Lucian Pintilie

LUCIAN PINTILIE

Contents

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Lucian Pintilie and the golden rule of “Don’t touch it!”

– an introduction by Corina Șuteu

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“I close my eyes and I see” – an interview by Mihai Chirilov

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An Essential Contemporary – an essay by Michel Ciment

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The Search for Identity – an essay by Magda Mihăilescu

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A Cinema LesSon – Lucian Pintilie in his own words

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On a Meeting – excerpt from Lucian Pintilie’s memoir, Bricabrac

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Filmography

This publication is produced by the Romanian Cultural Institute in New York on the occasion of the first U.S. complete Lucian Pintilie retrospective presented March 1-12, 2012 by the Museum of Modern Art (Laurence Kardish, Senior Curator), with the Romanian Cultural Institute in New York, and in collaboration with the Romanian Film Festival in NYC and the Romanian National Film Center, Bucharest.

The publication is an extended version of the Lucian Pintilie dossier included in the 2011 special issue of AperiTIFF magazine, produced by Transilvania Intenational Film Festival and the Romanian Cultural Institute.

Lucian Pintilie and the golden rule of “Don’t touch it!”

Corina Șuteu New York February 2012

Seeing all of Lucian Pintilie’s films presented in a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art is as close as one gets to witnessing a miracle.

I am not sure the artist would like this idea. He hates all pomposity and has little regard for Romanian bureaucrats. Pintilie’s artistic journey in the 70’s and 80’s Romania was peppered with what he metaphorically calls a “conflict with the Gogolian authority,” and it became, under the Communist regime, a never-ending struggle.

While presenting Reenactment (a film that was immediately banned in Romania) at Cannes in 1970, Pintilie was also in the early process of staging the theatrical production of Nikolai Gogol’s The Inspector General, the only production to provoke an official prohibitive declaration on Communist National radio, as well as in the pages of the official Communist Party newspaper, stating, “This production is banned from Romanian public stages because of its incompatibility with the scope of Romanian theatre.”

And this was so true for everything else Pintilie daringly created over the years.

Indeed, there is an intense and unyielding incompatibility between his art (Reenactment, Carnival Scenes, The Oak, Next Stop Paradise or The Afternoon of a Torturer, to mention only a few of his films) and the human compromise and anesthetized version of reality with which politicians try to blindfold life.

This incompatibility was so strong, and so dangerously revealing, that for the Communist regime the only way to stop it was to prohibit the author from creating, and to force him away from the country.

To an informed observer, Pintilie’s persona in Romanian arts acts much like the moment of truth in Hamlet, specifically when the fictional play within the play exposes Claudius the usurper, revealing him as the killer. How utterly unbearable such characters can be to politics and politicians!

And even more so when the man who creates them is also a great, true artist.

With his “mood killing attitude,” his often savage, untamed intellectual conduct, and an impressive body of work that offers – as film critic Michel Ciment notes – “a very rare combination of moral reflection, visionary power and a sense of the grotesque,” Pintilie has travelled his artistic path exclusively on his own terms.

In his autobiographical book Bricabrac, he confesses, “When fighting censorship I understood that if I impose on the censors the rule of ‘don’t touch it!,’ I will win the battle. The artwork will be saved and put to fire at the same time, but its symbolic value will triumph.”

Romania did not have a Vaclav Havel.

We have Lucian Pintilie.

For the Romanian Cultural Institute, this retrospective is an homage to him and – because of artists like him – to the enduring victory of art over politics.

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Lucian Pintilie: “I Close My Eyes and I See” Mihai Chirilov Bucharest February 2012

W When asked what he wanted

to be when he grew up, director Corneliu Porumboiu answered: Lucian Pintilie.

Credited with the rebirth of the Romanian cinema, director Cristi Puiu insisted that without Lucian Pintilie the New Wave would have never existed. Coming from Pintilie’s favorite directors, these statements bear witness to the truth: Lucian Pintilie is the most important Romanian filmmaker. A brilliant artist of immense irony who went from film to theater with the same elegance with which he combined acute social observation and visual poetry in his work. Always angry, cynical, subversive, disturbing and never willing to compromise, either politically or artisti-

cally, Pintilie accepted the French exile he was forced into when the regime in Romania tried to silence him. On the occasion of the screening of his full body of work at MoMA, Lucian Pintilie (who rarely gives interviews) agreed to look back, closing his eyes and letting us see the man behind an astounding career nowhere near its end.

You have made 10 features and one medium-length film in a career spanning almost five decades. Do you feel it is a lot, too few, or perhaps the right “balance”?

My natural pace is to make a film every two years. I point out, with a well-contained anger, that the Romanian cinema owes

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The Oak

me a ten-film debt – ten feature films were denied me when I was barred from cinema.

For 20 years (1970 – 1990) I was not allowed to make films in Romania.

In 1970 we were denounced, a colleague and I, having triggered an “unpatriotic feeling in the Romanian cinema”.

Anyone in Romania knows the meaning of such a denouncement. A 20-year absence, that is. Imagine how it would have been if The Oak (editor’s note: the literal translation of the Romanian title is The Balance) had appeared 20 years earlier. And all my other films.

In those years of absence, during which I owe my creative life and, let’s be honest, my survival, to very generous countries such as France and the U.S., I met my fellow wanderers Andrei Șerban and Liviu Ciulei. The hardest moments were my returns to Romania.

But I ask you, in turn: Do you know how many films were made in those 20 years by the director who denounced me to Ceaușescu? Aside from the “film”

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of Ceaușescu’s execution, in which he participated, there are 38 films. I repeat the question: Do you know how many films were made by the director who denounced Pintilie to Ceaușescu? My answer is always the same. 38 films.

When did you understand Romania better, before or after the Revolution that overthrew the Communist regime in December 1989?

When I saw General Stănculescu (editor’s note: a general in the Romanian Army before 1989, thought to be the mastermind behind the Ceaușescu trial and execution) making paper airplanes while waiting for Ceaușescu to be executed.

When I saw how the dictators were riddled with bullet holes. How that was passed on in the language – from “murder” to “legend” and then into slang, and how it then became an expression used by the head of state.

When I saw the tenderness between the two idiots (editor’s note: the Ceaușescus).

When I noticed how naturally Roma-

nians discovered that murder was part of their nature. It was a Romania that had no compassion, alien to me, cruel, closer to Syria than to Vienna’s Prater District. That is after 1989.

How did you reinvent yourself as an artist during your exile in France, how was it to take your obsessions someplace else, and why didn’t you make any films in France?

I returned in my old age, after wandering through the theaters of the world, to my house on the bank of the Baneasa lake. I sometimes don’t leave my monkish villa in Baneasa for several months in a row, and so I don’t notice that, in fact, the conversations that I have with my friends and collaborators about survival are only in my head, exactly how the Washington Post described them in an interview many years ago on March 2, 1989. I close my eyes and I travel. I close my eyes and I see.

When I am in Paris, I cross the Seine two or three times in a day before I realize that I am in Paris and that the river I am crossing, and which I can see better with my eyes closed, is the Seine.

My reinvention as an artist is a real dilemma; it would be worth further discussion some other time. In any case, I carry with me everywhere I go my exile in France, along with the sack filled with my obsessions, my postal sack…

Why didn’t I make a film in France?

Well, how could I have found the time to prepare that incredible labor of love and all of the backstage work which are necessary when starting a new project?

What is the most important recognition of your art that you have received in your entire career?

Maybe the Susan Sontag interview in the February 1977 Theater Heute. Being asked “What performances in the past few years have you felt were worthwhile experiences?” Sontag replied: “Lucian Pintilie’s Turandot. Robert Anton’s puppet theater.

Merce Cunningham. Peter Brook’s The Ik. Beckett’s Berlin staging of Waiting for Godot.

Plisetskaya doing Ravel’s Bolero. Strehler’s production of The Cherry Orchard.”

What is it that attracts you most to the idea of carnival? It is a word you use when speaking about your films and your vision of Romania.

The carnival attracts me; it seduces me as one of the most risky and challenging attempts to mimic death. I am reaching the end of my life, and every time I mock God’s name, I immediately look around in fear, should there be any snitches taking notes in their secret notebooks.

Carnival therapy is prodigious; for this the Merry Cemetery in Săpânţa was invented – an insane background for the carnival of the dead. People figured that out, and to merry alcohol they added a merry cemetery, quite vulgarized lately but with an impressive propensity for the metaphysical at its root.

When I staged the The Magic Flute at Aix-en-Provence, I was impressed by a non-carnivalesque letter from Mozart to his father, and I realized carnival was not the only possible approach to death. And, as death is the real goal of life, if we look at things head on, in the last few years I’ve become so used to this true and perfect friend of mankind that her image not only no longer holds anything to be feared, but I also find it to be most peaceful and soothing.

With which character have you most empathised and why? Which one do you think represents you the most?

With Mitică in Carnival Scenes. He eases the heavy burden on my shoulders.

What aspects of reality fascinate you the most as a filmmaker?

Mirrors. The multiple facets of reality reflected in a giant mirror, the lake.

Can you comment on the fact that your films have been described as tragicomedies with black Balkan humor (a type of humor that does not always translate well internationally)?

