Produced by the distribution and production platform Auguste Orts (presented at the Cinema Dynamo during thesummer 2013), at times showed in a larger installation, The Joycean Society is a film that benefits from its simplicity.

A reading group based in Zürich meets and talks, deconstructs sentence after sentence, word after word, James Joyce’s famous Finnegans Wake. Began in 1986 the first reading of the book – renowned for its difficulty and its many different interpretations – spurred a second reading more than ten years later, still carried out today, and certainly not the last one. The group has beenmeeting dedicatedly for almost 30 years; one can discern relations between members, without however really knowing how they unfold in daily life. Perhaps “normal” life in a sense is insignificant, or maybe too pragmatic in comparison to this collective enterprise, serene and steady, utopian in its detachment to economic imperatives or the necessity to “produce”. This Joycean “society” does not aim to reproduce social patterns, rather to extract itself from any – at least during its meeting times – and to immerge itself in a quest nearing insanity (that of the author and that of the reader, the notion of insanity having no pejorative connotation in this context).

It is a process unaffected by the passing of time, as is often the case of Dora García’s practice; she records with respect these exchanges and interactions and allows the film to render the moment in its real time frame, inserting only a few “exterior” elements – commentaries from an expert on Joyce, images of the author’s tomb –, as to avoid interfering or bothering a precious moment. To the text’s reading aloud as a central aspect of the meeting correspond the meticulous sound arrangements that grant a delicate depth to the film.