Anna O’Meara – Ja ja ja!: Isidore Isou on destroying words and pictures for their realization
The cinema is where words meet moving images in a continuum. Films seamlessly merge music, dialogue, narrative, and images. In 1951, Isidore Isou made a violent attempt to break film’s seamless continuum in Treatise on Drool and Eternity. An inspiration to filmmakers like Stan Brakage and Guy Debord, Isou’s film manifesto was a precursor to both American and French avant-garde art and politics. After working on a new translation of Isou’s film for Annex Press, I will discuss Isou’s methods in breaking traditional art forms in order to create new aesthetic and ideological standards. This discussion will use texts by Isou, many of which are untranslated, that wrestle with the creation of new forms through the deconstruction and reconstruction – through the merging and breaking – of the relationship between text and image in film.
Anna O’Meara is a French to English translator and historian based in Albany, NY. Her translations include a forthcoming publication with Annex Press of Isidore Isou’s Treatise on Drool and Eternity in partnership with translators Ian Thompson of Brisbane, Australia and Nadège LeJeune of Paris, France. She has also translated The Works of Arthur Cravan, which has appeared in Maintenant by Three Rooms Press. O’Meara received her M.A. in Art History from the University of Notre Dame in 2013 for which she wrote The Marxist Critique of Religion in the Films of Guy Debord. Currently, she serves as a Research Assistant to the New York State Historian, Devin Lander. O’Meara has conducted branding research and website development for a New York City production firm, Archivist Media, as well as exhibit development research for the Children’s Museum of Indianapolis. Previously, she served as the Director of Outreach & Development for the Museum Association of New York, and the Assistant Administrator of the Albany County Historical Association.
The 187th meeting of the NY Comics & Picture-story Symposium will be held on Tuesday, May 2, 2017 at 7pm at Parsons School of Design, 2 West 13th Street, in the Bark Room (off the lobby).
Free and open to the public.