Here is my response. It is a very broad categorization, way too broad, into which, indeed very much like a Balkan party, everyone is accepted. Enter Emir Kusturica who creates (with the exception of his first film) a cinema that I hate. Enter also Dusan

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Sunday at Six

Makavejev, this Serbo-Croation Godard with a cinema that I adore. I will enter, too, if you are so kind as to have me. Enter also Michael Cacoyannis, the oldest, the most melodramatic and most sentimental of us all. But who is not admitted?

The differences are, however, immense—much greater than one might expect, beginning even with the second languages each of us speaks. The Balkans is not a single entity but an immense incongruity that has exploded and over-exploded, which traditional characterizations fail to define, contain and explain.

What do the films based on plays lack, thus failing to be real cinema? If you were to adapt today one of the plays you have staged through the years, what would that be and why?

They lack people who really know how to adapt. I will try an adaptation this year; I will shoot a film based on The Seagull by Chekhov, to explain how I understand adaptation. I think one can do different things

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than what Marco Bellocchio admirably did in Fists in the Pocket many years ago and in many films that followed. An adaptation needs to contain within it another, tinier adaptation, a backup mechanism, and the best example is Vanya on 42nd Street, a perfect Chekhov by Louis Malle.

However, I did make, and it is included in this retrospective, Carnival Scenes (editor’s note: based on an outstanding Romanian play written by Ion Luca Caragiale). Have you already forgotten about it? It is a good example of how Pintilie understands the concept of adaptation. You should expect the same in the adaptation of The Seagull... Do you also want a title for it? Chekhov and Sakhalin. Do you want to know the story? To escape the ennui emanating from the women in love with him, Chekhov escapes to the island of Sakhalin, and there he tells the story of an execution he never witnessed.

I have noticed the time references, sometimes very specific, in some of

the titles of your films: Sunday at Six; An Unforgettable Summer; ; The Afternoon of a Torturer. Moreover, the narrative of Reenactment spans (only) 24 hours, intensifying the sense of real time – a device that can be found today in some of the New Wave films, in which the entire action also takes place over 24 hours. Other such films have in their titles as well very precise time references: 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days; 12:08 East of Bucharest; Tuesday after Christmas; Tales from the Golden Age; Aurora, etc...)

Time carries a metaphorical value, which I find deeply boring, as well as a metaphysical one, very stimulating. The observation is very interesting. Shall we discuss it further some other time?

Speaking of Reenactment, it is the beacon of the New Wave, according to some of its most important filmmakers. How do you see yourself in relation to the New Wave?

For me, the beacons are the films of Cristi Puiu and Corneliu Porumboiu, followed by a string of excellent directors.

Speaking of time, do you think that you manage to bury the past for good in your films (as splendidly suggested by the scene with the burying of the ashes at the end of The Oak)?

The issue here is not to bury it but to unearth it.

The moving episode about Charlie Chaplin on set is just one of the memorable pages in your memoir Bricabrac.

What do you think of that moment now, when you are the same age Chaplin was at the moment you met him?

I am glad you were moved by the Chaplin episode. For me, the greater the distance in time, the more moving these memories, because imagination also begins to play a part and distance amplifies them. What I remember for sure is Chaplin’s increasing timidity and aggravation as he had a hunch that the movie would be a flop.

Psychologically speaking, I can relate to this episode.

Too Late

The Afternoon of a Torturer

One of my favorite lines (from The Oak) is: “The offspring of the two of us can either be a genius or a madman. If it turns out to be normal, I’ll kill it with my own hands.” What is the most irritating representation of normality that you’d execute without remorse in a film?

Any representation of abnormality enacted as normality and accepted as such (and that is what The Oak is about) is prone to execution. I will tell you a real story that carries in it a great image: a few years ago, on a domestic flight, three priests in their robes were flying business class while a very distinguished Romanian politician, recently discharged from his office, was flying economy class, lost among the passengers. This image represents the very essence of the abnormal accepted as normal.

Are you as angry and exasperated with today’s Romania?

Even more so. But I have to confess that I am also very tired.

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An essential contemporary

By Michel Ciment

H

How many are there who

dominated both the scene and the screen in their time? A handful: Ingmar Bergman, Patrice Chéreau, Elia Kazan, Luchino Visconti, Andrzej Wajda. Lucian Pintilie is one of them. He is also one who established himself with his first two films, Sunday at Six and Reenactment, in the grand decade of the ‘60s, the years that saw the realization of Eastern European cinema that revealed the Russian Andrei Tarkovski, the Hungarian Miklós Jancsó, the Czech Milos Forman, the Pole Jerzy Skolimowski, and the Yugoslav Dušan Makavejev. Indeed, over the next forty years, Pintilie came to embody Romanian cinema almost by himself, before a young generation – which he helped hatch – started drawing the attention of the world.

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With this international recognition came major obstacles in his own country.

After making his theatre debut at the age of twenty-eight alongside another great artist, the older Liviu Ciulei (with Gorki’s play Children of the Sun), he staged ten plays until his version of Gogol’s The Inspector General was banned in 1972 after three performances by official decree announced

by Ceaușescu himself on state television.

Three years earlier, another work of his, Reenactment – later acknowledged by forty Romanian film critics as the best film in the history of the national cinema – had also been banned by censors. So the artist Ionesco once called “the savage” couldn’t but choose exile. Yugoslavia allowed him to shoot Ward no. 6 based on a novel by Chekhov, in 1973, but the main body of Pintilie’s work would for a while find a home in Paris theatres, where he staged productions of great public success and critical acclaim.

First, he directed Turandot after Gozzi and Puccini, a triumph at Théâtre National de Chaillot, then, between 1975 and 1990, ten productions – and as many aesthetic

Carnival Scenes

His work exhibits a rare coherence and offers a very rare combination of moral reflection, visionary power and a sense of the grotesque. shocks – at Théâtre de la Ville, ranging from Chekhov’s The Seagull to Strindberg’s The Dance of Death. He was even better received, if possible, in the United States and Great Britain where he proposed – among other things – corrosive interpretations of Tartuffe and The Wild Duck. In parallel, he successfully tried to stage operas, from The Magic Flute in Aix-en-Provence, to Carmen and Rigoletto in Cardiff.

Yet Pintilie was chomping at the bit, dissatisfied with not being able to express himself more directly – not only through the classics – and with not being able to bear witness to the present of his country through film. He was offered the opportunity to go back in 1979, after ten years of creative absence from cinema. He finished in his native country a film adaptation of

Ion Luca Caragiale’s Carnival Scenes, which he had already staged, and which would become the film De ce trag clopotele, Mitică? (known internationally as Carnival Scenes).

The verdict came again in the form of a total suppression (the film would be released only ten years later, after the fall of the regime), and Pintilie was again condemned to work abroad.

But the end of the communist regime allowed him to make The Oak, which marked his grand return. By one of those mysteries it alone understands, the Cannes Festival screened it outside of competition – in the noble company of Life and Nothing More by Kiarostami and Reservoir Dogs by Tarantino – even though a good number of observers would have handed the film the Palme D’Or. Pintilie would return from now on to Romania, producing a series of prominent films which are telling observations of the society in which they were made.

His body of work exhibits a rare coherence through ten feature films and a meteoric medium-length film, Tertium non datur, his last achievement to date. It offers

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a very rare combination of moral reflection, visionary power and a sense of the grotesque. One can feel it is generated by a force that refuses to accept a mere lucid gaze that rejects illusion and is in constant search for the truth hidden behind appearances. From his second film, Reenactment, Pintilie has laid it on the line disregarding allegory or fable, which often serves as a stratagem for directors working in totalitarian regimes. He duked it out with socialist realism. In order to avoid landing in prison after a drunken brawl, two young men agree to re-enact their deed in front of a camera, for the purposes of an educational film on the dangers of alcoholism. Following this mise en abyme device, Reenactment becomes the record of innocent deaths under the gaze of a representative of the state, an officer, and other figures of the establishment. For death is a familiar element in Pintilie’s cinema, from Sunday at Six to Ward no. 6, and from The Oak to Next Stop Paradise and Niki and Flo. Death is also associated with spectacle and populist feasts, from the barbarian banquet in The Oak to the fair in Carnival Scenes. In Reenactment,

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a mob coming out of a soccer match eventually lynches one of the protagonists. Like in Gogol, the apparition of the grotesque is a signal that anticipates death. It makes the apparent order burst out at the seams to reveal the hidden and monstrous face of the world. Hence the explosive mix of intense pain and irresistible humour.

