DVD : OULIPO a user manual (L’Oulipo Mode d’Emploi)

A film by Jean-Claude GUIDICELLI (France - 2010)
Written by Jean-Claude GUIDICELLI & Frédéric FORTE
In collaboration with Hervé LE TELLIER & Frédéric FORTE

Oulipo mode d’emploi (Oulipo : A User’s Manual) is a historical and up-to-date portrait of the OULIPO group, mixing archives, scenes from the group’s life and conversations with its members.
Smattered with wry animated images, this joyful film shows a playful, surprising, ever-changing, and yet strictly constrained world – in a word, oulipien.

At the end of November 2010, OULIPO, the Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle, celebrates its 50th birthday... or its 50,000th birthday, because at the OULIPO, each year is equal to a millenium!

This research workshop, created around the writer Raymond QUENEAU and the mathematician François LE LIONNAIS, is a group of ‘scientific poets’ who have assigned themselves the task of exploring languages potentialities, that is to say, to supply literature with structures, rules, and forms, or rather, ‘a user’s manual’.

Out of these formal constraints come innovative and often funny works, such as, for example, Exercices de Style by Raymond QUENEAU.

Among the most famous Oulipiens, we have Georges PEREC, Italo CALVINO, Marcel DUCHAMP or Jacques ROUBAUD...

Les oulipiens ?
Rats that build themselves a maze from which they try to escape . . . .

HE SAID...

« What is the OULIPO ?
OULIPO? What is this? What is that?
What is OU? What is LI? What is PO?
OU is for OUVROIR, a workshop.
To make what? Some LI to read LI is for literature,
what you read and what deed impedes.
What kind of LI? Well, LIPO!
PO means potential.
For unlimited quantities of literature,
potentially producible up until the end of the world,
in enormous, infinite quantities
for all imaginable uses. »
Marcel BENABOU, Jacques ROUBAUD

BONUS DVD

Interview of Umberto ECO about OULIPO

MORE ON THE WEB

OULIPO
Official French Site