"Yes, good folk, it is I who direct you to roast upon a red-hot shovel, with a little brown sugar, the duck of doubt with lips of vermouth, which, in a melancholy struggle between good and evil, shedding crocodile tears, without an air-pump everywhere brings about the universal vacuum. That is the best thing for you to do."

Lautréamont (Isadore Ducasse)

The Comte de Lautréamont, whose real name was Isidore Ducasse, wrote only one novel: 'Les Chants De Maldoror' which he published himself. He died a year later during the siege of Paris1870, alone and anonymous in his hotel room at 7 Faubourg-Montmartre. He was twenty four years old. On his death certificate the cause of death was listed as unknown. In his work he had written that he would leave no memoirs and that he knew his annihilation would be complete.

But Lautréamont's modesty, like his work, was constructed from the most toxic and delicious irony for in Maldoror, he had built a subversive device, half virus, half bomb, that would erode and disintegrate western literature. In Maldoror, Lautréamont takes the form of the 19th century Romantic novel and reanimates it like a demon possessing a corpse. The Songs are composed of complex and unstable allegorical narrative, shocking juxtapositions of language and image, breathtaking shifts in tone and style, endless sentences that wind and swerve and even deny their own subjects. And throughout there is the voice of Lautréamont. Sometimes a charming confidant, sometimes a delirious mystic or a bombastic lecturer, a penitent sinner, an angel, a deranged killer, a poet, the author of Romantic literature. Or perhaps it is Isidore Ducasse.

Both high literature and penny dreadful, Maldoror used plagiarism and collage before Dada. It was beloved and imitated by the Surrealists, revered by the Situationists and it was both Modernist and Postmodernist before Modernism. As decades pass the myths, the claims and the counter claims around the work of Isidore Ducasse shift and expand. Maldoror denies definition, it is ambivalent and unfinished. It is still dangerous. The film Maldoror is only a fragment of the book, each filmmaker (mis) reading the text, the idea of the text mutating and hybridising. Our film is the continuation of the book by other means.

The translation used in the film, and the best translation in English is by Alexis Lykiard, Maldoror and Complete Works of the Comte de Lautréamont, Exact Change, Cambridge, MA., 1994. ISBN 1-878972-12-X.