Leonardo Sciascia 100 years later, a documentary to tell the “alien writer”

Leonardo Sciascia he was the absolute, the only man capable of bringing together all definitions and all its opposites. An intellectual, he refused to be defined as such. Politician, he despised power. Ironic, he stayed away from any, and pure manifestation of comedy. Sciascia, of which January 8 marks the first centenary of his birth, it was the only one. “An anomaly”, it is defined in Alien writer, a documentary that in itself carries something of a circus.

The production, directed by Simona Siri with the narrating voice of Gioele Dix, is short and accurate. Four sections make it up, each reflecting a specific segment of the Sciascia man: man of letters, man of words, man of ideas and ideologies which, in the Italy of the First Republic, have not found any material belonging. Sciascia is told through Sicily, the proud son of sulfur, through politics, and a communism that has lost the opportunity to be revolutionary, doing nothing. It is told through Religion and Yellow, and it is told in the words of the family members who survived him, of the men he met, of the intellectuals who inherited the immense philosophical legacy.

Leonardo Sciascia – Alien Writer, his Sky Art in the early evening of Friday, it is told in minutiae, and it is from minutia that the picture of an “anomalous” artist can emerge. «Sciascia was an anomaly, master by constraint, he crossed fascism while remaining immune from it. He lived the First Republic as a loner, challenged churches and power while remaining a stranger to it ”, it is said in the documentary, where it is well explained what link the Sicilian writer has woven with politics. Communist not registered with the underground Communist Party, first deputy, then radical, he allowed himself to be subjugated by the eternal charm of power. But, a man of integrity, he then distanced himself from it, disappointed by the outcome of a battle which, in the eyes of the later, took on the marvelous features of quixotic mills. Sciascia, the first writer to have opened the doors of literature to criticism of the mafia, said he did not choose politics, but was forced to do so by his books. The same ones in which, however, a large part of his political disillusionment has flowed. Sciascia was cyclicality, a folding of time into an eternity that has no beginning or end, and which, today, still maintains its power intact.