Isidore Isou

Isidore Isou
Isou in his film Traité de bave et d'éternité (1951)
Born	Isidor Goldstein (1925-01-29)29 January 1925 Botoşani, Romania
Died	28 July 2007(2007-07-28) (aged 82)
Occupation	Poet, film critic, visual artist

Isidore Isou (29 January 1925 – 28 July 2007), born Isidor Goldstein, was a Romanian-born French poet, film critic and visual artist. He was the founder of Lettrism, an art and literary movement which owed inspiration to Dada and Surrealism.

Born into a Jewish family in Botoşani, Isou started his career as an avant-garde art journalist during World War II, shortly after the 23 August coup saw Romania joining the Allies (see Romania during World War II). With the future social psychologist Serge Moscovici, he founded the magazine Da, which was soon after closed down by the authorities. He moved to Paris, having developed many concepts that intended a total artistic renewal starting from the most basic elements of writing and visual communication. He adopted then the French first name "Jean" (John in English) and the pseudonym Isidore Isou. He called himself a Lettriste, a movement of which he was initially the only member (at the age of 16 he had published the Manifesto in 1942) and published a system of Lettrist hypergraphics. Others soon joined him, and the movement continues to grow, albeit at times under a confusing number of different names.

In 1951 the young Isou released his experimental and revolutionary film Traité de bave et d'éternité (Treatise on Venom And Eternity), work deemed revolting by many critics present at the premiere. Including a reflexive discourse on the making of a new cinema, it became a virtual Lettriste film manifesto. Attacking many film conventions by chiseling away at them in his film, Isou introduced the concept of "discrepancy cinema" where the sound track has little or nothing to do with the accompanying images. The sound track of Treatise on Venom and Eternity begins with jarring and unpleasant human noises, which continue in low volume throughout the spoken dialogue. In addition, the celluloid on which the film was recorded was attacked with destructive techniques such as scratches and bleaching. The film caused a scandal at the 1951 Cannes Film Festival, and was later introduced into the United States, where it influenced avant-garde film makers such as Stan Brakhage. In the early fifties one segment of Orson Welles' film journal, which was entitled Le Letrrisme est la Poesie en Vogue, included an interview with Isou and Maurice Lemaitre.