Gil Joseph Wolman

French film-maker, writer, political activist and Internationale Lettriste. An active agent provocateur from an early age, by 24 he had been: a member of the Young Communists, journalist for the magazine 'Combat', drug trafficker in the Algiers Casbah, long-distance lorry driver from Greenland to Pompeii, merchant marine captain, published poet and accomplished knitter. In 1950, he and Isidor Isou developed the principles of Lettrisme

In February 1952, the showing of his second film 'L'Anticoncept' (1951), at a Letterist film screening causes a major scandal. His first experiment in his new 'Cinematochrone' process, abolishing images altogether in a violent flurry of black and white strobes projected on a weather balloon, and accompanied by a soundtrack of his poems, brief reflections and syncopated texts. 'L'Anticoncept' was banned by the French censors; its screening at the Cannes Film Festival the month after it was completed was only open to the press and the banning prompts Wolman to lead a systematic disruption of the Cannes Film Festival the Letterists and he is only saved by a police escort.

In June 1952, Wolman and Debord formed the Letterist International and co-write 'A User's Guide to Détournement' and 'Theory of the Dérive' (both 1956) and published in the Belgian surrealist review 'Les Lèvres Nues' (Naked Lips). In 1955, Wolman and Debord wrote 'Why Lettrism?', published in Potlatch no. 22, and Wolman went on to represent the Letterist International at the World Congress of Artists in Alba, Italy, establishing important links between the Letterist International and others (e.g. Asger Jorn and Pinot-Gallizio of the International Movement for an Imaginist Bauhaus) who would go on to collaborate on forming the Situationist International.

Other Wolman innovations include the devising of his 'Scotch Art' in 1963, a process which consists in tearing off bands of printed matter and using adhesive tape to reposition them on fabrics or wood. He later developed 'dühring dühring', 'decompositions' and finally 'depicted painting' in a long line of artistic innovations and genius - "genius is what we all have when we stop improving one thing in order to make something else. When we only refuse to have talent".