Isidore Isou

• Contre l'internationale situationniste (1960-2000), essai, Éd. Hors Commerce, 2000. • Contre le cinema situationniste, neo-nazi, Librairie la Guide, Paris, 1979. • Isou, ou la mécanique des femmes, Aux Escaliers de Lausanne, Lausanne (Paris), 1949. • Les Champs de Force de la Peinture Lettriste, Avant-Garde, Paris, 1964. • Introduction à une Nouvelle Poésie et une Nouvelle Musique, Paris, Gallimard, 1947. • La Créatique ou la Novatique (1941-1976), Éditions Al Dante, 2003. • Les Journaux des Dieux, 1950/51. • Manifesto of Lettrist Poetry: A Commonplaces about Words. • Traité de bave et d'éternité, Éd. Hors Commerce, 2000. • Treatise on Eternity and Venom, Annex Press, 2019.

In 1951, Isou released his first movie, the experimental film Traité de bave et d'éternité (Treatise on Venom And Eternity), whose premiere took place at the Cannes Film Festival. Although the film was not officially entered in the festival, it was widely publicized in the press and its screening constituted one of the festival's fringe events. While threatening to form his own jury to judge the film,[17] Isou went door to door, harassing the administrators of the festival until they agreed to grant him a small, peripheral exhibition.[18] The film consisted of "four and a half hours [...] 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".[19] In addition, the celluloid on which the film was recorded was attacked with destructive techniques such as scratches and bleaching. In one of the film's voiceovers, Isou states his opinion on the medium: "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."[20] Following its screening, the work was deemed revolting by many critics present at the premiere. The film was booed and hissed from the start, but after the first section was completed and the screen went completely blank with the audio still going, the audience was furious and the screening had to be stopped. It was, nonetheless, celebrated by Cannes jury member Jean Cocteau, who called it "the most beautiful scandal of the entire festival" and handed Isou a hastily concocted "Prix de spectateurs d'avant-garde". Including a reflexive discourse on the making of a new cinema, Isou's film became a virtual Lettriste manifesto. Following the scandal after the film's showing at the 1951 Cannes Film Festival, it was later imported into the United States, where it influenced avant-garde film makers such as Stan Brakhage, who corresponded with Isou directly afterward and let it change his approach to the medium and to narrative entirely. In the early 1950s, one segment of Orson Welles' film journal, which was entitled Le Letrrisme est la Poesie en Vogue, included an interview with Isou and Maurice Lemaître.[21]

In the 1950s, Francois Dufrene created a phonetic poetry movement which breaks the structures of language that he called Ultra-Lettrist. The Ultra-Lettrist movement was an art form developed by Dufrene along with Jean-Louis Brau and Gil J Wolman[23] when they split from Isou's Lettrism. The Ultra-Lettrists explored the vocal possibilities of concrete music, a form of expression based on spontaneity directly recorded to tape, exploiting the noise music qualities of sound, meaning and nonsense. Visual conceptual artists Raymond Hains, Jacques Villeglé and Mimmo Rotella also participated in the Ultra-Lettrist movement. In the 1960s Lettrist, Lettrist-influenced works and Isidore Isou gained a certain amount of respect in France.[24] Former co-agitators of Isou, writer Guy Debord and artist Gil J. Wolman broke away in 1952 to form the Lettrist International. It later merged with the International Movement for an Imaginist Bauhaus, and the London Psychogeographical Association to form the Situationist International, a dissident revolutionary group. In this new form, using means acquired over the course of a decade prior, Lettrist art exerted a profound influence upon the posters, barricades, even designs for clothing in the attempted revolution of 1968. Isou would go on to claim that his 1950 manifesto Youth Uprising: First Manifesto was a catalyst for the events of the 1968. Members of his Lettrist group are still active, among them cineast and writer Roland Sabatier and film director Frédérique Devaux.[25] Many of Isou's works, and those of the other Lettrists, have recently been reprinted in new editions, together with much hitherto unpublished material, most notably Isou's extensive (1,390 pages) La Créatique ou la Novatique (1941-1976).[26] In July 2007, Kino International released the DVD collection Avant-Garde 2: Experimental Films 1928-1954, which included Isou's film Traité de Bave et d'Èternité (Venom and Eternity) (1951).[27] In 2021, Andrew Hussey's book The Strange and Enchanted Life of Isidore Isou was published by Reaktion Books.