However, I was quite please to discover that the last film in the series was Isidore Isou's Venom and Eternity. Like a lot of fans of punk, I stumbled across Isou, a Parisian film maker from the early 1950s, in Griel Marcus' fanciful history on the origins of punk, Lipstick Traces. I say fanciful, because there is a lot of speculation involved in Marcus' linking of punk to past avant garde movements like dadaism, situationism, and Isou's own lettrism, something he described as a celebration of pure noise, freeing letters and sound from the tyranny of thousands of years of words.
Venom and Eternity was Isou's attempts to explore this idea in film, and just as he wanted a disconnect between sounds and words (meant, I think, more in the sense of narrative meaning) in poetry, Isou argued that the next phase in the evolution of film (following World War II), was the severing of the relationship between sound and images. He felt that both of these artistic avenues could be used to explore different, but complementary, themes simultaneously. The visual literacy of the audience was such that they didn't need a dialogue or film score to reinforce the images being presented, their audio faculties could be engaged along other lines.
What we see in Venom and Eternity then is a set of filmed sequences following the main character "Daniel" as he wanders around Paris. There is a narrative voice-over, but the two are not related in any direct way, other than perhaps to say that Daniel features in both. Isou has also scratched and drawn on the film stock, making the overall effect very similar to a lot of the films I've seen shown at punk rock and electronic shows as a visual backdrop to the music. In fact, it struck me that perhaps the punk shows represent an idealized manifestation of Isou's lettrism in film, and strengthening some of Marcus' claims.
Judge for yourself (here is a random selection from Venom and Eternity since Isou wasn't all that keen on narrative):
