Isidore Isou
Traité de Bave et d'Eternité
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Add rightsFormat DVD Interzone
Original format 35mm
Year 1951
Language(s) French
Artist(s) Isidore Isou
Sous-titres English, espagnol, italien, allemand
Livret 52 pages (français, anglais)
Running time 123 min
Films
TRAITÉ DE BAVE ET D'ÉTERNITÉ (1951) 120'
BANDE ANNONCE (1951) 7'
Description
Isidore Isou arrived in Paris from Romania in 1945 where he founded the Lettrist movement and published a series of books. Lettrism attempted to decompose poetry into letters and syllables in order to reconstruct new languages, and then went on to attack all forms of art. Traité de Bave et d'Éternité is the movement's first cinematic manifesto. Isou showed it at Cannes without an invitation, where it won the audience prize for avant-garde. The poster signed by Jean Cocteau announced its release on the Champs-Elysées. For Isou, this film is a "revolution against cinema": sound and image are deliberately desynchronized, and the images are destroyed by bleach and scratched. The film marks a pivotal point in cinema, prefiguring all the Lettrist and Situationist cinema to come, including the films of Guy Debord and Maurice Lemaître.
"The greatest filmmaker of all time... Isou is the leader of our generation."
— Maurice Lemaître