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ON VENOM AND ETERNITY Isidore Isou, Trait\u00e9 de bave et d\u2019\u00e9ternit\u00e9, France, 1951, 120 min (new print) ON VENOM AND ETERNITY TRAIT\u00c9 DE BAVE ET D\u2019\u00c9TERNIT\u00c9 (ON VENOM AND ETERNITY) Isou brought Trait\u00e9 de bave et d\u2019\u00e9ternit\u00e9<\/em> uninvited to the Cannes Film Festival (1951) where it both caused a riot and won the audience prize for the avant-garde. Isou\u2019s \u2018revolt against cinema\u2019 is a landmark work that prefigured the Letterist and Situationist cinema to come and influenced many experimental filmmakers, including Stan Brakhage. The film\u2019s participants include some of the greatest names in 20th Century French arts and letters: Jean-Louis Barrault, Blaise Cendrars, Daniel G\u00e9lin, Colette Marchand, Andr\u00e9 Maurois, and Jean Cocteau (who also designed the poster promoting the 1952 release on the Champs-Elysees). (Re:Voir)<\/p>\n In the above context of The Lumi\u00e8res and M\u00e9li\u00e8s as \u2018the 2 wings\u2019 of Film, I take Isou to be the visceral backbone, complete with electrically \u2018scratched\u2019 nervous system synopting \u2013 all rhythms tending to that consciousness we know as cathexis or investment. His Trait\u00e9<\/em> has certainly been prime inspiration for all of my film-making, since I first saw it, and for many of the U.S. independent film-makers \u2026 and I do not mean simply for (how did you put it?) the \u2018scratch or blinking films\u2019. The verbal rethoric of Trait\u00e9<\/em> is at one with the aesthetic of the moving picture imagery and in its subtle weave of be-seemingly dull photography (which effectually obliterates traditional and slavishly composed photography \u2013 whether scratched-over, turned upside-down or not). Trait\u00e9<\/em> opened each sensibility (that will be open to it) for new feeling about film, thus for the new feelings each might have uniquely rising in each self appropo [sic] that which is intrinsically Film. I know no other works of cinema which, without intruding its own aesthetic, more frees human sensibility to dance, in the mind\u2019s eye, with cinematic possibilities. (Letter from Stan Brakhage to Fr\u00e9d\u00e9rique Devaux)<\/p>\n
\nFriday 19 October 2012, at 6:30pm
\n<\/strong>London BFI Southbank NFT 3<\/p>\n
\n<\/strong>The first and only film by the founder of the French Lettrist movement begins with a warning: \u2018Dear spectators, you are about to see a discrepant film. No refunds will be given.\u2019 Advocating for the rupture of language and photography, Isou expects the spectator to \u2018leave the cinema blind, his ears crushed, both torn asunder by the disjunction of word and image\u2019. At the 1951 Cannes Festival, where Trait\u00e9<\/em> received its first pubic screening, it won the admiration of Guy Debord and Jean Cocteau, who wondered if it would take 50 years before its radical aesthetics could be understood. The Lettrists believed the development of cinema had been stalled by the domination of the studio system. In order for a new cinema to emerge, it had first to be destroyed \u2013 symbolically and physically \u2013 by bleaching and scratching the images, and by replacing soundtracks with abrasive concrete poetry and enraged tirades.<\/p>\nPROGRAMME NOTES<\/a>
\n<\/strong>Friday 19 October 2012, at 6:30pm
\nLondon BFI Southbank NFT 3<\/p>\n
\nIsidore Isou, France, 1951, 35mm, b\/w, sound, 120 min
\n<\/strong>Isidore Isou arrived in Paris from Romania in 1945 where he founded the Letterist movement, an art and literary movement that owed inspiration to Dada and Surrealism. Letterism attempted to break down poetry into letters and syllables, and then all arts into their constituent parts, to build up new languages for each art form. Isou wrote, directed, photographed, composed the music for, and acted in Trait\u00e9 de bave et d\u2019\u00e9ternit\u00e9<\/em> (Treaty On Venom And Eternity), the first Letterist film manifesto. Isou proceeds to discuss what is wrong with the cinema and then counter it with what he thinks the cinema should consist of through \u2018Discrepant Cinema\u2019 in which the sound and the picture are purposefully unrelated and the images are manipulated or destroyed through bleaching and scratching.<\/p>\n