Too Late, in which the action is placed after the fall of the Great Ruler, the Führer of the Carpathians according to the filmmaker, shows that there is no clear cut separation between the old and the new regimes. Manipulated by the powers that be, the miners take over Bucharest to rescue Ion Iliescu’s corrupt government in 1990, and to put an end to anti-government protests. In this thriller, one of the author’s bleakest films, the fetish-actor Răzvan Vasilescu conducts his investigation all the way through. It is because of his past cowardice, his old submisiveness, that his character now refuses to give in. Pintilie does not indulge the post-communist regime and the reign of the mob any more than he did the totalitarian system that preceded it. His entire cinema is carried by the refusal to forget, by the

Ward no. 6

Pintilie is not more indulgent with the post-communist regime and the reign of the mobs than he was with the totalitarian system that preceded it. His entire cinema is carried by the refusal to forget, by the need to question history. need to question history. This is the meaning of The Afternoon of a Torturer, his most denuded film, based on the simplest device in which the torture is never exhibited but evoked by a former torturer who agrees to talk. He ends up being taken for a fool because he contradicts what Pintilie calls “the complete inability of Romanians to confess and repent.” Pintilie brings forth memory as a duty and dialogue with the past as a necessity, in the manner of Angelopoulos, Rosi, or Wajda. Thus, the children of executioners come to lead a bunch of youngsters in chanting patriotic songs and refusing to acknowledge the crimes of previous generations. And again, pessimism prevails in this world adrift without moorings. In his fascinating book Bricabrac, a blend of diary, essay and scrapbook published by Éditions L’Entretemps in 2009, Pintilie sums up his relation with the Romanian people: “this unfortunate people for whom I carry a forbidden love with desperate fury.” One of the beauties of his cinema is precisely this spectral analysis of a nation.

In An Unforgettable Summer, one of his greatest and one of only two films, along with Tertium non datur, situated in the past, he gets at the roots of the twentieth century, wondering, not without irony, “if ethnical delirium is the only alternative to the communist gulag.” Through the prism of a garrison life in a border area in the ‘20s, he questions the reasons for which a strong-arm regime generates conflict among communities. Born in Bessarabia (a province that is today annexed to Ukraine), Pintilie recalls the German village of his childhood as a mosaic of people: Romanians, Ruthenians, Turks, Jews, and Russians living in a “paradisiacal void.” One of the protagonists of An Unforgettable Summer is interpreted by Kristin Scott-Thomas,

who makes an admirable portrait of a woman - only one of the many such women the director gave us, like Maia Morgenstern in The Oak or Dorina Chiriac in Next Stop Paradise. Like their companions, these women are animated by a powerful energy, a fantastic survival instinct that sometimes takes on a suicidal appearance. And with it, they often live a love delirium that is often the salutary counterweight to the political and the grotesque delirium around them.

No doubt, the theme of the stalked lovers in Next Stop Paradise – so specific to American film noir – finds here its most powerful expression on the silver screen. Mitu, the hero of the film, is unmistakably the most radical character Pintilie has ever created; he goes the farthest against accepting any compromise, he is an imprecator who reforms the state of the world.

The absence of illusion about Romanian post-communist society equally stands at the core of Niki and Flo, in which the filmmaker confronts a military past, representing the old order, with an arrogant civilian from the new regime. Through an art consumed by dialectic, Pintilie dissects the dispossession of one human being by another, and the cruelest is not the one you would expect. Pintilie, eternally refractory, is the one that says “No!” At the end of The Oak, after the lovers are reunited under the tree of life, the man tells the woman, “If our baby is normal, I will kill him myself.” This anarchist provocation strikes the hallmark of black humour and is a call for reflection and for refusing passive ideas. To the author, the “normal” person is the keystone of all utopia, meaning communism. But this cinema cannot be reduced to its social and political dimension. Pintilie frequented the great texts – Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, Kafka, Gogol, Pirandello – so that his reflection of evil would not be purely metaphysical. And the greatness of his art comes from the alliance of opposites: an anchorage in the most material, even teratological reality (the frequent presence, like in Buñuel’s films, of the animality) and the philosophical speculation, the tragic thrill, and the burst of laughter, the assumed theatricality, fluidity or syncopation specific to cinema.

Pintilie: an essential contemporary.

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The Search for Identity

By Magda Mihăilescu

At first glance, nothing seems to link the three films made by Lucian Pintilie in Romania before 1989. In Sunday at Six (1965) a young man pays a steep price for his dreams in the years before communism. Reenactment (1969) chronicles the tragic game of imitating reality, and Carnival Scenes (shot in 1979, but made public only after 1990) is a terrifying representation of the all-too-familiar dictum “the sleep of reason produces monsters.”

H His first film seemed a stylistic exercise at the time; this observation holds true even today when, now familiar with Pintilie’s full body of work, we have come to expect something different. Visibly influenced by the formalist experiments of the European auteurs of the 60s focused on capturing memory flow and on offering a visual equivalent for the mental obsessions which undermine the structure of temporal connections (Resnais, Robbe-Grillet), Sunday at Six was utterly provocative in the context of a cinema keen on protecting, first and foremost, the well-being of epic storytelling. Five years later, via Reenactment, the author would defy all metaphorical road posts. Reality, stripped of all its

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protective layers, is brutally on display, revealing the emptiness of the most trivial details required to signify something. Both style and content correspond in this case to a formula borrowed from Starobinski – “two sides of the same coin,” breathing the same air. Carnival Scenes goes on to propose the opposite – a baroque display of a make-believe of desperation and disgust.

The temporal axis of Pintilie’s first film (Sunday at Six) was the past, the second film (Reenactment) clang to the present, while the third foretold the future. And yet, however different they might be, all three films are populated by characters who share a common feature: the withdrawal from their own identity. They give their identity up, they have it stolen from them, or they simply lose it in a dim-witted, trivial self-oblivion. One way or another, Pintilie’s post-1990 works revive this obsession.

“Do not forget, your name is Ion Arghir,” a woman tells the young man seated next to her in a train compartment at the beginning of Sunday at Six. She says it again: “Your name is Ion Arghir.” The boy

Lucian Pintilie

memorizes his new identity mechanically while looking out the window, lost in thought, at all the youngsters like him, boys and girls getting ready for a trip. He could have been one of them, had he not chosen to work for an underground movement while giving up his own identity. The owner of the borrowed name cannot resist the display of vitality until he rediscovers his true identity and his real name, Radu. This rediscovery is enhanced by a traditional type of storytelling which is, nevertheless, regularly interrupted by the disturbing image of an elevator falling like a guillotine on an unseen stump. Past flows into the present, and the return to the “now” time frame takes place without those cinematic

devices which usually emphasize the end of a dream or a nightmare sequence.

Reenactment brings us into the core of Pintilie’s cinema, but it’s not a cinema dying to take over reality, to pin it down as if it were some kind of monstrosity to be kept in an imaginary museum of history.

In this 1969 film (written by Horia Pătrașcu from his outstanding homonymous short story), we witness the “reenactment” – a tension-filled, forced recreation of a relatively harmless fight between two teenagers shot on camera by the police to serve as a pedagogical tool. The camera – which is clearly used by an amateur pulled out of a cinema club – is leisurely examined so that we can see its inner workings

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and what unused film stock looks like and, taking over the screen, it gives the impression of a thoroughly cleaned and fully loaded weapon which is then given to those meant to wield it by coercing reality to imitate itself. It is only then – in the absurd reenactment – that the incident has a tragic outcome. Only when it is recreated on the capricious order of some authority, prevented from fading from our memory as a commonplace occurrence, does the incident take its tragic revenge. Reenactment presents the perfect paradigm of anxiety projected in a motionless time.

In Carnival Scenes, men and women lose their identities as if they were trapped in a never-ending, carnivorous carnival which, when deprived of nourishment, turns everything that comes its way into grotesque matter. But how can one arrive at this carnival? By going through the swamp, by becoming immersed in it with a paradoxical delight which, in time, turns into lust. The cineaste moves away from the brilliance of “ironic drive.” The realism of Caragiale’s slums, colorful and boisterous, no longer exists. It is now replaced with a fictitious space, a wasteland filled with garbage and dirty water, shared by people and animals alike. This is a world in which normalcy means delirium; a world which goes berserk if this “normalcy” is questioned or threatened. And here resides that terrifying tension of absurdity which feeds itself with itself. In 1979, ten years before the fall of the communist dictatorship, Lucian Pintilie assails us with fullblown shock treatment. He couldn’t have suspected, back then, but the bridge to his future films was becoming visible.

While in Carnival Scenes the mocking delirium was typical of the characters, in The Oak (1992) the regime of normalcy becomes one with the regime of the grotesque, ever-present from birth to death.

Childhood is placed within the ugly imagery of vulgar grown-ups gorging themselves on food, and everything becomes one in a sort of rebellion against squalor. Neither life nor death has a place here: the ashes of the female protagonist’s father will be carried around in a coffee can and the ride to the grave is inconspicuously but efficiently

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attended by the always watchful “blue-eyed boys” of the state surveillance apparatus. In a world in which normalcy is overturned, our two young heroes are the only ones who allow themselves to be sarcastic and to behave as crazed lambs. This is all they have left, anyway.

The drama of being unable to follow your own approach to life returns both furiously and frantically in Pintilie’s next films.

Mitu from Next Stop Paradise (1998) tried to go to America, but his father prevented him from leaving. In response, he chooses to live with the animals, because “pig is the brother of man – both would kill their brother for a slice of bread.” In order to be free, in order to defend his love, the young man will kill. In an unbalanced, chaotic world, one can only enter by force. It is what society makes the powerful do.

The tyranny of the powerful doesn’t necessarily need large, open spaces – everything can happen on the inside, as is the case with Florian Tufaru, aka Flo, in Niki and Flo (2003). The character perversely enjoys overseeing other people’s lives, as if he were a frantically and dementedly benevolent, energetic and priggish dictator. He’s the reason why the past is not left to die.

