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This chapter studies Isidore Isou's Traité de bave et d' éternité (On Venom and Eternity), which premiered on April 20, 1951. By using Lettrist poetry as part of the film sound track's experimental conceit, Isou lays claim to bodily intonation and its signifying possibilities for sound in cinema. With Traité's faulty transfer of sound, Isou uses one type of sound technology to remediate another. Remediation usually describes the condition whereby a medium “appropriates the techniques, forms, and social significance of other media and attempts to rival or refashion them in the name of the real.” Consequently, it most frequently refers to media that replace older technologies in the service of more accurately reproducing reality.

This book examines the core Lettrist films produced by Isidore Isou, Maurice Lemaître, Gil J Wolman, François Dufrêne, and Guy Debord in the years 1951–1952. In the film Traité de bave et d'éternité (On Venom and Eternity), Isou employed montage discrepant (discrepant editing)—the purposeful nonsynchronization of sound and image—and also drew directly on the celluloid to intensify and produce what he called image ciselante (chiseled image), which changed cinema. The Lettrists were committed to a cinema that implied spectators' active participation. They foregrounded sound as well as participation, and consistently employed dissociative strategies in their films—disjunctures between speech and sound, sound and image, screen and space—in pursuit of an unmediated cinema consistent with their desire to move from the space of representation to the event itself.

For decades, the canonical histories of postwar avant-garde cinema have begun with the “mythopoetic” and “visionary” ideas of Deren and Brakhage, in utter neglect of the radical Lettrist cinema by which Brakhage was himself inspired. This chapter explores the brief flowering of Lettrist cinema in Paris of the early ‘50s as establishing the aesthetic and theoretrical foundation of the Expanded Cinema and intermedia practices of the 1960s and ‘70s. Isidore-Isou’s Treatise on Slobber and Eternity (1951) inaugurates the movement with its conception of a radically disjunctive aesthetics, prefiguring both the sound/image mismatch of Jean-Luc Godard and the critical film essays of Chris Marker. Maurice Lemaître’s Has the Film Begun? (1952) extends this disjunctive conception to cinema’s theatrical situation, presenting an idea of synthetic cinema-performance which frustates the distinction between the local and cinematic space.

World War II led to a renewal of cinepoetry, not as utopian experiment but as a practice aiding in the reconstruction of the embodied self, of being-in-the-world and of the sensoriality of language. While the Occupation censored cinema, writers after 1943 increasingly turned to writing scenarios and theoretical texts on cinema, including Barjavel's Total Cinema (which Bazin recycled). When the Liberation finally arrived, France reconstructed itself in the shadow of the Hollywood backlist, launching new cinema institutions and studies. In 1946, three young Jewish refugees—Isou, Lemaître and Pomerand--met and together founded Lettrism, the first-avant-garde poetic movement of the postwar. This chapter argues that Lettrism's cinepoetic revaluation of the ‘letter’ must be understood as the intersection of the new filmic culture, Kabbalistic mysticism, and a damaged post-Shoah reality. Other poets connected with Surrealism also conducted cinepoetic experiments to reimagine and rematerialize what binds together their psyche, body and writing in the wake of the war and the Shoah. This chapter draws on Isou's theoretical works on poetry and cinema, Jean Cayrol's concentrationary Lazarean esthetics and his poetic text written for Resnais’ Night and Fog (1955), and Cayrol and Claude Durand's poetic theory of cinema.