The Striking Isidore Isou
He was a painter, poet, novelist, playwright, essayist, theorist, musician, erotologist, economist, dancer, filmmaker – and much more. He was also, in equal measure, a troll ‘avant la lettre’, a terrorist and manipulator of received ideas, a pompous speculator, and an uncompromising genius. In January 2025, one hundred years passed since the birth, in Botoșani, of avant-garde artist Isidore Isou (1925–2007), an event of major cultural importance that, predictably, went largely unnoticed in Romania. Almost miraculously, a one-day symposium (October 17), organised by professors Christian Ferencz-Flatz and Andrei Rus at UNATC and capped off by the screening of his only feature film at Cinema Elvire Popesco, came to partially repair this inexcusable oversight.
From a historical perspective, Traité de bave et d’éternité (Venom and Eternity, 1951), the two-hour feature (originally four) that Isidore Isou conceived in Paris at the age of just 25, is quite possibly the most important “Romanian” film ever made. Indeed, it’s hard to find another title that anticipated – or at least indirectly influenced – such a vast constellation of future artists. From Stan Brakhage – who discovered Isou’s hand-drawn embellishments on film stock in San Francisco in 1953, just after shooting his first short, and later confessed to watching the film at least ten times – to Godard, who half-admitted Isou’s precedence only late in life, Traité de bave et d’éternité was a meteor that somehow crash-landed in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, erasing through its effortless radicalism the tortured gesticulations of that era’s so-called “cursed” cinema.
The fruit of relentless tenacity – Isou embodied the refusal to take “no” for an answer – the film simply defies temporal placement. An audiovisual manifesto of Lettrism, the avant-garde movement founded by Isou, the film is furiously anti-narrative and fiercely self-sufficient, carried by a luminous arrogance. It takes a moment to grasp that this work of contemporary art turns 74 this year. It would sit comfortably among today’s essay-films, conceptual hybrids, and loose image-sound assemblages that wander the festival circuit – only that Isou’s has more bite, and an almost anachronistic faith in art’s transformative power. Premiering noisily on the fringes of the Cannes Film Festival, supported by figures such as Jean Cocteau, Traité de bave et d’éternité – like so many Lettrist happenings and provocations – was a masterstroke of communication. It’s enough to see how the film opens with a “modest” overview of Isou’s published works to date – already enough to fill a small bookstore shelf – as if serving first and foremost as a shameless act of self-promotion
Though its reception was rocky – dismissed by critics and ignored by audiences, only to be kept alive by a few loyal devotees – the film stands as both a triumph and a singular creation. Isou, eternally dissatisfied, would never make another film like it.
Isou was a one-man factory – a proto-Warholian Factory on two legs. He fancied himself a kind of Messiah, and some of his followers – most notably the great Lettrist artist Maurice Lemaître – wholeheartedly bought into the myth, dazzled by his aura. At 17, in wartime Bucharest (1942), he began a diary in Romanian with a telling line: “Perhaps because I will one day be famous, I’m beginning to write my journal as a direct anticipation of my future value.” A Jew who narrowly escaped Romania and the Holocaust after a brutal beating by Iron Guard thugs, he arrived in Paris at 20 as a man on a mission: to rewrite the very ontology of art, to systematize all forms of expression on new aesthetic foundations – not out of whim or ego, but with mathematical rigor, through axioms and assertions of “this is how things must be.” Less than two years later, he published a major essay with the prestigious Gallimard (Introduction à une nouvelle poésie et à une nouvelle musique), widely read among the radicals of the day; soon after, he was jailed for “offences against public decency” upon publishing an obscene pamphlet. In barely three years in Paris, he had managed to alienate every enlightened faction in town.
A spiritual guru and an insufferable sectarian, Isou was a kind of social hub for his time. A quick glance at the roster of key figures in France’s political and aesthetic avant-garde of the 1950s through the 1980s reveals his magnetic knack for attracting interesting people – sometimes even giving them a sense of purpose. From the experimental bard Jean-Louis Brau to the polymorphic artist Gabriel Pomerand, and from Gil J Wolman to a certain Guy Debord – who, as a teenager, fell under Isou’s spell – countless intellectuals who worked across different artistic media first emerged within the orbit of Lettrism, only to end up, sooner or later, as Isou’s sworn enemies in a string of endlessly petty yet entertaining quarrels.
Already, in Traité de bave et d’éternité, Isou denounced jazz as an artificial substitute for Black people’s return to an ancestral heritage, to a primitive, archaic form – when the true primal impulse, of course, resided in Lettrism! Following his lead, his devoted disciple Maurice Lemaître would later attack the likes of Godard, Duras, Marker, and Resnais as plagiarists of Lettrism. The resentment is understandable: the movement remained largely confined to the margins, deprived – perhaps deliberately – of the cultural prestige of the mainstream.
Today, in an age of trendy relativism and cynicism in the art world, Lettrism’s messianic fervour, its belief in being the cornerstone of a new aesthetic vision, is simply hilarious. I rewatched the film recently in a packed Paris screening, and the pompous voiceover drew waves of laughter. Made long before conceptual art or the Nouvelle Vague, the film genuinely believed it could turn art upside down and rescue it from stagnation. The project also served Isou as a platform for widely disseminating – or so he hoped – the main concepts of Lettrist cinema: “chiselling” (le cinéma ciselant), the act of decorating film stock with arbitrary, often nonsensical graphic marks; and “discrepancy” (le cinéma discrépant), the total disconnection of image and sound, freeing the latter from its usual subordination to the visual element.
