Venom and Eternity

Isidore Isou / France / 1951 / Czech Premiere / 123 min.

synopsis

The Lettrist manifesto of disjunctive film aesthetics, with its inventiveness and sly irony, disrupts the alliance between image and sound, speech and language, meaning and movement. Audiovisual DJing employs manual mixing and the scratching of audio and photographic materials. It grafts uncompromising rhetoric onto aimless wandering through the suburbs of Paris, underpins dissenting cries with mantric recitations, and twists the romantic plot into political commentary interspersed with cinematic graffiti and inverted film frames. The film culminates in unique recordings of Lettrist poetry of pure noise.

“I was not, in my youth, particularly affected by cinema’s ‘Europeans’ […] perhaps because I, early on, developed an aversion to Surrealism—finding it an altogether inadequate (highly symbolic) envisionment of dreaming. What did rivet my attention (and must be particularly distinguished) was Jean-Isidore Isou’s Treatise: as a creative polemic it has no peer in the history of cinema.” — Stan Brakhage

Source: “Inspirations”, in The Essential Brakhage, ed. Bruce McPherson (New York: McPherson & Co., 2001), pp. 208–9.

biography

The founder of the Lettrist movement, Isidore Isou (1925–2007), was a poet, theorist, performer, and author of radical manifestos. His programme consisted of a relentless fight against the stagnation of artistic forms and in opening up new possibilities for poetry, literature, the visual arts, and film. Traité de bave et d’éternité (1951) is the first Lettrist film, a manifesto of “divergent cinema,” which, through manual interventions in the film strip and the incorporation of found footage, heralded a new understanding of experimental film.