Mollysday is a 74-minute-long feature film, yet to be completed. It is meant to give life to the last episode of James Joyce’s Ulysses, known as ‘Penelope’ – the notorious ‘stream of consciousness’ of Molly Bloom. The movie has been filmed and edited at 70% of its completion.
What is it looking for?
Waiting for a Studio to be legally covered and distributed.
Financially speaking, it tends towards self-sufficiency. The locations for the scenes yet to be filmed are Trieste, Zürich and Paris: the places where Ulysses was actually written (not set). A few weeks of work, already ‘storyboarded’; including a few days of audio post-production.
A “work in progress”.
This film is the result of a dramaturgical montage: approximately a thousand lines selected and taken (literally, with the original orthography too) from the text, from the very first page to the last one; it is actually conceived to render the monologue in its entirety. Once completed, plenty of material will remain for at least two more films. These two subsequent movies can be shot at a later date. The whole chapter should last about five hours. In the shape of a trilogy, a series or a single product. These successive forms can take place in different moments and involve more than one director. But they are not indispensable. This project was born to be autonomous and complete in itself.
Its way.
Primarily, it is an opus (a film, a video…) on language; then on Joyce; then on a character (Molly Bloom); finally, on women: as seen from a man. In accordance with the initial assumption (the Plato’s excerpt mentioned in “the project” page), each sentence (the unity) is there to be considered as an individual subject: a picture, a painting, a frame, a strip. A tableau vivant.
At a first level, it is the Language itself to be performed and staged. In its ways. Dialogical ways. As in Joyce himself– and in the Gospel of John, would have perhaps added the artist as a young man. To do a merely ‘theoretical’ experiment, there would be as many Mollies as there are lines (a thousand, in this case, as we said). But the Modernism of Ulysses does not pursue ‘absolute forms’; and therefore, neither shall we. At this step, there are five / seven main Mollies, with a ‘trinity’ at its centre.
The English subtitles are an integral part of it: each line lives on its caption, which faithfully reproduces Joyce’s original text – the edition published in 1922. It is not an ‘addition’.
They are Titles, not Subtitles.
The double subtitled version (Italian / English) is for presentation only. The basic version is the one with English (sub)titles. The ‘blacked-out shots’ and voice-over parts stand as placeholders for the scenes yet to be staged.
Its name.
The title “Mollysday” intends to give space to the ambiguity between genitive and plural of Finnegans Wake; a work that, with the comfort of many eminent scholars, we see in continuity with this one – and with all the previous ones of Joyce’s progress. The nocturnal finale of Mollysday wants to be an invitation to the inauguration of Finnegans Wake.
mollysday 