Reading cinema The legendary film by Isidoro Valcárcel Medina
Forget all cinema conventions. When at the 1972 Pamplona Meetings, Isidoro Valcárcel Medina presented La celosía, he told the press: ‘In 1957 Alain Robbe-Grillet published La jalousie. In 1972 Isidoro Valcárcel turned it into a film.’ Coming from those years when the avant-garde took risks, he transferred the book of this French novelist to the screen, literally: the one and only scene in the film shows typed extracts of the novel that progress slowly. Although the fragments are in French and Spanish, the voices that read them are in different languages. Valcárcel superimposes multiple voices until they are unintelligible, dissociating what is heard and what is read. In so doing, he emulates the content of Robbe-Grillet’s book, La jalousie, a title that, in French, maintains the polysemy between the concept of ‘jealousy’ referring to envy, and the lattice or jalousie window through which one can see without being seen. The book breaks all the conventions of the novel by presenting an obsessively jealous husband who is unable to distinguish real events from those imagined. Valcárcel constructs an exercise in filmic dissociation that amounts to an experiment about the duration of the shot. All the experimental power of one of the leading artists of Spanish Conceptual art now on display in the MACBA Collection exhibition.
