Strange creatures, writers—and no two are quite the same. Scribblers of all kinds are at work across this collection, in which writing proves to be so much more than words. Literature is inseparable from the wider world for both the novelist in Alice Diop’s Saint Omer (2022) and the intellectual in Meeting the Man: James Baldwin in Paris (1970). Though decades apart, these riveting films both interrogate where writing belongs in the embattled arena of justice. Autofiction shapes the other French films in this collection. While Mia Hansen-Løve reflects poignantly on what it is to be among giants and remain an artist in one’s own right in Bergman Island (2021), Olivier Assayas’s Non-Fiction (2018) satirizes the egos of Paris’s publishing world with stinging insight.
Writing is humbled in Jim Jarmusch’s Paterson (2016). For a bus driver in this quiet, lilting film, poetry is no more and no less than a daily rite. Meanwhile, the eponymous copywriter in Dominik Graf’s epic melodrama Fabian: Going to the Dogs (2021) aches with lofty aspirations, dreaming of greatness from an atmospheric cloud of cigarette smoke in Weimar Berlin. Wong Kar Wai’s 2046 (2004) elevates words to the spectacular realm of time travel: shuttling between the past and the future, a lovesick writer goes in passionate search of lost memories. Volumes of thought and emotion are contained in the manifold lives of authors—and all of it is just waiting to be put into words.

Strange creatures, writers&#8212;and no two are quite the same. Scribblers of all kinds are at work across this collection, in which writing proves to be so much more than words. Literature is inseparable from the wider world for both the novelist in Alice Diop&#8217;s Saint Omer (2022) and the intellectual in Meeting the Man: James Baldwin in Paris (1970). Though decades apart, these riveting films both interrogate where writing belongs in the embattled arena of justice. Autofiction shapes the other French films in this collection. While Mia Hansen-Løve reflects poignantly on what it is to be among giants and remain an artist in one&#8217;s own right in Bergman Island (2021), Olivier Assayas&#8217;s Non-Fiction (2018) satirizes the egos of Paris&#8217;s publishing world with stinging insight.
Writing is humbled in Jim Jarmusch&#8217;s Paterson (2016). For a bus driver in this quiet, lilting film, poetry is no more and no less than a daily rite. Meanwhile, the eponymous copywriter in Dominik Graf&#8217;s epic melodrama Fabian: Going to the Dogs (2021) aches with lofty aspirations, dreaming of greatness from an atmospheric cloud of cigarette smoke in Weimar Berlin. Wong Kar Wai&#8217;s 2046 (2004) elevates words to the spectacular realm of time travel: shuttling between the past and the future, a lovesick writer goes in passionate search of lost memories. Volumes of thought and emotion are contained in the manifold lives of authors&#8212;and all of it is just waiting to be put into words.

Between the Lines: Writers on Screen

BETWEEN THE LINES: WRITERS ON SCREEN

What goes on between bookish lines? Casting light on the manifold lives of writers, these films have more than one way with words. From lilting odes to everyday beauty to momentous epics that travel through time, the vertiginous act of writing is a passage to the world, the self, and the sublime.

What goes on between bookish lines? Casting light on the manifold lives of writers, these films have more than one way with words. From lilting odes to everyday beauty to momentous epics that travel through time, the vertiginous act of writing is a passage to the world, the self, and the sublime.