David Lynch is not the only director doing a little acting job on the current billboard – he plays John Ford in a cameo that for many is the icing on the cake in Spielberg’s film. In the film Los hijos de los otros, by Valeria Zlowtoski, the legendary 92-year-old American documentary filmmaker Frederick Wiseman has a small role. Wiseman, author of more than 40 films that bear his particular stylistic stamp (in his films there is no narration, exposition or interviews) agreed to play the endearing gynecologist because he has mutual friends in Paris with the director and he was amused by the proposal. Zlotowski commented in Le Monde that Wiseman, who is famous for the hundreds of hours of filming he accumulates before editing his documentaries, was a bit intimidated by the camera.
THE BOOKS FOR WHOM THEY WORK
A group of international authors and the Edizioni Alegri cooperative are collecting funds to celebrate the first “working class literature” festival in Italy at the beginning of April. Its inspiration comes from a similar event that took place in Bristol in 2021. If they manage to raise enough, the event will take place inside the premises of the Gkn factory in Florence, which produces automotive components and whose workers are currently on strike. Authors such as Claudia Durastanti, Wu Ming, Anthony Cartwright and Simona Baldanzi are committed to the literary encounter. The objective, they say, is “to help create a new class imaginary and give the right cultural weight to writers who have dealt with issues such as class wounds, labor oppression and their struggles, and professional misfortune.” The message echoes what authors such as the Scotsman Douglas Stuart (A Place for Mungo, Random House Literature) have been repeating in recent years, warning of the pijification of the literary landscape.
SHAKE AND VINDICATE GUIMERÀ
Sacralized as the author of classics that are read in the Baccalaureate and are staged continuously from the amateur theatre, hardly anyone expects to find Àngel Guimerà in contemporary literary conversation. But it seems that this has changed in 2023. On the one hand, there is Terra baixa (reconstruction of a crim), the play that premiered this week at the TNC and that Carme Portaceli and Pablo Ley have written, turning the Catalan theater classic into a fake crime, a whodunnit-sequel that reconstructs what happens after the famous “he mort el llop”. In addition, a tweet from @manolileonsegur that gained some traction on literary Twitter called for a queer reinterpretation of Guimerà and asked for more explanation –as is done with heterosexual authors– his love story with the journalist Pere Aldavert, with whom Mutual powers of attorney were granted (a kind of pre-wedding). Both share a grave, as they wanted, on Montjuïc.
THAT IS A LITERARY AWARD
Unlike the cinematographic ones, many literary prizes do not even materialize in something physical, a statuette that the authors can put in their office and show to the visitors. Some do, the well-endowed ones like Planeta or Nadal, who award a corporate trophy. Although the literary awards that deliver the best gadgets are the awards that bear the name of the writer Shirley Jackson. Each year they are awarded to various works (there are categories of short stories, novels, novels, and collections of short stories) that stand out in the fields of terror, the fantastic, psychological suspense, and what they call “imaginative fiction.” The winner gets a sundial, after Jackson’s book of the same title, and the runners-up get a flat stone each with her name inscribed on it. In reference, of course, to the pebbles that the residents of a town throw at another randomly chosen fellow citizen until he is stoned to death in Jackson’s most famous tale, that brutality called The Lottery.
IF YOU DON’T HAVE A BIOPIC, YOU ARE NOBODY
The biopic industry does not rest. If you’re someone half famous who did something significant in the 20th or 21st century, there’s probably a movie being made about your life right now and you haven’t heard about it. Or yes, because they will have entered a check for biographical rights. In addition to the Amy Winehouse film, a Susan Sontag film based on Benjamin Moser’s biography is currently in the works, in which Kristen Stewart will play the intellectual superstar, a film, Fred
