the destruction of the image
by Douglas Messerli
Isidore Isou (director) Traité de bave et d’éternité (Treatise
on Venom and Eternity) / 1951
Isidore Isou or Isidore Goldstein was as Fluxus artist
Ben Vautier has described him, a man of “ego,” “megalomania,” and “pretence,”
while yet admitting that Isou was very influential to him when he first theorized
about art in 1958. In fact, there is no film ever made that is quite so
ego-driven as Isou’s manifesto, misogynist rant, and declaration of his own
genius: Treatise on Venom and Eternity—but
then there has never been another movie quite like Isou’s 1952 debut.
Isou, playing a figure named Daniel
throughout the film, is a firm believer in the new. While it’s clear he admires several filmmakers such as Charlie
Chaplin, Abel Gance, René Clair, Sergei Eisenstein, Erich von Stroheim, Robert
Flaherty, Luis Buñuel, and others to who he dedicates the film, the young
would-be filmmaker argues for a completely new way of filmmaking that does not
simply imitate these greats. Influenced by his Romanian homeland’s Dadaism,
Surrealism, and, although he doesn’t quite acknowledge it, Italian Futurism,
Isou is a promoter of noise and nonsense more than music and coherent sense.
The founder of what he describes as “Letterism” (or Lettrism), he prefers words
(mostly nonsense words) over image and meaning. Accordingly, in film he seeks
to replace the picture with speech, to end the cinematic dominance of
photography, and tell a story primarily through the use of language without a
coherent sequence of images accompanying it.
The film,
indeed, begins with an entirely black header (not so very difference from some
Hollywood films of the 1950s and 1960s—even Funny
Girl uses this device—to present what might be described as blank screen
overture of voices repetitively evoking a few words of nonsense (again a
reminder of the influences of both Italian and Russian
Futurism).
The first
part of this film, “The Principle” is primarily a recounting of Daniel’s ideas
as expressed before a hostile audience of his peers, who toss back invectives,
howl, and hoot has his “brilliant” new ideas. A sympathetic narrator, spoken by
Robert Blin, occasionally interrupts Daniel’s declarations to comment and
elucidate, but primarily it is Daniel (played by Isou) who speaks. At the same
time the director displays a series of images of Daniel moving through Paris
neighborhoods, mostly near St. Germain des Prés. The director-character walks
through the streets, stopping several times to tie his shoes or to look
directly into the face of the camera like a slightly pouting James Dean before
moving off into space once more. There is little logic to the sequence of
images, but the images themselves, of our “hero,” seem appropriate at least to
the subject.
At the
same time, however, the language of the film argues for a separation of the
two: “I want to destroy the picture by the speech.” As I write above, Daniel
argues for the end of “photography,” and, in particular, the end of the cinema
craftsmen. For him, art is raw, a bad or banal film more interesting that the
most well-made document. Manifesto-like statements come fast and furious, as
the provocateur claims he “wants to make a film that hurts your eyes,” and
intends to “hack open a new road for Cinema.” Like Oscar Wilde, the young
Daniel argues that art has little to do with social life: “The evolution of art
has nothing to do with the revolution of society!” And, in the second section,
he will explain his boredom of the French Communist Party, of which he was
briefly a member.
Many of his manifesto-like
statements have little to do with the actual making of cinema, and most of his
proclamations on centered upon a very romantic notion of “genius,” which, he
seems to argue, never gets appreciated in its own time. The new, even more than
in Pound’s early century proclamations, is always superior to the old, to
craft. “There is no ‘worst’ in what is new.” Like the futurists the young
Daniel argues “Everything that has existed is bad, else no one would have ‘improved
upon it….’”
The second
part of the film “The Development” essentially is meant as a demonstration of
his previous ideas. Here the images, generally stock clips about natives,
sailing and sailor, skiers, and sportsmen seem almost to invoke the works of
the Russian director Dziga Vertov, except the seemingly random images of a work
such as Man with a Movie Camera do
very much cohere as vibrant images of a city, while Isou’s-Daniel’s almost
purposefully work against any narrative coherence. Of course, we cannot escape, in the manner of Surrealism and Freudian
association in making occasional links between the spoken story and the images,
but, generally, we must recognize that it is a fruitless attempt to link them
up. And, as if to encourage our purposeful dissociation, many of the images are
scratched, faces penned over, splotches of light whitening out parts of the
images, and entire frames presented upside down and run backwards. 