But should the past be left to die? This is only one of the subversively subconscious questions which torments us in Lucian Pintilie’s films, even those which are, apparently, somewhat more gently narrated, as is the case of The Afternoon of a Torturer (2001), a film about people’s failure to let memory do its job.

If Reenactment, The Oak and Too Late were called by the author “the trilogy of losing hope,” the later titles could be perceived as the films which ended “the dialogue with evil.” The filmmaker himself said of this dialogue: “I stopped talking about it, making it explode, I’m looking at it without any emotion, disgusted, aghast.” It would be an abuse to talk about finding hope in Pintilie’s films. However, there is, in Next Stop Paradise, a place where, at the end of the road, both death and life are celebrated: the church where Norica baptizes her child. A window opens towards the sky.

CALENDAR OF EVENTS March-July 2012 ONGOING THRU MARCH 4 THU–SAT at 7:30 pm SUN at 2:30 pm

THEATRE András Visky’s play I KILLED MY MOTHER premieres in NYC at La MaMA

La MaMA E.T.C., First Floor Theatre, 74 A East 4th Street, NYC Tickets: www.lamama.org

MARCH 1–12

FILM LUCIAN PINTILIE: The First Complete U.S. Retrospective at MoMA See next page for the full schedule of events!

Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53 Street, NYC

FRI, MARCH 2 7 pm

FILM | ARTIST TALK A Conversation with legendary actors Victor Rebengiuc and Mariana Mihuţ. In Romanian only.

Presented in connection with the Lucian Pintilie Retrospective.

Romanian Cultural Institute in New York (RCINY) 200 East 38th Street, NYC Free admission

MARCH 3 – MAY 6

EXHIBITION RESTLESS: Films and Other Works by Mircea Cantor at Museum of the Moving Image The Romanian artist’s first solo museum exhibition in NYC Accompanying the exhibition, selected programs of Mircea Cantor’s short films will be presented continuously in the Bartos Screening Room (new selection starts each Saturday).

Museum of the Moving Image, 36-01 35 Avenue, Astoria, Queens Visiting hours and tickets: www.movingimage.us

SAT, March 3 ARTIST TALK 3 pm Opening Event: Mircea Cantor. The artist will introduce a selection of his short films, followed by a moderated discussion and reception.

MON, March 5 ARTIST TALK 6:30 pm Mircea Cantor In Conversation with art critic Steven Henry Madoff THU, MARCH 22 6:30 pm

LITERATURE RCINY celebrates the publication of ROMANIAN WRITERS ON WRITING Hosted by acclaimed author Norman Manea, editor of the anthology, with guest Romanian writers Nina Cassian, Dan Lungu, Simona Popescu, Lucian Dan Teodorovici, Carmen Firan, and Bogdan Suceavă. With an introduction by Edward Hirsch, editor of the series.

FRI, March 23 Associated event: “ROMANIAN WRITERS ON… WRITING UNDER CENSORSHIP” at Bard College MARCH 21 – APRIL 1 FILM CRULIC: THE PATH BEYOND, a film by Anca Damian, at New Directors / New Films Director in attendance

Museum of the Moving Image Free with museum admission Cultural Services of the French Embassy, 972 Fifth Avenue, NYC Free admission with RSVP

RCINY, 200 East 38th Street, NYC Free admission Bard College, Annandale-onHudson, NY Free admission Film Society of Lincoln Center; 144 West 66th Street, NYC Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53 Street, NYC Screening times & tickets: newdirectors.org

CALENDAR OF EVENTS / March–July 2012

APRIL 1–10

SITE SPECIFIC PERFORMANCE THE WINDOW Rediscover RCINY’s venue through this innovative and collaborative site specific performance created by acclaimed Romanian director Ana Mărgineanu. U.S. based Romanian stage designers are invited to redesign our 3rd Avenue storefront gallery space, while acclaimed U.S. playwrights write new plays for this re-imagined space. Come outside the window and watch magical worlds unfold. Different teams of stage designers and playwrights for each run of the project.

Part of RCINY’s PLAYGROUND platform dedicated to innovative Romanian-American artistic collaborations.

RCINY – THE GALLERY 573-577 3rd Avenue (at 38th St.), NYC Free admission

APRIL 11–22

FILM DISAPPEARING ACT IV: European Film Festival in NYC Co-presented by Czech Cultural Center and RCINY, in collaboration with numerous European partners. RCINY will continue to support both the participation of Romanian films and filmmakers, and a larger presence of films from South East Europe.

IFC Center Czech Cultural Center French Institute Alliance Française Free admission

APRIL 30 – MAY 6

LITERATURE Gabriela Adameşteanu in PEN WORLD VOICES, the most important literary festival in NYC RCINY salutes the participation of Nobel award winner Herta Müller

All venues in NYC. Tickets for all events at www.pen.org

THU, May 3 Resonances: Contemporary Writers on the Classics. – 2:30 pm Gabriela Adameşteanu, Giannina Braschi, Ib Michael, and Laurie Sheck in a conversation moderated by John Brenkma

Baruch Performing Arts Center, Brenkman Engelman Recital Hall, 55 Lexington Avenue

THU, May 3 Herta Müller’s 2011 Göteborg Lecture 3 pm An event presented by PEN World Voices, Deutsches Haus, German Book Office, and the Goethe-Institut New York

Deutsches Haus, New York University, 42 Washington Mews

FRI, May 4 Gabriela Adameşteanu in A Literary Safari 6:30 pm

Westbeth Center for the Arts Arts155 Bank Street

FRI, May 4 In Conversation: Herta Müller and Claire Messud 7:30 pm An event presented by PEN World Voices, 92nd Street Y, German Book Office, Goethe Haus, and Unterberg Poetry Center

92nd Street Y, 1295 Lexington Avenue

MAY 6–10

LITERATURE Gabriela Adameşteanu embarks on a U.S. East Coast tour presenting her novel WASTED MORNING.

MAY 10 – JUNE 2

LITERATURE Writer BOGDAN O. POPESCU on a literary residency at LEDIG HOUSE

Ledig House, Omi, NY

MAY 20–30

SITE SPECIFIC PERFORMANCE THE WINDOW II A different team of stage designer-playwright-actors continues the reimagining of RCINY’s storefront gallery space, under the direction of Ana Mărgineanu.

RCINY – THE GALLERY 573-577 3rd Avenue (at 38th St.), NYC Free admission

THU, MAY 24 7 pm

PERFORMATIVE READINGS VERA ION: youshine.youarebeautiful MIHAELA MICHAILOV: Family Offline In the framework of “Eastern European Playwrights: Women Write the New,” an initiative celebrating the 30th Anniversary of The League of Professional Women, RCINY and Immigrants Theatre present a double bill of performative readings with new plays by celebrated Romanian playwrights Vera Ion and Mihaela Michailov. Talkback follows the readings, with the participation of the playwrights.

RCINY, 200 East 38th Street, NYC Free admission

Details available soon online

CALENDAR OF EVENTS / March–July 2012

JUNE 1–10

RCINY enlarges partnership with Transilvania International Film Festival RCINY continues its prominent collaboration with the Clujbased festival, which celebrates its 11th edition. Continuing its focus and support to the contemporary Romanian productions, and the US-Romanian professional dialogue in the field, RCINY co-organizes the festival’s Romanian Days (June 7-9), presenting a selection of the best Romanian movies produced during the last year, and supporting the presence at TIFF of a delegation of American film professionals. The special RCITIFF collaboration – the English language magazine aperiTIFF dedicated to contemporary Romania cinema – will have its 3rd issue, produced under the editorial guidance of Mihai Chirilov, Cluj, Romania launched during TIFF. Details available soon online

JUNE (date tbp)

LITERATURE: BOOK LAUNCH Join us to celebrate the first U.S. Anthology of Poet Nichita The Bowery Poetry Club, 308 Stănescu, published by Archipelago Books Bowery, NYC

JULY 3–12

PERFORMANCE EMINESCU: A Special Event of Poetry and Music with ION CARAMITRU and AURELIAN Octav POPA on U.S. Tour. In Romanian only.

Details available soon online

THU, July 12 7 pm

LITERATURE European Book Club: VAIN ART OF THE FUGUE by Dumitru Tsepeneag

RCINY, 200 East 38th Street, NYC Free admission

JUNE–JULY (date tbp)

VIDEO ART VJ CINTY: My Romania Winner of the FringeNYC video design Award for Excellence, Romanian video artist Cinty Ionescu returns to New York for a series of live performances with NYC based musicians who created music inspired by Cinty’s new set “My Romania.”

Part of RCINY’s PLAYGROUND platform dedicated to innovative Romanian – American artistic collaborations.

Details available soon online

MORE TO COME! STAY TUNED FOR MORE EVENTS AND VISIT WWW.ICRNY.ORG FOR REGULAR UPDATES. ALL EVENTS ARE IN ENGLISH, UNLESS OTHERWISE NOTED. EVENTS SUBJECT TO CHANGE. ADDITIONAL DETAILS AND FINAL PROGRAMS AT WWW.ICRNY.ORG

LUCIAN PINTILIE RETROSPECTIVE SCHEDULE OF EVENTS

THU, March 1

4 pm Niki and Flo (Niki Ardelean, colonel în rezervă) (2003) U.S. Premiere 7 pm Reenactment (Reconstituirea) (1968) NEW PRINT! Official Opening: Screening introduced by Lucian Pintilie

FRI, March 2

4 pm Sunday at 6 (Duminică la ora 6) (1965) 7 pm Niki and Flo 7 pm A Conversation with Victor Rebengiuc and Mariana Mihuţ In Romanian only. Moderated by Mihai Chirilov.

