Traité de bave et d'éternité

D: Isidore Isou, Frankreich 1951, 120 Min., 35mm
Introduction: Pip Chodorov (Re:Voir, Paris)

“In the above context of The Lumières and Méliès as „the 2 wings“ of Film, I take Isou to be the visceral backbone, complete with electrically „scratched“ nervous system synopting – all rhythms tending to that consciousness we know as cathexis or investment. His Traité has certainly been prime inspiration for all of my film-making, since I first saw it, and for many of the U.S. independent film-makers... and I do not mean simply for (how did you put it?) the „scratch or blinking films“. The verbal rethoric of Traité is at one with the aesthetic of the moving picture imagery and in its subtle weave of be-seemingly dull photography (which effectually obliterates traditional and slavishly composed photography – whether scratched-over, turned upside-down or not). Traité opened each sensibility (that will be open to it) for new feeling about film, thus for the new feelings each might have uniquely rising in each self appropo [sic] that which is intrinsically Film. I know no other works of cinema which, without intruding its own aesthetic, more frees human sensibility to dance, in the mind’s eye, with cinematic possibilities.“

Stan Brakhage in a letter to Frédérique Devaux, 1993