The Book To Come
‘The Book to Come’ – Reading Group. Photo: Bulegoa z/b.
Thursday 5 November 2015
‘La jalousie’, proposed by Isidoro Valcárcel Medina
5pm / Bulegoa z/b, Bilbao / Session four, ‘The Book to Come’ – Reading Group.
“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 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 watch Marcel Broodthaers’ Un voyage en Mer du Nord, a film from the same time, also a book.