Isidore Isou, the Romanian-born founder of Lettrism.
Compared to the first half of the last century, the contemporary art scene is extremely conservative. What it lacks are -ists: Cubists, Surrealists, Fauvists, Expressionists, Structuralists, Futurists, Situationists and Lettrists. The founder of Lettrism, the Romanian-born Isidore Isou, died a few weeks ago aged 79, a death ignored, as far as I know, by the Anglo-Saxon press. The principles of Lettrism spread throughout the arts, including film, of which Isou stated:
"I believe firstly that the cinema is too rich. It is obese. It has reached its limits, its maximum. With the first movement of widening which it will outline, the cinema will burst! Under the blow of a congestion, this greased pig will tear into a thousand pieces. I announce the destruction of the cinema, the first apocalyptic sign of disjunction, of rupture, of this corpulent and bloated organization which calls itself film."
Isou's contribution to the "destruction of the cinema" was Traité de bave et d'éternité (Treatise on Slime/Spittle/Venom, and Eternity), which was screened at the Cannes Film Festival in 1951, where it created a riot. The film consisted of four and a half hours (a 111-minute version has just been released on DVD) of 'discordant' images, enhanced with scratches, shaky footage running upside down or in reverse, blank frames, stock shots and a soundtrack consisting of monologues and onomatopoeic poetry (i.e. sounds rather than words). The barely perceptible narrative, featuring Isou himself, is set among the students and cinéastes of St Germain des Prés.
For leading avant-garde film-maker Stan Brakhage, Traité de bave et d'éternité, was a "portal through which every film artist is going to have to pass." Maurice Schérer (later known as Eric Rohmer), praised the film in Cahiers du cinéma, and Jean Cocteau (who appears in the film) presented Isou with a Prix de l'avant-garde created specifically for the occasion.
A year later, Isou's erstwhile Lettrist colleague, Guy Debord, announced, over a blank screen, in Hurlements en faveur de Sade (Howls in Favour of de Sade), "There's no film. Cinema is dead. There can't be film anymore. If you want, let's have a discussion". In 1968, Jean-Luc Godard's Weekend ended with "Fin... du Cinéma."
Although the obituaries of cinema have been somewhat premature, it is, paradoxically, those who have proclaimed its death who have done most to revivify it.
In 1960, New American Cinema Group Manifesto contained the declaration: "The Official cinema of the world has run out of breath. It is morally corrupt, aesthetically obsolete, thematically superficial, and temperamentally boring." Many years previously, Sergei Eisenstein saw film as both an artistic and revolutionary force: "Karl Marx proclaimed 'The bourgeoisie created the world in its own image.' Comrades, we must destroy that image."
The work of radical, relatively mainstream, film-makers such as Robert Bresson, Federico Fellini, Luis Buñuel, Jean-Luc Godard, Jean-Marie Straub, Marguerite Duras, Chantal Akerman and Chris Marker, continued to formulate a film language free from the dominant bourgeois culture of the west. The death of Michelangelo Antonioni reminded us of how much he realigned our perception of time and space in cinema and, like those great directors mentioned above, he fought against the narrowness of narrative and the primacy of plot.
The plot is the least important aspect of a film. A film that relies on plot for its appeal is dispensable. When anyone asks me what a film is about, I reply, "about 90 minutes." It is as futile to explain what a film is about as it is to say what a painting or a symphony is about. The creation defines itself.
