Deceased Artiste Isidore Isou

I pride myself in doing obits for the folks in arts and entertainment who get very marginal coverage in the mainstream press. A case in point is a third filmmaker who died this week. Bergman was a god, Antonioni was a genius, but Isidore Isou — now there was a troublemaker! I had just recently gotten a full-on introduction to Isou by watching his feature Venom and Eternity (1951), which is included on the new Experimental Cinema: Avant Garde 2 set that has come out from Kino International. The film is a major act of provocation, one that I was very happy to review on the show. I have uploaded the part of my review of the Kino box that pertains to the Isou film, plus four short clips from the feature, which is truly still, 50-plus years later, an overwhelming experience. For those who aren't familiar with Isou, here's an interesting Net biography of him, courtesy of Wikipedia.


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Funhouse upload: Deceased Artiste Ingmar Bergman talks about... Deceased Artiste Michelangelo Antonioni

The fact that Bergman died within a day or so of Antonioni is certainly remarkable, as they were of course two of the remaining Old Masters of cinema (I still think of the French New Wavers — still rockin' in their 80s — as a bit younger than they). I couldn't resist putting up this bit of a 2002 TV interview in which Bergman brought up Antonioni's name while discussing the new films he would see in the cinema on Faro, the island where he lived out the latter part of his life.


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