475 Park Avenue South, 6th Floor, New York, NY, 10016
Monday - Friday
11:00am - 5:00pm
"The coolest film organization in the world." —John Waters
Est. 1961.
Isidore Isou arrived in Paris from Romania in 1945 where he founded the Lettriste movement and published many books. Letterism attempted to break down poetry into letters and syllables, and then all arts into their constituent parts, to build up new languages for each art form. LE TRAITE DE BAVE ET D'ETERNITE (On Venom and Eternity) was the first Lettrist film manifesto. Isou brought it uninvited to the Cannes Film Festival (1951) where it won the audience prize for the avant-garde. Jean Cocteau's poster promoted the 1952 release on the Champs-Elysées. The film is Isou's "revolt against cinema": the sound and the picture are purposefully unrelated, and the images are destroyed by bleach and scratched. The film is a landmark work that prefigured the letterist and situationist cinema to come and influenced many experimental filmmakers.
"The greatest filmmaker of all time... ISOU is the leader of our generation."
- Maurice Lemaitre, Ur
Traité de Bave et d’Éternité (Venom and Eternity) - 1951, 35mm, 120min
Watch the film online on our VOD page:
Author(s) | Isidore Isou |
Format | DVD9 PAL Interzone/Region 0, Mono, 1.33 |
Original format | 16mm |
Year | 1951 |
Language(s) | French |
Subtitles | English, German, Italian, Spanish |
Runtime | 123 min |
Publisher | Re:Voir |
The Film-Makers’ Cooperative (a.k.a. New American Cinema Group) is the largest archive and distributor of independent and avant-garde films in the world. Established in 1961 by a group of 22 path-breaking moving image artists (including Andy Warhol, Jonas Mekas, Shirley Clarke, and Stan Brakhage), the Coop has more than 5,000 films, videotapes, and DVDs in its collection.
475 Park Avenue South, 6th Floor, New York, NY, 10016
Monday - Friday
11:00am - 5:00pm