2003
NEMLA
Aesthetics and Politics III:
Film and Television
La
Pauvreté de ces Moyens: Lettrist Film Criticism and the Portrayal
of the Radical
With this paper, I engage in the ongoing debate over cinematic efficacy in the portrayal a political idea, experience, or agenda though a discussion of the filmmaking and writing of Isidore Isou.
In 1945, Isidore Isou immigrated to Paris from Romania at the age of twenty. Shortly after arriving in Paris, he founded a group of young writers and artists called the Lettristes, a name that reflected the style of poetry that he had developed in Romania. Isou's approach to poetry was to break down language to its essence, sound and the letter. Letters, according to Isou, carry the capacity for new representation. His goal was to revolutionize art making, the art object, its exhibition, and its reception. The Lettrists saw traditional art as dead and the only possible form of expression, therefore, as détournement, the recontextualizing of elements to subvert their original intent and thereby explore possible new meanings, a practice that later came to define Situationist art making. (Guy Debord, founder of the Situationist International, began his career as a member of the Lettrists and owes his work on détournement to his collaboration with Isou.)
Isou's theory of cinema developed from his criticism of poetry and painting; the letter itself is not sufficient for Lettrist painting as there are only twenty-four letters. To compensate for what he regarded as the "pauvreté de ces moyens," Isou sought to reach beyond the object to the overall context in which the object exists. For cinema, this contextualization encompasses the spectator's social comprehension, daily experience, and physical presence. Isou's approach to cinema was to undermine all standard tropes of filmmaking while assaulting the audience's expectations of spectatorship. The Lettrists quickly became known for their unconventional activities, often seen as scandalous by the French public and press. Their radical cinematic activities culminated in the controversial 1951 screening of Isou's film Traité de bave et d'éternité at the Cannes Film Festival.
Isou's ultimate
aim was to create an aesthetic representation of the political that was
as radical as the depicted subject, while concurrently undermining the
cinematic conventions of image, sound and spectatorship. This goal later
became the crusade of Jean-Luc Godard in the films of his self-proclaimed
radical Dziga-Vertov period. However, Isou grappled with these questions
twenty years prior to Godard yet never achieved either the public or academic
recognition of the Nouvelle Vague cinéaste. Isou's critique of
representation must be posited in the larger debate over art and politics
in general, and the question of radical cinema specifically.