Before John Cage or Pierre Schaeffer’s sonic experiments, Isou was already dismantling the harmony of sound and image, cultivating the creative power of disjunction in every possible art form. In the film’s most illustrative sequence, a paranoid and vaguely misogynistic love story unfolds over footage of colonial outposts and military drills – scraps of film rescued, quite literally, from the garbage bins of Parisian labs.
Traité de bave et d’éternité is both theoretical and abstract, fond of coincidence and random poetry. Its epic opening scene, where the director’s alter ego Daniel recalls the uproar following a cine-club screening – after scandalising the bourgeoisie by declaring war on “proper” cinema – is a staggering display of visionary thinking: a cascade of intuitions that have only now begun to materialise, if not turn into clichés. Each insight could have formed the backbone of a lifelong artistic program.
Paying homage again and again to masters like Griffith, Eisenstein, or Chaplin, Daniel (played by Isou himself, wandering aimlessly around Saint-Germain, leaning on lampposts, tying his shoelaces, and so on) doesn’t wish to erase the past but to reinvent form through new coordinates, retaining the grandeur distilled from his illustrious predecessors. As the narrator himself states: “If what I wanted to do already existed as cinema before I made it, there would be no evolution.”
A marginal current takes shape here – one built on jolting the well-behaved spectator and sidestepping every trend before it even takes hold. It’s the spark that will eventually ignite the militant, demystifying cinema of the 1960s, born in a politically charged, anti-imperialist and socially liberated era. At the root of it all, Isou’s battle was with the professionalisation of the film industry, which he saw as working against difficult ideas and singular visions – the very forces that push art forward – in favour of a self-protective guild of commerce and convenience. “Those who will especially hate my film,” he declares, “are the professionals for whom cinema has never been an art of creation, but a unionised industry built to protect existing means of production. But who ever said cinema was the art of photographers?”
The movement Isou demands of his audience is based on two principles: on one level, he’s appealing to something already within us, buried deep under the disposable layers of ‘culture’ and ‘civilisation’ we have acquired by living in society. On another, he’s asking for a rare kind of sensitivity – the ability to see beauty and meaning in what’s raw, vulgar, and desacralizing, the very energy he believed would fuel the art of the future. The paradox is crucial, and Daniel, Isou’s alter ego, underlines it with a striking metaphor: “I understood that it takes great knowledge and a special refinement to find interest in cheese that stinks.” To reach this purity that lies beyond articulated language – to see letters and sounds collide freely in disarray – Lettrism positioned itself, albeit without openly claiming it, as the heir to Dadaism and Surrealism: an aesthetic and political weapon designed to pull humanity out of culture’s servitude, liberating it through a total fusion of art and life.
Traité de bave et d’éternité was made on a shoestring, with the zeal of a guerrilla fighter, produced by none other than Marc-Gilbert Guillaumin – better known as Marc’O – an influential filmmaker, video artist, theatre director, and driving force behind France’s alternative cultural scene of the 1960s and ’70s, who passed away earlier this year at a venerable age. Marc’O was also behind the only issue of Revue ION (1952), a small, light-green volume bursting with ardour, featuring the first-ever text published by Guy Debord and a dense, hundred-page essay by Isou titled Esthétique du cinéma. In it, he famously declared: “The public should be invited to destroy the seats in theatres when they are offered banal, standardised merchandise, and not when they are shown an original work. […] The ideas of theatre directors – or even the directors themselves – should be eradicated in the name of cinema’s stupidity, just as others have been eradicated in the name of Race or the People.”
Isou’s output was staggering – close to a thousand Lettrist paintings, over a hundred books, and so on – many works now lost or still overlooked. Mapping his legacy is a balancing act in itself. In the same spirit, Lettrism laid the groundwork for what we now call “expanded cinema,” imagining film in every conceivable form: a projection in a theatre, a reel displayed in a gallery, a script acted out by friends without a camera (an impromptu performance), or even the mental possibility of a film. The restless instigator of these wild experiments, Isou died isolated and largely misunderstood. As musicologist Frédéric Acquaviva – the foremost expert on his work – notes, he never enjoyed the fame of a Debord, remaining instead a resistant theoretical territory. It took 12 years after his death for the Centre Pompidou to host an exhibition dedicated to him.
Still, Lettrism was radical in the most inclusive sense – it refused to exclude any form of expression, conceived as a total, collective intervention within an ossified official culture. In Romania, Isou remains an illustrious unknown, much like Gherasim Luca or, to a point, Benjamin Fundoianu. In France, he’s an unacknowledged innovator – a tenacious visionary whose contributions demand to be reappraised. Traité de bave et d’éternité destroyed cinema, and on its still-smoking ruins, the radical practices of tomorrow would blossom. Thank you, Isidore Isou.
Film critic and journalist; writes regularly for Dilema Veche and Scena9. Doing a MA film theory programme in Paris.
Film critic and journalist; writes regularly for Dilema Veche and Scena9. Doing a MA film theory programme in Paris.
