A fictionalised autobiography based on the condition of spectatorship and the drift of contemporary cinema.
Combining different forms of speech, such as essay, chronicle and intimate diary, Carlos Losilla immerses us in a soliloquy in which he insists, time and again, on salvaging something, however little it may be, from the wreckage.
Why a diary? Perhaps because the writer no longer trusts other discourses, neither the academic article nor the speculative essay. That is why he begins to talk about one of the things he likes most, the cinema, in a random way, as if it were an interior monologue. And that is why he creates a character that is him and is not him, although he cannot stop constructing theories, returning to his usual themes… Over the course of a year he talks about Tarantino and Pedro Costa, Hong Sang-soo and Kelly Reichardt, he tries to guess what cinema is and has been for him, and even sets out to prove that the films of the 50s and 70s are the most important in history, until the endeavour proves impossible, until reality imposes itself in the form of science fiction, of a pandemic that stops everything. And then he realises that his diary, his writing, is just that: a struggle between ‘science’ and ‘fiction’ in which the latter always comes out on top.
Carlos Losilla (Barcelona, Spain, 1960). He writes and lectures on film, an activity that ranges from the magazines Caimán Cuadernos de Cine and La Furia Umana to the Universitat Pompeu Fabra and the ESCAC, as well as the Festival Internacional de Cinema D’Autor de Barcelona (D’A), of which he is a member of the planning team. He has published several books which reflect his passion for film history and theory -La invención de Hollywood o cómo olvidarse de una vez por todas del cine clásico (2003), La invención de la modernidad o cómo acabar de una vez por todas con la historia del cine (2010), Flujos de la melancolía. De la historia al relato del cine (2010), Raoul Walsh (2020) – and has combined them with peculiar mixtures of essay and autofiction – En busca de Ulrich Seidl (2003), El sitio de Viena. Traces of Fritz Lang (2008), Shadow Zone. Notas dispersas a partir de Viaggio in Italia (2014).
