Venom and Eternity

Endorsed by Cocteau to enable its screening at the Cannes Festival in 1951, rewarded with a custom-made prize, promptly admired by the young Debord, praised by Rohmer (“‘hooked’ me a thousand times more than the best non commercial film I’ve ever seen”), later described by Stan Brackhage as a “cinematic masterpiece, and Isou a filmmaker of greater importance than Griffith, Chaplin, Von Stroheim”, this is a unique film. Simultaneously theoretical, burlesque, a self-destructive exercise of wonder, it famously separates “the two wings of film”—sound and image.