The story meanwhile, is an
almost inanely romantic melodrama concerning the loves past and present of the
hero. Beginning with an attractive Norwegian Daniel has encountered in a bar,
Eve, who, when asked to dance has rejected him, the spoken tale is a rather
insipid story about what an earlier lover has described as Daniel’s “skirt-chasing”
behavior. Drawn to Eve for her beauty and aloofness—a pretense, he declares,
that allows her to pretend she is in a movie— Daniel soon
becomes disenchanted with her, while Eve, who at first declares she cannot
possibly love a man with whom she disagrees, is quickly swept away by her love
for him. Sated by his experiences, he recalls an earlier flame, Denise, and
attempts to return to her, consuming her in his often sadistic behavior: “And
she bore black and blue marks, like his rubber stamp jealous ownership.” “And
he broke her, he tore her, to feel himself within her."
A dinner
with one of Denise’s male business friends, however, ends their relationship,
as Daniel mocks the businessman, demanding Denise leave with him, and then
refusing to exit the restaurant. Denise, finally fed up, leaves alone, and the
after two days silence refuses to even recognize his existence when he calls.
So Daniel
returns to Eve, who dominates the final section of this film, “The Proof.” It
is, perhaps, a bit unclear what the “proof” is in this rather incoherent section.
It begins with a performance of lettriste poetry with two poems by François
Dufresne: “March” and “I Question and I Inveigh,” which, so the narrator
declares, reveal the “barbarity of the throat” as opposed to what he describes as the “phony primitivism”
of jazz, performed with “civilized and complicated” mechanical instruments. In
fact, throughout Daniel often speaks in outrageous terms, arguing, at one
point, for a return to slavery: “Man will never get used to not having other
men do his bidding.” But during the reading, for the first time, the images
shift to purely abstract figures and scratches in accordance with the sounds.
Evidently
Daniel’s film has also been shown at the event, for the next several frames—now,
once again, with the attendant random smeared and scatched stock footage—consist
of various figures proclaiming the filmmaker’s genius, with even Eve perceiving
how Daniel, despite the fact that others before have sought to destroy the image,
her lover is the first “to understand this destruction.”
As in
several previous scenes, wherein the young director has plopped major figures
such as Blaise Cedrars and others into his narrative, he soon displays himself
lunching with Jean Cocteau, making an analogy between his film and Cocteau’s The Blood of the Poet.
If Eve has
seemingly come to terms with Daniel’s art, however, he now seeks to get rid of
her, and demands she leave. She begs him to simply stay the night, but soon
realizes that her pleas will have no effect his narcissistic belief that women
are only to be enjoyed and, once the male is satiated, left behind. And the
final passages of the film, proper, detail Eve’s sad decline into madness,
until one day she is observed being taken away the police for deportment back
to Norway.
Ever the
egoist, Daniel is surprised to meet another man with whom, evidentially, Eve
has had a sexual relationship after she has left him.
The last
several frames, a kind of postlude, demands that the viewer recognize that “we
are always twenty years too late” in recognizing genius, and demanding the
viewer answer the simple question: “Ask yourself on the way out
whether or not this film possesses at least the value of a gangster film or a
love story – or any ‘realistic’ film which critics consider acceptable.”
Depending upon your acceptance of Daniel’s (Isou’s) inarguable logic, you will
either have to deny or admit his presumption. I’d be willing to say, yes, this
is more interesting, in some ways, than The
Public Enemy or Little Ceasar.
But clearly most people would not agree with him, and when the film was
screened at the Cannes Festival in 1951, it was met with a total riot, with fire
hoses being used to control the audience. It’s hard to imagine such passion and
vehemence about any art these days.
On the other hand, the
film did not become, as Isou seemed to argue it would, a kernel from might grow
numerous other of his films. Although he remained an influential figure in
France, influencing Guy Debord and others who later called themselves
Situationists and even, on occasion directors of The New Wave, Isou’s primarily
influences were on American experimental fimmakers—who created far superior
visual works—such as Stan Brakage and Gregory Markopoulos. Isou himself died in
poverty and ill-health in 2007.
Looking back today, Treatise on
Venom and Eternity, appears at
times as an almost naive—if monstrously ego-driven—document. Most of its braggadocio and chest-thumping rhetoric
today seems embarrassing, and its narrative is outrageously male-centric and
patriarchal to say the least. One has to wonder, as film commentator J. J.
Murphy suggests, whether such nonsense was simply a product of “male narcissism”
and “youthful hubris” whether its statements were deliberately provocative, or
were simply racist and sexist. Murphy concludes, and I concede, “Whatever its
problems, there simply aren’t many films like it out there, never mind at the
multiplexes.”
Los
Angles, July 11, 2015
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