Jean Isidore Isou co-founded and was principal theorician for a postwar avant-garde movement called lettrism. So called for their emphasis on the letter as the essential element in poetics (as opposed to the word or phrase), they worked in the Paris of the forties and fifties much as the prewar European avant-garde groups such as futurism, dada and surrealism before them did: through manifestos and polemics and public events such as recitals of lettrist poetry, which usually took the form of rhythmic repetition of vocables divorced from lexical meaning. Today they are remembered more for their attitude than for their contributions to aestheitics and culture -- Greil Marcus writes about them as a sort of prototype for the punk subculture in his book Lipstick Traces.
Isou's ideas extended into other areas than literature, and Venom and Eternity (Traité du Bave et d'Eternité) is an example of his idea of "discrepant cinema," the deliberate sundering of the unity between sound and image in film. Perversely, from the standpoint that film is usually considered a visual medium, Isou privileges the heard over the seen in Venom and Eternity supplying a coherent narrative through dialogue and narration on the soundtrack while the visual component consists of randomly selected stock footage, black and white leader, footage of Isou walking through the streets of Paris, and cameos of various leading lights of French literature and film (such as poet-filmmaker Jean Cocteau and novelist André Maurois). As the film runs the visuals progressively become more fragmented and incoherent as footage is repeated, run backwards and upside down, and embellished with scratches and paint. Meanwhile the narrative on the soundtrack, concerning a young filmmaker named Daniel recalling his debate on the aesthetics of discrepant cinema with a hostile crowd in a cinema club and going on to musings mostly on his relationship with his girlfriend Eve, ticks along nicely like a radio play with visual accompaniment, making this film one of the more accessible that I have seen.
Venom and Eternity is intriguing for its rejection of assumptions shared by conventional and experimental filmmaking alike. But from the perspective of today, where yesterday's avant-garde technique is tomorrow's music video or commercial for soft drinks, questions can still be asked about the film: for example, why should the soundtrack be so coherent and straightforward, given the author's advocacy for poetic language and speech liberated from sense? Why is the material chosen so autobiographical in nature, or at least why does it seem so? Wouldn't lettrist poetry or texts have been an equally appropriate choice, if not more so? The basic idea of discrepant cinema is interesting and also inviting to the non-professional: theoretically you could do it without a camera -- today, you could do it without film. The film questions audio-visual unity, to an extent it questions narrative, and it certainly questions image. It does not question authorship though, and it doesn't question the romantic myth of the artist as visionary. All this leads for me to the almost unavoidable identification of the author Isou with his fictional mouthpiece Daniel -- what with Daniel's advocacy of discrepant cinema and lettrism coupled with the countless instances of Isou's handsome mug ( Isou definitely pioneered the Elvis look before its time) through the film -- and to a hard-to-miss sense of egotistical self-promotion which, given Daniel's high-handed treatment of his opponents, his emotional callousness towards the women in his life, and his general appearance of being a loudmouthed jerk, gives the film an unpleasantness that's difficult not to carry to the author. But maybe that's just me.