NOTE DIFFERENT VENUE: RCINY (see address below). FREE ADMISSION

SAT, March 3

1: 30 pm Niki and Flo 4 pm Carnival Scenes (De ce trag clopotele, Mitică?) (1979) Screening introduced by Victor Rebengiuc and Mariana Mihuţ 7:30 pm The Oak (Balanţa) (1991) NEW PRINT!

SUN, March 4

1:30 pm An Unforgettable Summer (Un été inoubliable) (1992) NEW PRINT! 4 pm Too Late (Prea târziu) (1996) U.S. Premiere. NEW PRINT! 6:30 pm Niki and Flo

MON, March 5

4 pm Niki and Flo

WED, March 7

4 pm The Afternoon of a Torturer (După-amiaza unui torţionar) (2000) U.S. Premiere. NEW PRINT! preceded by Tertium non datur (2006) 7 pm Niki and Flo

THU, March 8

4 pm The Oak 7 pm Carnival Scenes

FRI, March 9

4 pm Ward 6 (Paviljon VI) (1973) 7 pm Sunday at 6

SAT, March 10

1: 30 pm Next Stop Paradise (Terminus Paradis) (1998) U.S. Premiere. NEW PRINT! 4 pm The Afternoon of a Torturer preceded by Tertium non datur (2006) 7 pm Reenactment

SUN, March 11

1: 30 pm Too Late 4 pm Ward 6 6: 30 pm Next Stop Paradise

MON, March 12

4 pm An Unforgettable Summer

All screenings take place at MoMA, The Roy and Niuta Titus Theater Admission: $12 adults; $10 seniors, 65 years and over with I.D. $8 full-time students with current I.D. Admission is free for Museum members and for Museum ticketholders.

The “Conversation with Victor Rebengiuc and Mariana Mihuţ” takes place at the Romanian Cultural Institute in New York, 200 East 38th Street, NYC. Free Admission.

A Cinema Lesson

Prior to Lucian Pintilie’s celebration at MoMA, Transilvania International Film Festival paid tribute to the greatest Romanian filmmaker by screening in 2011 - for the first time in his native country - his full body of work. Pintilie, now 78, has been talking about his films at various stages in the course of his life, before and after the Romanian Revolution of 1989. Here are the highlights of Pintilie’s career in his own words - a pure lesson in cinema.

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R

Reenactment in Cannes

This is a text I wrote at the request of PierreHenri Deleau, on the occasion of the twentieth anniversary of the Directors’ Fortnight in Cannes. Notably, the text was written and sent from Romania in 1988, during the most absurd, the bleakest and the cruelest years of the Ceaușescu regime.

Somehow self-conscious about my unfortunate role as a mood killer, which I regretfully must play in a context intended to be relaxed, cordial and celebratory, I am sending my reply to your letter with some delay. This somber reply can only dissonate, but, since dissonance is ultimately about dissonance itself, there is no point in camouflaging it. The recollection con-

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Reenactment

tained therein can only enrich, at least by contrast, your collection of real memories.

Well, I have no real memory of my participation in the Directors’ Fortnight. I do not have the faintest anecdote to recall. Nothing to tell about the presentation of my film at Cannes. No anecdote, however trivial. No encounter, revelatory or not, with another director. No, absolutely nothing. My memory is completely blank. And I am truly sorry.

All this is simply because your invitation, intercepted by some Gogolian officials, never reached me. And so I experienced the presentation of my film, Reenactment, at Cannes only through what other people told me. My arbitrary isolation rendered all the more savoury and exhilarating the echoes of resounding statements, of special and un-hoped-for admiration, and of highly positive reviews that saluted, by way of my film, the late birth of the Romanian cinema. These rumours, making their way from distant lands, made me glory in my state of privileged “hostage.”

Excited by the success of Reenactment, which I associated – and that was another

It is true that in the beginning my artistic expression was radical, but my fury was rather hormonal. utopia worthy of a late-blooming teenager – with the international success of my first film, Sunday at Six (a doomed film that had to be, however, recuperated by the official Romanian filmography), I considered my conflict with the Gogolian authority solved. On the contrary! The presentation in Cannes ended – at least in Romania – my filmmaking career.

Ten years had to pass before I could start shooting a new film. A new film, inspired by a play written by the great Romanian playwright Caragiale [Carnival Scenes], which I had staged. The success of that show had turned me and my troupe into globetrotters. Yet I had to overcome unimaginable obstacles to get, three years later, an answer print for that film.

Even though the film had officially been invited to represent Romania at Cannes, the invitation was refused by the same officials, under the mind-numbing pretext that the film wasn’t finished. To this day, the film has not been screened. It’s still sleeping, buried in the storehouse of the National Film Archive, nowadays hosted in the building which formerly held the most famous prison in the country. This may be difficult to believe, but it is impossible for me to gain access to this film.

As for all the film projects I proposed after that (around twenty, all in all), they were killed in their infancy. Only one survived the massacre and made it to production.

Thus, the elephant-like memory of those Gogolian officials suppressed over twenty years the destiny of a film that dared to take its place in cinema dictionaries and histories. The unfailing vigilance of the officials will make sure such an accident would not happen again.

I would return to Cannes many years later, invited in Un Certain Regard, but this time not as a representative of Romania but of Yugoslavia.

In 1972, Jack Lang, at the time the director of Théâtre National de Chaillot, invited me to stage a show. Turandot became my

Parisian debut. Everything from then on followed naturally, and I fully dedicated myself to theatre, and then to the opera in France, Great Britain, Canada, the United States, etc.

Thus, in May 1970, on the occasion of the Cannes screening of Reenactment, some bureaucrats decided they would try to erase my name from the annals of the Romanian cinema for good. But as long as I am alive, they haven’t completely won the battle.

Self-destruction or fight?

I have the biography of an artist who has been denied, exceptionally, its most picturesque elements. It is true that in the beginning my artistic expression was radical, but my fury was rather hormonal. Now that I think about it, I had an alcoholic and apolitical adolescence that was extreme and frenetic in its good humour. I was not afraid of the Securitate, because I had this mix of stamina and lack of imagination that simply inhibited the stupid, humiliating fear I should have felt.

I couldn’t care less about interdictions.

My energy was spent on practical jokes and drinking. Like the nice chap I was, I would party, shortly after being fired, in the company of those who had just fired me. This may very well be the source of my special take on the complicity between the executioner and his victim – see the guillotine scene in the priest’s house in The Oak. Fortunately, this sweet care-free confusion didn’t last long. My identity started taking shape. This anarchist, nihilistic gelatin that I had been until then started crystallizing. I was maturing. Censorship – that is, the Securitate, as censorship was just one of the specialized branches of the Securitate – was also maturing. We were growing up together.

Our awareness as executioner and victim, respectively, took shape simultaneously, and I could understand how, in a country like ours, which mirrored a world turned on its head, the two roles could sometimes end up reversed.

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The exorcism through desecration, through eliciting the carnivalesque, is not an aesthetic attitude, but an existential one, an existential challenge.

An Unforgettable Summer

I had this revelation on the occasion of my first show, in which I abandoned my youthful and random nihilism in favor of a more structured and assumed nihilism. It was a satire, Fools under the Moonlight, an exceptional Romanian play, pervaded by a Gogolian feeling. Ceauşescu banned the show himself, but, unlike other interdictions, this one was happening as Romania was opening towards hypocritically liberal times. So shows in our situation were offered the chance to be revised, improved.

Just this one time, I obeyed, and I corrected the show several times. I did that so well that by the end there was nothing left of it. Only then, once the massacre had been enacted, did the censorship commission in charge with revising the show vanish, into thin air – leaving me holding a corpse and marred by the endless shame of having tried to collaborate with them.

This is when I realized the grotesque dimension of Romanian socialism, the mark of its unique monstrosity, a kind of catastrophic and carnivalesque dimension that made it so special in the Eastern-European landscape. A crazy world in which any sign of normalcy was forbidden. What is Romania today, if not the same world, turned on its head, a parody of normalcy?

The Oak was made very smoothly, with no resistance from the official administration. In the days following the Revolution, I was assigned to be the director of the Film Production Studio of the Romanian Ministry of Culture. I took advantage of the enthusiasm and confusion that followed

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the Revolution to start the co-production without delay. The obstacles that did not fail to materialize along the way only added more color to the paradise I was in. But paradise would not exist without contrasts.

It goes without saying that this kind of ideal situation is unrepeatable; yet coproduction, in general, is the only chance to survive for an impoverished cinema like ours. However prestigious the awards, the cost of labor in our country continues to be – and that’s not something to be proud of – outrageously cheap. Let’s take advantage of our poverty! We can still make films with modest investments.

The film opens with a Christmas scene in which Securitate employees in a state of playful, drunken excitement act out a parody of the merciless annihilation of all class enemies. Like in Reenactment, this is a parody of reality, an act of defiance against reality, accomplished through carnivalesque blasphemy. Everything is carnivalesque: the massacre, the pistol, etc.

