Sqizo, l’invisibile Wolfson
by Duccio Fabbri, Italy/USA/France, 2016, 3’45’’
A journey into a special mind. Born in NY in 1931, diagnosed schizophrenic and interned in various psychiatric institutions where he undergoes some 120 rounds of electric shock, Louis Wolfson, once out, as a form of revenge, stops speaking in English, studying Russian, German, Yiddish and French. In French he writes his autobiography, Le Schizo et les langues (Gallimard, 1970) becoming an immediate literary sensation. Nevertheless he continues to be an homeless and an inveterate gambler. At age 72, he moves to Puerto Rico, near the world’s biggest radio telescope, to discover new lives in the universe. Here he wins the lottery, to fall into ruin again. The ‘American writer of the French language’ who fascinated Sartre, De Beauvoir, Lacan and Deleuze but also Paul Auster and Le Clézio is a mysterious and invisible genius aged 86, with a life as an unmissable piece of art.