Excerpts from the soundtrack of the film Traité de bave et d’éternité (1951) by Isidore Isou
translated from the French by Charles Clement and modified by William E. Jones
In the film, the following text is read mostly by Albert J. LeGros, playing the part of Daniel, a young cineaste presenting his manifesto to an audience at a Left Bank cine-club. Hecklers interrupt him periodically. A friend called Pierre and Daniel’s girlfriend Eve also deliver dialogue that can be considered a significant part of the manifesto.
Daniel speaks:
The film medium interests me because of its inherent possibilities of discovery and continual progression. I love the cinema when it is insolent and does what it shouldn’t.
First of all, I believe the cinema is too rich. It is obese. It has reached its limit, its maximum. The instant it attempts to expand itself, it will burst. Congestion will tear this fat pig into a thousand pieces. I announce the destruction of the cinema, the first apocalyptic sign of disjunction, the rupture of this bloated organism known as a film.
Today’s films have a complete, perfect, tranquil quality. This results in the harmony between the elements of composition, the classic unity between the film’s constituent parts: speech – image. To conquer, one must divide. We must tear apart the two wings of cinema, sound and image. We must break the natural association which made speech correspond with vision, the spontaneous commentary engendered by photographs.
I wish to separate the ear from its cinematic master: the eye. I want to cover the film stock with a howling phrase unconnected to the scenes on the screen. One must make indifferent the unfolding of images in relation to a terrible soundtrack that can be projected, piercing the darkness of the theater. The connection between the images (perhaps coherent in themselves) must be severed; in relation to sound, they must be incoherent.
Whereas up to now speech was only a commentary on the image; hereafter the image shall be a simple complement, necessary or useless, to the sound. Analyze the composition of any film. You will see that the effect of a succession of images is that the dialogue illuminates the gestures of the protagonists. Recently I looked over a screenplay. Just like the old-fashioned titles cut into silent films, the dialogue alone made no sense.
From now on, I want the dialogue to have a precise and rigorous surface at the expense of the picture. I want to destroy the picture with dialogue, to do the opposite of what has been done, the opposite of what people believe the cinema is. Who said that in the cinema – whose meaning is movement – the movement must be that of the image and not the movement of speech?
Photography is too banal. All the combinations of angles, chiaroscuro, and double exposures demonstrate that one must go further, beyond the image, and attack the film stock. Before anything, one must spoil photography.
The fact that photography has passed from the original precision of its effects, from photography “copied from life,” as they say, to artistic photography, from its reality to monstrous unreality, from clarity to chiaroscuro; this proves the incessant enfeeblement of photography. Thus it is overtaken by its uselessness.
When you fiddle around with something in the hope of finding another thing, you extract its secret charms, but you also kill it. [A heckler shouts: Don’t do it to your girlfriend!] Precisely.
Think of the Marquis de Sade’s relations with the weaker sex. The divine Marquis knew so many women that in his search for the unknown, he reached a special kind of love known as perversion. The more ugly, toothless and disgusting the woman was, the more she excited him and pleased him in love.
Similarly, the cinema has reached the status attained by painting with the Impressionists and the Cubists, by poetry with Baudelaire and today’s Lettrists, and by modern music. The more the subject matter is spoiled and perverted, the more beautiful it is. The more the film is stained, gangrenous and infected, the more precious it will be to the filmmaker.
Is it a perversion of language or taste? Perhaps I am not right. But soon, others will be wrong. In the quest for renewal, I have exhausted the possibilities before they did. They are still busy testing the chances of photography, but I am through with photography. I now attack the film stock itself directly so as to destroy it and let myself be moved more by its madness than by its reason.
Let people come out of a movie with a headache. There are so many movies from which one emerges as stupid as one entered. I’d rather give you a migraine than nothing at all. I’m not paid by an optometrist to bring him clients, but I would rather ruin your eyes than leave them indifferent. In this mess of vision, the voice alone shall be coherent and terrible, until research and invention make it incongruous and disfigured. The spectator must emerge blind, with his ears crushed from the disjunction of speech and image. The break between speech and image I will call cinéma discrépant.
