A confrontational yet essential masterpiece of avant-garde film, Isidore Isou's Venom & Eternity lays out a set of aesthetic innovations and theoretical preoccupations that have been further developed in the films of Brakhage, Debord, and Godard. Deliberately constructed to provoke the audience, the film begins without images, testing the viewer's patience by playing noisy Lettrist music over a black screen for some time before cockily stating, "The film you are about to see differs radically--to put it mildly--from any film ever made any time, any place." On the soundtrack, a young man named Daniel enrages a ciné-club audience by arguing that existing film traditions must be destroyed so that the cinema might be saved. Devoted without reservation to the modernist quest of pursuing the aesthetically new, Daniel admits that the cinema he desires to create might actually be painful to watch, sadistically claiming, "I want to make a film that hurts your eyes." He proposes a new, "Discrepant Cinema," which would free the film's sound from its images. "In my pictures, I would use speech as an extra dimension, supplementing the image as if the sound came from without and did not exist as heretofore because of internal necessity within the belly of the image." This statement describes Venom & Eternity itself, which couples Daniel's vituperative proclamations on the soundtrack with seemingly autonomous images of Isou wandering the streets of Paris as well as footage borrowed from other films. These images are further attacked by often being played in reverse or projected upside down. At one point Daniel states, "One must go beyond the image and attack the film stock," and proposes to "sculpt flowers on the film stock" by scratching it. Isou subjects much of Venom & Eternity to such defacement, which, destructively acting on the material foundations of the film, produces a beautiful and playful new vision. Like the Lettrist poems recited in the film's final section, Isou's film attempts to liberate its medium from the protocols of form and meaning, "chiseling" away at existing conventions so as to uncover and free the materials for a future cinema.
Saturday, January 15, 2011
Isidore Isou: Venom & Eternity (1951)
A confrontational yet essential masterpiece of avant-garde film, Isidore Isou's Venom & Eternity lays out a set of aesthetic innovations and theoretical preoccupations that have been further developed in the films of Brakhage, Debord, and Godard. Deliberately constructed to provoke the audience, the film begins without images, testing the viewer's patience by playing noisy Lettrist music over a black screen for some time before cockily stating, "The film you are about to see differs radically--to put it mildly--from any film ever made any time, any place." On the soundtrack, a young man named Daniel enrages a ciné-club audience by arguing that existing film traditions must be destroyed so that the cinema might be saved. Devoted without reservation to the modernist quest of pursuing the aesthetically new, Daniel admits that the cinema he desires to create might actually be painful to watch, sadistically claiming, "I want to make a film that hurts your eyes." He proposes a new, "Discrepant Cinema," which would free the film's sound from its images. "In my pictures, I would use speech as an extra dimension, supplementing the image as if the sound came from without and did not exist as heretofore because of internal necessity within the belly of the image." This statement describes Venom & Eternity itself, which couples Daniel's vituperative proclamations on the soundtrack with seemingly autonomous images of Isou wandering the streets of Paris as well as footage borrowed from other films. These images are further attacked by often being played in reverse or projected upside down. At one point Daniel states, "One must go beyond the image and attack the film stock," and proposes to "sculpt flowers on the film stock" by scratching it. Isou subjects much of Venom & Eternity to such defacement, which, destructively acting on the material foundations of the film, produces a beautiful and playful new vision. Like the Lettrist poems recited in the film's final section, Isou's film attempts to liberate its medium from the protocols of form and meaning, "chiseling" away at existing conventions so as to uncover and free the materials for a future cinema.
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Just saw this film for the first time - I was fascinated but ambivalent about its aims & methods. Namely, I dislike the idea that cinema itself (not just a type of cinema, but cinema) must be attacked and destroyed so that something new can be born. For one thing it seems awfully premature in 1951 to declare the medium dead when its best years were ahead of it (on the other hand, a self-consciousness and playfulness were hallmarks of that new cinema, and Issou seems to open the door for those here). For another I dislike the idea of spitting on the visual appeal of cinema in the name of an aesthetic revolution, instead of using and transforming the visual appeal. Granted, Issou does the latter as well (his scratches are, as you say, "beautiful and playful") but much of the film is deliberately un- or anti-cinematic, and not of the decidedly perverse variety that manufactures anti-cinema out of cinema, rather the visuals play rather indifferently, as if Issou genuinely wants to make the film visually unexciting. I feel this is a bit self-defeating, throwing the baby out with the bathwater - why can't revolution & radicalism be born by the visual potential of film, what does it have to be born outside of it? Unnecessarily perverse, I think.
ReplyDeleteBasically, this is a fantastic and fascinating polemic - but one I wouldn't want to see extensively followed. Its confines seem too limiting - in contrast to the Lettrist prose (which is genuinely and viscerally exciting) the cinematic experiments seem to be an intriguing dead end. I think the Cahiers crowd, reanimating the cinema of the past and transforming into something new rather than trying to build outside of it altogether, paved a far more interesting way forward.
@Bocko But if we permit the belief that Isou did destroy cinema with Venom and Eternity, then we can also believe that cinema was reborn in the form of the Nouvelle vague.
ReplyDeleteOtherwise, I do agree that Isou is very cocky in his presentation of himself. I thought while watching that this film is the epitome of the "pretension" amateur film critics often decry of modern art films in its self-perceived and cinematic declarations.