Towards the end of the film, in the last act entitled “The Massacre of the Innocents,” reality fires back at this blasphemous challenge. Emptied of its carnivalesque marks, reality turns out to be a vision of death. And this time the massacre is real, the pistol is real, the massacred children are all real.

You surely noticed that the pistol is never fired. It’s on the verge of being fired a few times, but it never is. What is the destiny of the bullet waiting to be fired inside the gun? Self-destruction or fight?

It’s a question that hasn’t been answered by the Romanian Revolution. The exorcism of death (that’s what we’re talking about), through desecration, through eliciting the carnivalesque, is not an aesthetic attitude, but an existential one, an existential challenge. It’s a pure death-denying cry, in the most classical tradition of carnivalesque blasphemy. How else

can one understand Nela’s gesture, who, a pint of beer in her hand, clinks his glass against the urn containing her father’s ashes, if not as a carnivalesque blasphemy, a futile cry of protest?

Babel and Kristin

“Babel” means “confusion” in Hebrew. A terrible confusion plunged history into eternal mourning. This divine strategy is adopted and imitated by mortals with amazing spontaneity, sometimes forgotten, then rediscovered, with such vitality after the fall of the communism. What is the most efficient method to dominate people and to make them rise against one another – especially when political terror is temporarily suspended or when the legitimacy of the state is questioned? The awakening of the darkest tribal instincts, the exaltation of differences accompanied by the denial of the right to be different, as well as the recuperation of a concept I had thought had been forever buried: ethnic cleansing.

How professionally stimulated is interethnic hate in some former communist countries! In record time, this new fascism, which exalts ethnic delirium, managed to awaken nostalgia for the golden age – a time when this ethnic turmoil didn’t shake Europe. One of my few firm certainties is that ethnic delirium is always invented, always provoked. It always appears in a place where the legitimacy of power is questioned.

I am Romanian, born in Romania under monarchic rule, in southern Bessarabia, today part of Ukraine, in a German village, in an area inhabited by a genuine ethnic mosaic: Romanians, Ruthenians, Gagauzes, Turks, Tatars, Jews and, of course, Ukrainians and Russians. I don’t get the slightest hint of ethnic tension when I recall the harmonious picture of that era. I was still a child when I left Bessarabia speaking a mind-blowing language, a kind of Esperanto, a mix of languages that exasperated and delighted everybody around me. The war came, and I quickly forgot the exotic words; the paradise was gone, and my Esperanto gibberish was gone with it, when, one night in Bucharest, a few Germans rang at our

door, in terror, like some kind of escapees; they were high school teachers, my father’s peers. The mad wind of history was already blowing over southern Bessarabia.

People had become aware of the differences between them seemingly overnight, and this awareness was the first step to ethnic cleansing. In a strange twist of irony, the Germans were the first victims of ethnic cleansing I’ve ever met. The faces of those Germans are connected in my mind with those of the Jews dressed in white in the streets of Bucharest a year later. In my visceral hatred towards any kind of discrimination, the picture of those Germans and of those Jews stayed forever connected. That moment left me with an absolute intolerance towards anyone displaying nationalist enthusiasm, an insensitivity that enraged many people. Also at that moment I developed a very critical look at myself, at the people I belong to, a critical look in which few were able to read the nearly pathological love for the people of which I am part.

I made An Unforgettable Summer because I want to believe that Romania has reached maturity, or is about to, that it is a country capable of taking a critical look even at such a painful episode as the one that happened in our reference age, our blessed age, the golden era on which we often look back in awe. Modern Romania, the Romania that was destroyed by communism, was established and structured through the exercise of the critical spirit.

The critical spirit represents the fundamental law of modern Romania. As long as this is not recognized beyond the shadow of a doubt, An Unforgettable Summer risks remaining my bravest artistic act. Much braver than Reenactment. This is not necessarily a function of the quality of the film itself, but a worrying sign of the state of the critical spirit in Romania.

Above all, An Unforgettable Summer is the portrait of a woman: Kristin Scott Thomas. This portrait is all the more mysterious as it is built with blinding certainty. I regret the fact I couldn’t show in my film how much I was in love with her.

Just like I’ve always been in love with all the actresses, both in theatre and in film, who became memorable in the parts I gave

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them. Falling in love with your actress is for me a strict matter of professional ethics.

How can one build the portrait of a lady?

Just by falling in love with her. Falling out of love, once the final scene is shot, usually takes between two and four hours.

A natural reserve of orangutans

We are not animals… Orangutans are not like that. That’s the only thing I disagree with in this film, which I otherwise find absolutely extraordinary. (Alain Fienkielkraut) Mr. Alain Fienkielkraut, you have only one objection against Too Late, and I have the insolence to disagree with you.

Because that idea, “a natural reserve of orangutans”, doesn’t belong to the author of the film; it’s not mine. The idea belongs to a prosecutor, who is one of the characters. The idea is, in fact, wrong. It comes to him during a scene in which he has a confrontation with the manager of a mine.

During the investigation, the prosecutor will discover something much more touching, much more complex than this rather limiting theory. What is it that he discovers? That coal miner Ferzaţiu is an atypical case; he is much more than the mere outcome of a system. Ferzaţiu is not just a prototype, he exceeds such limits.

He is, if you want, an abyssal case. He is the underground man, in a Dostoevskian sense. And in the literal sense. This is the case of an individual who, disgusted by human nature, wants to disappear. The Hamletian dilemma of the prosecutor – to be or not to be, “verschwinden oder bleiben,” to remain or to disappear – is identical with Ferzaţiu’s. My character wants to disappear. He doesn’t have the strength to die, to choose death. So he chooses an intermediate state between life and death. Somewhat like characters in Noh theatre, caught between life and death… Dying is harder than we think, he wants to stay here a bit more, to see…what exactly? A guy pissing down to the bottom of the mine. But even this, seeing a guy pissing in a corner, makes him want to stay alive. For a few moments more. To watch a bit more.

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It is hard to leave this world. And he is about to do something monstrous: to choose to stay alive a bit more. But he can’t go out anymore; he can’t appear before others. And the others suspect that he hasn’t disappeared, that he is just pretending. In order to prove he is not an impostor, he considers killing a man and making the others believe that the body is his, thus sending the world

the message that he’s dead. But the size of the penis gives him away. He miscalculated; he is an impostor, not a pro.

So there’s the rub. What you disapprove of doesn’t belong to me. It is just a stage in one character’s vision of the world, it’s not my own conviction – it’s the prosecutor’s. You are saying they are not animals. This may be so. I don’t know, I don’t know anymore.

What happens when, after the mass euphoria caused by an apparently definitive end to all catastrophes, a new inferno is reconstituted spontaneously, and fast, on the remains of the past one? And when this inferno can no longer be neutralized by the one shield that used to work before – black humour? What happens when evil, recycled and rejuvenated, with its formi-

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dable force of imagination and adaptation, gives birth to a society even wilder than the one that simulated its death in order to survive? When the entire communist elite converts to a class of new money, when the mob replaces the old Party, when the fate of the ever “misérables” is to become a natural reserve of orangutans programmable by request? When there is no resistance left? When there is no exile? When everything is too late?

Too Late closes my trilogy on communism and its rampage through Romania.

The first of the series is Reenactment, a last romantic hope attached to the utopian idea of communism with a human face.

Twenty years followed in which I was forbidden to work in Romania. The Oak is the image of a paraplegic, agonizing communism. Finally, Too Late, probably my bleakest film, is about the cunning and efficient transformation of communism into capitalism. Is it a pessimistic title?

Not really. Let’s not forget that I continue to believe in miracles.

Me and Marin

Unlike the trilogy, Next Stop Paradise reflects (I suspect) an internal change of perspective. In my poor country, evil settled, it seems, forever, and adamantly. I stopped talking about it, trying to sabotage it; I look at it only from a distance, in disgust, appalled. And so I happened to catch a glimpse, somewhere in the dozens of hours of filmed material presented by my assistants in order to choose the location, of the white church in the film… I tried to rewind, but I couldn’t find it; I fast forwarded, and it wasn’t there either, so blinded was I by this miraculous landscape passing in front of my eyes. I found it eventually. Of course, the church was not there, but that was not at all important, we built it afterwards. What did it stand for?

A linking point between life and death. A luminous “terminus.” The light enters the film through this window open to the sky.

This image triggered neither the festive optimism nor the hope for repentance, it was rather, so to speak, a change of perspective.

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I stopped talking about the evil, trying to sabotage it. I look at it only from a distance, in disgust.

Yes, in Next Stop Paradise there is a change of perspective.

Is Next Stop Paradise a great love story?

Yes, it can be. But I don’t think this is the most important thing about the story. More important are the acting, the provocation, the contretemps, the misunderstandings, the dance on a razor’s edge, the restless love that cannot find time to contemplate. A love that doesn’t offer the two protagonists even the interlude to make love, or the opportunity to say to each other “I love you.” A love which the female protagonist understands only in the moment they part. Yes, it is, after all, a great love story, but one lived in a very personal and challenging way.