I am launching the manifesto of cinéma discrépant. I call for a willfully lacerated film, a chiseled film. Those who will particularly hate my film will be the cinema craftsmen, those to whom the cinema has never been a creative art, but an industry organized in defense of current production.
Pierre speaks:
The cinema already has its masterpieces. All we can do is chew these masterpieces, digest and vomit them. Vomiting these old masterpieces is the only means to achieve original expression. Spitting out these masterpieces is our only opportunity to create in cinema our own masterpieces.
Daniel speaks:
Cinematography must therefore enter its evil phase. I have often thought with wonder about the peak of refinement reached by the Marquis de Sade as he ate the feces of his mistresses, adoring their excrement more than them. [A heckler shouts: Sadist!] A peak of refinement unfortunately still beyond my reach. Either the cinema will nourish itself from the excrement of its own photography, or else it will congeal into the academic pompousness known as Hollywood, USSR, or Italy.
From the point of view of photography, I will fuck with the film stock. I will take old outtakes and scratch them. I will claw them so that unknown beauty appears. I will sculpt flowers on the film stock. Tomorrow I will make a new order from this disorder, exactly as Cézanne changed Impressionism into an art fit for the museum.
I want to make a film that hurts your eyes just like during the screening of a very old print, cut up and shredded, when you see the numbers flashing upon the screen. I’ve always loved the flashing numbers at the beginning of reels. [A heckler shouts: But what you want to do is not cinema!] If what I am doing is already called cinema, I deserve no merit, for it already exists. But the significance of my act stems precisely from the fact that what I am doing is not cinema now, but shall henceforth, thanks to me, become cinema.
Eve speaks:
Haven’t others before you used outtakes in making films?
Daniel speaks:
Perhaps others have used outtakes, but they have tied them to a coherent whole. They have organized this footage in a logical montage. I, for the first time, will abandon myself to the footage, just as Dostoyevsky abandoned himself to his downfall.
Eve speaks:
The images of the actors will have no relation to your scenario, as if you had taken the sequences of a film, and instead of cutting them, you had become bored with a story known in advance, as if this bric à brac was the very lassitude of film, as if this very lassitude meant the destruction of the cinema.
You will show that images do not count, that you can make them say what you want and what they do not say. Right now, any image equals any other image. All images are equally indifferent.
Madame de Charrière told Benjamin Constant that god existed but died during the creation of this unfinished world. The universe you see is but the scaffolding of a never-to-be-completed universe. Similarly, the cinema will never again be constructed as it used to be. If I follow you correctly, Daniel, according to you the god of the cinema is dead.
I know that others before you have already destroyed the image, but you are the first to understand the necessity of this destruction. Others may have destroyed the image, but they did it accidentally. They then gave up the job and turned to something else. You’re the first to understand that the destruction of the image is its only means of evolution.
Pierre speaks:
The cinema up to now has already produced all its possible masterpieces. We can do nothing better than by our intelligence, by the parasitic intelligence of these masterpieces, by fission, show our understanding of them. Previous creators had an open space in front of them in which they could move. That is why they were able to choose the epic, cinematographic action. But we, the Epigoni, the late-comers, all we have to work with are historical memories of this cinematographic action, the critique or apology of previous actions. Our films can only be simple commentaries – conscious or unconscious – on the films of the past.
Perhaps the story you will tell in film will be banal, but tomorrow another will be able to tell any story at all by employing your method of cinema discrépant, indifference to the image. Any novelist will be able to make a film without spending a penny.
Daniel speaks:
They will claim I had no trouble in making this film, but it took years of thought to reach the point of using random film footage. People will say that my films are full of errors, but there are no perfect works.
I think my film will contribute to the medium in all its aspects: (a) a new technique of the image: chiseled or ruined photography; (b) an original screenplay technique with speech explaining the invisible; (c) original, discrepant montage; (d) a new, unheard of approach: an anti-aesthetic of cinema.