{"id":1192,"date":"2012-10-17T13:29:36","date_gmt":"2012-10-17T12:29:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/experimenta\/?p=1192"},"modified":"2012-10-17T17:16:30","modified_gmt":"2012-10-17T16:16:30","slug":"isou-venom-and-eternity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/experimenta\/2012\/10\/17\/isou-venom-and-eternity\/","title":{"rendered":"On On Venom and Eternity"},"content":{"rendered":"

This year’s Experimenta Weekend begins with the screening of an incendiary film that, at the mid-point of the 20th Century<\/em>, set out to be the turning point between film’s history and future. Mar\u00eda Palacios Cruz discusses Isidore Isou’s<\/em> Trait\u00e9 de bave et d\u2019\u00e9ternit\u00e9 (On Venom and Eternity)<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn true avant-garde fashion, it becomes something beyond itself. In as much as it is a formal exercise in filmmaking, it is a cinematic treatise on art, normalcy, society and culture\u201d. (William E.B. Verrone)<\/p>\n

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The first and only film by Jean-Isidore Isou, poet and founder of the French Letterist movement, constitutes a plea for cinema to enter into its second aesthetic phase. It is the manifesto of this new film era, which he calls chiselling (\u201cciselant\u201d) and discrepant. The film begins with a dedication to the great cinematographic masters (Griffith, Chaplin, Clair, Von Stroheim, Flaherty, Bu\u00f1uel, Cocteau \u2026), that \u201ccontributed something new and personal to the art of film\u201d, and with the filmmaker\u2019s humble wish that his work will equally contribute to the advancement of film as an art form. Isou believed that cinema had come to an impasse at the end of its period of expansion and development, describing this \u201camplique\u201d phase as a centrifugal force which must now be replaced by a centripetal one. Turning film towards itself, to its own deconstruction, he felt that film must become its own subject of observation and reflection \u2013 film as the object of film, ontologically and aesthetically, as well as materially. For Isou, the \u201camplique\u201d and \u201cciselant\u201d phases follow one other in all artistic disciplines, from literature to painting to theatre. By the middle of the 20th Century, time had finally come for cinema to become a truly modernistic art form, and to undergo a revolution equivalent to that brought by jazz to music.<\/p>\n

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Trait\u00e9 de bave et d\u2019\u00e9ternit\u00e9<\/em> is divided into three chapters, all constructed following the principles of discrepant editing. Going beyond counterpoint editing, Isou seeks to fully dissociate sound and image, treating them as two \u201cparallel columns\u201d bearing no relation to one another. The first chapter introduces Daniel, the film\u2019s hero and Isou\u2019s alter ego. Daniel has just been to a screening of a Chaplin film and we hear an account of the heated debate that followed. This first chapter (\u201cThe Principle\u201d) serves to announce the foundations and intentions of Isou\u2019s manifesto, which in a mise en ab\u00eeme<\/em> will be put into practice during the two following chapters. In the meantime, we see shots of Isou walking around Bld St. Germain and neighbouring streets in the Quartier Latin. Our mind wants to bring some sense of coherence to the words we hear and the images we see, so we are tempted to imagine Daniel wandering in Paris after the film club debate. But during the second chapter (\u201cThe Development\u201d) it becomes increasingly difficult to establish connections between the images (mostly found footage recovered from the rubbish bins of the Ministry of Defence) and the verbal account of Daniel\u2019s romantic adventures with Eve, Denise and Mimi. The third chapter (\u201cThe Proof\u201d) introduces Letterist poetry and brings an end to Eve and Daniel\u2019s love story. The filmstrip is progressively scratched, drawn and manipulated, but unlike Lye or McLaren, Isou seeks no correspondence between the rhythms of the soundtrack and the scratches and etchings that cover the images.<\/p>\n

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\u201cI want to separate the eye from its cinematic master: the eye\u201d, says Daniel. With Trait\u00e9<\/em> \u2013 a film which demands to be heard rather than seen \u2013 Isou proposes a temporary disturbance of the hierarchy of our senses, sight becoming secondary to sound. Screening a work in progress version at the Cannes Festival in 1951, Isou didn\u2019t bother showing any images for the second and third chapters, and only presented the soundtrack. Moving words instead of moving images. Nevertheless, the film was awarded the unofficial Prize of the Avant-Garde Spectators by a jury including Jean Cocteau, Curzio Malaparte and Raf Vallone.<\/p>\n

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The film\u2019s image track underlines its emptiness and the destruction that cinema must undergo in order to be born again. For Daniel\/Isou, \u201cVomiting up old masterpieces is the only way for us to manifest our originality, [\u2026] to create masterpieces of our own.\u201d Isou makes use of the vomit \u2013 the venom<\/em> \u2013 of commercial film production: abandoned, rejected, forgotten rushes found in the garbage, which are then subjected to scratching, bleaching and painting. The scratches create continuity between the disparate images of fishing, sport events, military parades, Paris \u2026 By destroying the filmstrip Isou intends to destroy the audience\u2019s passivity, its desire of identification. He turns the spectators\u2019 attention away from the image and onto the sound. He shows them that there is no longer nothing to see. Rejecting beauty in nature and art, Isou finds the possibility for a new beauty to emerge amid ugliness and putrefaction.<\/p>\n

Trait\u00e9<\/em> would not be the preface to other film works that Isou conceived it to be, and remains his only completed film. A unique work, which announces in a quasi-premonitory way many of the preoccupations of the film avant-garde in the 1960s and 1970s, it remained largely unseen for many years. Stan Brakhage, who claimed to have been present at the North American premiere of the film in San Francisco in the 1950s, was deeply influenced by its vision, acknowledging its influence on all of his films. For him, Trait\u00e9 <\/em>embraced the possibilities of the film medium, allowing a new feeling towards cinema to emerge.<\/p>\n

Mar\u00eda Palacios Cruz<\/em><\/p>\n

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Link to more info on ON VENOM AND ETERNITY here<\/a><\/p>\n

ON VENOM AND ETERNITY screening :-<\/p>\n

Friday 19 October 2012, at 6:30pm, BFI Southbank NFT3<\/p>\n

Link to book tickets for ON VENOM AND ETERNITY here<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This year’s Experimenta Weekend begins with the screening of an incendiary film that, at the mid-point of the 20th Century, set out to be the turning point between film’s history and future. Mar\u00eda Palacios Cruz discusses Isidore Isou’s Trait\u00e9 de bave et d\u2019\u00e9ternit\u00e9 (On Venom and Eternity). \u201cIn true avant-garde fashion, it becomes something beyond […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[150,151,143,121],"class_list":["post-1192","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","tag-isou","tag-jean-isidore-isou","tag-lff","tag-lff-2012"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/experimenta\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1192","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/experimenta\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/experimenta\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/experimenta\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/experimenta\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1192"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/experimenta\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1192\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1278,"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/experimenta\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1192\/revisions\/1278"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/experimenta\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1192"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/experimenta\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1192"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/experimenta\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1192"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}