Making this film had something to do, first of all, with my very special relation with Marin Karmitz, with whom I started to work in 1991, right at the moment I went back to film. Marin saw the final cut of The Oak, he liked it very much, but he had only one objection that really disturbed me. He suggested I should get rid of 20 minutes of film. Until then, nobody, not even Ceauşescu, could make me give up a single shot of my films. Or any scene of my plays.

My films remained under the strict guard of Securitate, but at least they hadn’t been mutilated, corrupted to the satisfaction of power. And there I was in this delicate, tense situation, dissimulated under a formal smile on both sides. His proposition might have proved interesting… still, we were talking about 20 minutes… but it could have also proved stupid. We had to try it. I proposed, very earnestly, to make a long version and a short one. It is important to say “earnestly.” I suggested to present them to the public. The long version didn’t survive the test. It was withdrawn after a few days; the experiment took place in Romania. From that moment on, without establishing anything, with no unnecessary words, an extraordinary relation was born between Marin and myself, based on the capacity to listen to each other.

Next Stop Paradise

With Next Stop Paradise an even funnier thing happened. I showed him the script, based on the novel of a very talented but marginalized Romanian writer. He liked it, he thought it was good, but on the whole, he wasn’t too enthusiastic about it. Then I showed him a different script, based on a different writer, who had had a completely different destiny, a very accomplished career – he had become a government minister, a member of the cabinet. As with the first one, Marin thought the script was interesting here and there, but that it did not hold on its own. I put them both aside, thinking that that was the end of that. Then one day he called me, about two weeks after: “Lucian, I know it might seem stupid or absurd, but I only ask you to consider this for a second: How about combining the two scripts, that of the beggar and that of the minister? Then I will tell you what I think.”

I smiled. Alright, agreed. “Fine, I’ll think about it.” I was planning to call him after a couple of days to curb his enthusiasm a bit: “You know, Marin, it does seem interesting but I don’t think it is doable.” But I didn’t call him after a couple of days, because his proposition sounded like a challenge that really got to me. Marin knows so well how

to flatter me! I mixed the noble essence and the dregs of the two scripts, I melted them and decanted them in my alchemist’s oven and, ten days later, the script was ready, and Marin and I were very pleased.

Confess and repent

Because The Afternoon of a Torturer is about the extraordinary difficulty and even impossibility to confess, I would like to start with a confession. I am in a slightly grotesque situation: on the one hand, I am entrusted with this theme as with a moral duty, and, on the other side, I have a deep, undeclared resentment towards it.

Actually, this theme inspires general repulsion. There is a natural disgust towards it. Becoming aware of evil is sabotaged by indifference, oblivion, and group actions.

We are all responsible for this sabotage.

In the film, there is a female journalist who has turned her job into an obsession, a professional obsession, not so much a moral one. Except for her, everybody else sabotages, one way or another, the revelation of a murder. The ill son, the blind wife, the victim… Nobody is interested in

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Niki and Flo

acknowledging the murder – or maybe I am exaggerating a bit. For Ţăndărică, confessing brings neither relief nor salvation. It is true that he discovers a certain ecstatic satisfaction in confession, but his confession, however dreadful, doesn’t impress anyone. His confession in the void, about murders that should inspire horror, doesn’t impress anyone, as horror soon turns to indifference.

The Afternoon of a Torturer is a film about the total incapacity of Romanians to confess and repent. In a country in which the notion of repentance is despised on a national scale, a character like Ţandără is considered insane. A flaccid consciousness, one that doesn’t vibrate, the most flaccid consciousness of all – this is what we, Romanians, are endowed with. An eternally stunted foetus unable to take shape, stuck in an innocent placental stage unperturbed by anyone or anything, not even by the illuminating and critical perspective of a church, for example. This is what Romanian consciousness is, organically anchored in a promiscuous complicity between torturer and victim.

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This was the first time I tried to make a film with the ambition of triggering a moral electroshock. I want to electrocute this consciousness; I am all the more persistent as I know my attempt is meant to fail.

I am an old master of metaphors inspired by the myth of the tree. But this time, the film revolves around a tree of murder and horror; it is somehow different. At the roots of this tree, a little girl was buried and a father was killed; a dwarf aunt died here; and the most abominable crimes of the concentrationary universe are evoked here: testicles burnt with a cigarette, soles electrocuted, etc. At the root of this tree, the ground is soaked in the sweat and blood of the dead. But the tree must remain paradisiacal. The female torturer penetrates this universe mimicking the angelic swing of the little girl.

Bells chime gently in the tree, witness to a monstrous crime. All murder weapons and accessories are gathered around the tree or hung in its branches. It is an infernal tree and, at the same time, a theatrical tree.

The dramatic tree of life and death. Life is full of images stolen from Paradise. A

paradisiacal universe pervaded by only apparently innocent elements of inferno.

Anatomy of a Murder

Niki and Flo is a very dear film of mine.

Maybe because it’s my last film, in every way, or maybe, who knows, my first film, in a different kind of accounting. The story of the film is fairly simple. I first read a sixpage synopsis. It was the story of a murder which is being built slowly, implacably and unavoidably. Like the slow, luminous and hidden movement of an iceberg. The project fascinated me through its strange banality, “the banality of the abyssal” (as I think the authors called it), the inevitable and secret aspect of the crime matched by the absence of the drama of the epic buildup. Here is a crime, told entirely differently, and understood by no one. By the end of the film, all the characters would come to believe that Niki is simply insane.

In short, this was “an invitation to revisit the crime stories that lie in all of us, and in me, personally.” The conclusion is extremely unusual. It must be placed outside the story – it’s the distance Kundera mentions in The Art of the Novel – in order to understand that Flo’s murder brings things back to the moral order. It’s very strange that a murder can make things go back to their moral order, but, for me, this was the main catch point of the synopsis, which I transformed… The colonel’s entire inner life is progressively infiltrated by the moral necessity of the crime. Niki’s honor can be only be restored through this murderous act.

Niki kills Flo on Army Day, to revenge the honor of the army. No one noticed this detail in the beginning, then I helped them do it.

It’s a ritual murder, with a hilarious, grotesque dimension. The ritual cutting of the toenails, right before committing the crime, can only be understood from the novelistic perspective, as understood by Kundera: “A novel examines not reality but existence, and existence is not what has occurred. Existence is the realm of human possibilities, everything that man can become, everything he’s capable of. Novelists draw up the map of

It’s very strange that a murder can make things go back to their moral order. human existence by discovering this or that human possibility. But again, to exist means to be in the world. Thus, both the character and his world must be understood as possibilities.” This quote from Kundera perfectly illustrates the theme in Niki and Flo, the first film I ever made without contributing to the script. The script belongs to Cristi Puiu and Răzvan Rădulescu, and it is profoundly innovative.

The story of the film is a story of complete and utter dispossession, as performed by one man on another man.

From the beginning until the end of the film, Flo dispossesses Niki of every physical, moral and spiritual value, of his image of himself, or “the consciousness of one’s self-dignity,” as Dostoevsky calls it. Of everything, whether it’s material goods or consciousness, that represents the identity of a person. In the name of a remnant of military honor, Niki has the strength – because it’s the 25th of October, the Day of the Romanian Army, and he is encouraged by the military band he listens to on the radio – to cut his toenails, which had overgrown lately, to shave, to put on his army uniform, to get the hammer (he doesn’t have the strength to remember the shoes as well), to cross the street in his slippers, and to kill Flo. Niki and Flo recounts the story of an inexplicable murder, a murder whose real witnesses will never understand it. They will understand this crime only by moving away from facts, taking the kind of distance that allows us to distinguish the design of the map of existence. In short: Seen close-up, this crime is incomprehensible.

Neither family nor neighbours will ever be able to explain why Niki killed Flo. They will never comprehend it, except for the moment when they take the right distance from this event, when they look at it from a novelistic perspective. Then they will understand that this murder, which never saw the light of day, was the only rational and moral solution.

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On a meeting This is an excerpt from Lucian Pintilie’s book Bricabrac, first published in Romanian by the Humanitas publishing house (2003) and then in France

by L’Entretemps Éditions (2009) in a translation by Marie-France Ionesco. It is an unconventional autobiography, a collection of “valueless objects, used and out of fashion, bearing the signs of their times, fragments, lots of printed papers, my own war with the papers,” as Pintilie described it. “He frantically put together bits and pieces because this is the only way it could work as a whole,” the late Alex. Leo Şerban once wrote. One can only hope that this outstanding work will soon be made available in an English version.

I

I was – several years ago – invited to London, not in the sublime circumstances of an anemic fellowship, but in the heinous circumstances of an official visit. No other time in my life has ever been relegated as much to the surreal and the nightmarish, with hues of extravaganza, as that short, fortunately extremely short, time in which Rolls-Royce cars took me from one banquet to another, as in a technicolor Kafkaesque setting.

No doubt the highest point of this delirium of honors was the moment when the archbishop of Canterbury himself approached us, in the middle of the ruins of the gothic cathedral in Coventry and engaged in an ample conversation with us - an honor which we naturally owed to the

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fact that our film delegation was mistaken for a governmental delegation, whose visit to Coventry was supposed to take place, through a strange coincidence, on the same day that we, the less consequential folk, were scheduled.

