Traité de bave et d'éternité

Traité de bave et d'éternité

Synopsis

Isidore Isou arrived in Paris from Romania in 1945 where he founded the Lettriste movement. 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. Traité de bave et d'éternité (On Venom and Eternity) was the first Lettrist film manifesto. Isou brought it uninvited to the Cannes Film Festival (1951) where it won the audience prize for the avant-garde. Jean Cocteau's poster promoted the 1952 release on the Champs-Elysees. The film is Isou's "revolt against cinema": the sound and the picture are purposefully unrelated, and the images are destroyed by bleach and scratched. The film is a landmark work that prefigured the letterist and situationist cinema to come and influenced many experimental filmmakers.