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 whom 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.
The language
of the film, however, 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
are 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 rejects 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.
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
Daniel’s film, so it appears, has also
been shown at the event, and for the next several frames—now, once again, with
the attendant random smeared and scratched 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, now
described as her lover, is the first “to understand this destruction.” Perhaps
this is what we must imagine as “the proof.”
As in several previous scenes, wherein the
young director has plopped down major figures such as Blaise Cendrars 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 upon 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, evidently, 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 Caesar. 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 filmmakers—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,” and 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, 2017
Reprinted from World Cinema Review (July 2017).
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