I will always remember fondly the archbishop of Canterbury who, even after one of his subordinates revealed, in a most delicate code, the vaudevillian error in which he was immersing himself, carried on, after a few blinks of an eye, to speak generously with us as if nothing had happened, since he knew that it was important to be consistent even in error.

All our other adventures were, however, cardboard adventures – nothing real happened in this drugged time of ceremonies –

until, one morning, we were informed that, through lateral means such as sympathy or friendship, which tend to be much more efficient than any official means, the three members of the Romanian film delegation had been granted the right to assist on a set near London, where a high prestige film directed by an old and venerable artist was being shot.

This great artist was also a prelate who hadn’t officiated in a very long, long time.

We also knew that this artist had never allowed a foreign presence on set – the honor bestowed on us, three strangers, being another form of arbitrariness for him.

Thus, on the following day at the crack of dawn, as they say, we found ourselves at the entrance of an old, derelict studio containing, nevertheless, state-of-the-art technology – a common English perversity.

After being searched for illicit photo cameras – with the same severity with which, years later, I would be searched in the London airport as a preventative mea-

sure against my intention to highjack the plane which was about to take me to New York in God-knows what new direction – we were allowed to enter the set.

The atmosphere was typical of any shoot, so well described throughout the years by the reporters of Cinema magazine – nothing new, nothing surprising, except perhaps the presence of the trailers for the big stars.

After a brief and casual wait, the great artist appeared on set, very casually, where he was greeted with a casual politeness by actors and technicians, who casually mistook each other, to which he casually replied, with a joke (maximum two), as it was his casual way, upon which he casually started to work.

Next the venerable artist looked at us, the three intruders – he frowned remembering the previous day’s weakness when his consent had probably been extorted, he looked at us like Master Puntilla must have looked down on his man servant Matti

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As I was watching him intently, meeting his gaze was like having the rug pulled out from under me. I sank in the bareness of his look, I fused with him. the day after, when everything had settled down, but he casually kept his thoughts to himself and continued working.

I left my colleagues and selfishly chose a much more discreet observation spot (my curiosity wasn’t supposed to be provoking). I found a more penetrating way of watching the process from a lazy angle, from somewhere behind the venerable artist, where I could perfectly see his profile, his hands (much more interesting when seen from behind), the tension of his entire being, and the way in which his tension was projected on the face of actor Marlon Brando.

He then whispered some directions to Marlon Brando, who listened to him with casual attention – there was no space left to express the joy of working together, the remarkable chance of meeting the venerable artist.

Finally, the venerable artist brought his short monologue to a close and left Marlon Brando, trying to get behind the lights and the camera, in order to call “action”.

Oddly, at least for me, he didn’t choose the shortest route – taking a few steps back in the shadows behind the light curtain. He chose a very bizarre route – an ample one, which took him far from the set and which then came back to that commanding spot, behind the camera.

My spot was somewhere tangent to a point on this circuit. When the great artist drew close within reach, he looked up suddenly and quizzically at me.

As I was watching him intently, meeting his gaze was like having the rug pulled out from under me. I sank in the bareness of his look, I fused with him – I’m sure this is precisely what happened. I remember it dizzyingly well.

All of this happened lightning fast, after which he continued on his path, closing his circuit behind the camera.

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Everyone was waiting to hear “action” – when he, unsatisfied with something, went to Marlon Brando again, and again started to give him whispered directions, maybe not as whispered as the first time.

Then, instead of backing off directly behind the camera, he retraced the same path, a path that would inevitably lead to his meeting my gaze again. This time, however, I had been forewarned, and, like a boxer who knows his opponent’s blow, I planted my feet, balanced my body forward, ready to receive his gaze. He reached the place where I was, looked at me, perused me, and carried on his way to his commanding spot.

Yet again, everyone waited calmly to hear “action.”

The venerable artist even lifted his arm to start the call – but, to everyone’s confusion, he dropped the command, went again to Marlon Brando, giving him abundantly more directions, more nuances, more explanations, more gestures: the whole thing was turning into a small spectacle. He took leave, retraced the roundabout route, and again our eyes met – I could clearly see that he was checking me out-- he was analyzing me as if to discern validation on my face.

The scene repeated and amplified, acquiring a vicious, irreversible tone; the circuitous route became by now an automatism, our mutual gaze, locked, the return to the camera and canceled “action” call, all predictable.

And then suddenly I realized that the great artist simply had stage fright, and that he was checking on my face – more and more openly and childishly – the reactions stirred by his directions to Marlon Brando, that he was instinctively looking for the confirmation of his genius, that he was taking, at 80 years old, at the end of a career that can only be venerated, an exam before me, this stranger, and that I was supposed to confirm his genius just as if I were confirming the result of a biopsy.

I immediately went out of the studio and started to cry – a sincere cry, with shaking shoulders and head buried on the wall.

The name of the artist whose sublime, angelic ego I have exposed is CHARLIE CHAPLIN.

Filmography Sunday at Six (1965)

The Oak (1992)

A love story set in 1940 as Romania, with Fascism on the rise, prepares for war.

Festivals: Cannes, 1966 (Rencontres Internationales Film et Jeunnesse) – Grand Prix; Mar del Plata, 1966 – Special Jury Prize and Critics’ Special Prize

In 1988, having just lost her father, Nela decides to leave Bucharest to go and teach in a small provincial town.

There she meets Mitică, a doctor at the hospital who, like her, no longer believes in either God or man, and who shares her salutary humour. But the couple stirs up bad feelings.

Festivals: Cannes 1992 (Official selection, out of competition); Best Actress Award – Geneva; Felix Award for Best Actress of the Year (Maia Morgenstern)

Reenactment (1969) Two boys get into a drunken brawl.

They are arrested by the police and tried. The courts grant them impunity on condition that they reenact their brawl for the purposes of making an educational film.

Festivals: Cannes 1970 (Directors’ Fortnight).

Voted best Romanian film of all time by 40 Romanian film critics WARD NO. 6 (1973) In a psychiatric hospital in Tsarist Russia, a doctor discovers a student committed for his political beliefs.

Listening to his patient, the doctor develops a new view of reality, much to the displeasure of his colleagues.

Festivals: Cannes 1979 (Un Certain Regard)

Carnival Scenes (1979) It is carnival time. Propping up the bar, the perennial Mitică and his gang of skiving civil servants are seriously tipsy. In the middle of the bistro, a heated political discussion is underway. And against this cacophony, lovers embrace...

Released in the spring of 1979.

Banned for 10 years. Rereleased in 1990.

An Unforgettable Summer (1994) In 1920s Romania, Marie-Thérèse von Debretsy, the young and beautiful wife of Captain Dimitriu, rebuffs General Ipsilanti’s advances. This leads the family to be transferred to the other side of the Danube to the troubled region of Dobrudja.

Festivals: Cannes 1994 (Official selection, in competition)

Too Late (1996) Young prosecutor Costa is sent to investigate the suspicious death of a coal miner in the Jiu Valley. His investigation is barely underway when a new corpse is discovered, then a third. The investigation causes growing unease among the local authorities.

Festivals: Cannes 1996 (Official selection, in competition)

Next Stop Paradise (1998) On the outskirts of Bucharest, Norica, a young waitress, and Mitu,

a pig-keeper, meet and provoke each other. Their relationship could rapidly become the stuff of matrimony if it were not for two particular flies in the ointment: Norica is to marry her old boss and Mitu must spend two years in the army.

Festivals: Venice 1998 (Official selection, competition). The Special Jury Award – Silver Lion.

The Afternoon of a Torturer (2001) In Romania Frant Ţandără, a former torturer in the prisons of the Communist regime, is ready to confess his crimes to a journalist and former political prisoner.

Festivals: Venice 2001 (Official selection, competition)

Niki and Flo (2003) Angela and her husband have decided to leave Romania for a life in the United States. Niki, Angela’s father, is torn between his wish to see his daughter happy and his desire to have her close by; meanwhile Flo, the father of Niki’s son-in-law and a domestic tyrant of sorts, slowly exerts his control over Niki.

Festivals: Cannes 2003 (Directors’ Fortnight)

Tertium non Datur (2005) In the spring of 1944, a Romanian military unit receives an unexpected visit from a starving German general and a major. During the meal, the young major reveals to his hosts that he possesses the famous “Auroch’s Head,” a priceless stamp of which only two copies exist in the world.

Festivals: Berlin 2005, Telluride 2005.

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The Romanian Cultural Institute in New York (RCINY) aims to promote Romanian culture throughout the U.S. and internationally, and to build sustainable, creative partnerships among American and Romanian cultural organizations. The Institute acts as a catalyst and proponent of initiatives across artistic fields, striving to foster understanding, cultural diplomacy, and scholarly discourse by enriching public perspectives of contemporary Romanian culture. For the past five years, RCINY has been an active enabler and supporter of the presentation and promotion of Romanian cinema in the U.S. www.icrny.org.

Produced by the Romanian Cultural Institute in New York Editor: Mihai Chirilov English translation: Laura Popescu, Andrada Romagno Proof editors: Mimi Plauché, Oana Sânziana Marian Photos by Roald Aron Film photos: Romanian National Film Center, Filmex, Lucian Pintilie’s personal archive Design: Carmen Gociu Special thanks: Laurence Kardish