Session four, “The Book to Come” Reading Group: “La jalousie”, proposed by Isidoro Valcárcel Medina

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“IN 1957, ALAIN ROBBE-GRILLET PUBLISHED ‘LA JALOUSIE’
IN 1972 VALCÁRCEL MEDINA CARRIED IT OVER INTO A FILM
THIS IS THE FILM POSTER”

The film poster for the Isidoro Valcárcel Medina’s one and only film is explicit and literal: La Celosía is not a filmed adaptation of Robbe-Grillet’s book, but a carrying over of the work into film. Two elements make up the film. Firstly, it contains different paragraphs from a novel built up out of detailed, objective, repetitive descriptions of people, things and situations. These paragraphs appear as written text on the screen or in the soundtrack, in French or Spanish, and are not synchronously ordered. The second element in the film is its length: 115 minutes. The film weaves a geometrical fabric out of the material, which is superimposed on to the lattice structure of the original text, so that movement and temporality are determined by the frame of the film screen.

Bulegoa zenbaki barik have invited Valcárcel Medina to share different parts of the making of a film-book with The Book to Come reading group: over 300 written pieces of cardboard used in the sequences that make up the film; the film poster; one of the two copies Valcárcel Medina annotated and used as his script (the Spanish 1958 edition of Robbe-Grillet’s novel), and La Celosía, the end result, made up of text-image and text-sound.

We will also be watching Marcel Broodthaers’ Un voyage en Mer du Nord, a film from the same time, also a book.

To take part in the session, which will run from 17:00 to 20:00, please contact bulegoa@bulegoa.org

Isidoro Valcárcel Medina

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                1.9571.9581.9591.9601.9611.9621.9631.9641.9651.966
                1.9671.9681.9691.9701.9711.9721.9731.9741.9751.976
                1.9771.9781.9791.9801.9811.9821.9831.9841.9851.986
                1.9871.9881.9891.9901.9911.9921.9931.9941.9951.996
                1.9971.9981.9992.0002.0012.0022.0032.0042.0052.006
                2.0072.0082.0092.0102.0112.0122.0132.0142.015

The project The Book to Come is developed as part of Corpus, network for performance practice. Corpus is Bulegoa z/b (Bilbao), Contemporary Art Centre (Vilnius), KW Institute for Contemporary Art (Berlin), If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution (Amsterdam), Playground (STUK Kunstencentrum & M-Museum, Leuven), and Tate Modern (London): www.corpus-network.org.

Corpus is co-funded by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union.