Joycean Society
Dora Garcia
2013 - 53 min - Vidéo HD - Couleur - Belgique

Not without irony nor bravado, James Joyce had foreseen it: his Finnegans Wake was to fuel endless comments for centuries. Dora Garcia takes us to a literary hotspot, one of the famous ’reading circles’. Familiar with mazy interpretation games (like in her previous films, screened in this Festival), she chooses a single, simple setting: a small room filled with books and posters of the literary master, where amateurs fascinated by the Irish novelist’s great work meet on a regular basis to go through his text with a fine-tooth comb, analysing it patiently, word after word, page after page. They are at once dedicated and learned, but none of them is a professional expert: you’d think you were attending an informal religious meeting about some sacred book, given the seriousness and scrupulous method that prevail here. Devout as it may look, the initiative is nonetheless secular. And joyous. And playful. It is common knowledge that Joyce’s text has the particularity to have it all programmed: its illegibility and its never-ending translation, its madness and its overruling, its forbidden transparency and its renewed call to the Other. As if they were suffering from a secret and adulated disease, the readers are enthralled by the strangeness of such a common practice: talking.
(Jean-Pierre Rehm, FID 2013)