, quantities which could not actually exist except conceptually, the Letterists developed the notion of a work of art which, by its very nature, could never be created in reality, but which could nevertheless provide aesthetic rewards by being contemplated intellectually.
Both currents, he felt, had simply failed to take into account a large part of the population, namely those young people and other 'externs' who neither produced nor exchanged goods or capital in any significant way.
He felt that the creative urge was an integral part of human nature, but that, unless it was properly guided, it could be diverted into crime and anti-social behaviour.
One recent exception is: Maurice Lemaître has privately published translations of a few of his own works, though these are not at all easy to find: Black Scat Books: 2012 (http://www.blackscatbooks.com)