The first few minutes are unpromising, the director expresses his desire to revolutionize cinema and catch up with the greats, and to demonstrate his credentials he reminds us that he is a poet and that he has published several works: we are shown one by one the covers of his now forgotten literary works, which seem to be included in an equally forgotten avant-garde style called lettrismo.
Then, and for half an hour, Isou repeats over and over again, through a voiceover, his revolutionary vision: cinema should be a kind of read text, on images with which this text has no connection. It is original, but it seems to us without a future and frankly wrong. In fact, after a few minutes we get bored listening to that voice while images of the author strolling through Saint Germain des Pres are endlessly repeated.
Unfortunately, Marguerite Duras will continue down those paths in some of her most boring films.
But Isou proposal is not without interest, and in fact Isou is a true pioneer who announces many of Godard's findings, or Marker's way of documenting. This in its second part, where we are told about the protagonist's relationship with a young Russian woman. And the truth is that interest arises when he abandons the radical nature of his attempt, which is gratuitous in itself, and what he does is partially dissociate spoken narration and image, without the separation being complete. Thus, when there is a clear divergence in the rhythm or character of the image, or when there seems to be a distant relationship in the contents. It is then that it seems that Isou opens the door to a world to explore.
The problem is that Isou doesn't seem aware of where the true interest of what he proposes lies, and that his findings alone cannot sustain interest for two hours. They are valid as a formal element, one of many, in a larger work (the future that Godard will give it), or because of the primary interest in the narrated content (Marker's documentaries), that is, they require talent beyond just being an innovator.
The work then seems to me to have an unexpected significance, given its early date, and one of the novel contributions to experimental cinema since the advent of talkies.
