Tribute to Cristi Puiu / 19-23/08/2013
An interview with Cristi Puiu by Mihnea Măruţă Tribute to Cristi Puiu | 1
Tribute to Cristi Puiu 19-23/08/2013 Monday, 19/08/2013 Meeting Point Cinema, 15:00
Thursday, 22/08/2013 Meeting Point Cinema, 15:00
Romania, 2001, Colour, 90 min. Režija / Director: Cristi Puiu Scenarij / Screenplay: Razvan Radulescu, Cristi Puiu Uloge / Cast: Alexandru Papadopol, Dragos Bucur, Ioana Flora, Luminita Heorghiu, Razvan Vasilescu, Costica Draganescu, Petre Pletosu
Romania, Switzerland, 1995, Colour, 22 min. Režija / Director: Cristi Puiu Scenarij / Screenplay: Cristi Puiu
Stuff and Dough
Tuesday, 20/08/2013 Meeting Point Cinema, 15:00
Cigarettes and Coffee
Romania, 2003, Colour, 13 min. Režija / Director: Cristi Puiu Scenarij / Screenplay: Cristi Puiu Uloge / Cast: Victor Rebengiuc, Mimi Branescu, Mihai Bratila
The Death of Mr. Lazarescu
Romania, 2005, Colour, 153 min. Režija / Director: Cristi Puiu Scenarij / Screenplay: Cristi Puiu, Razvan Radulescu Uloge / Cast: Ion Fiscuteanu, Luminta Gheorghiu, Gabriel Spahiu, Doru Ana Wednesday, 21/08/2013 Meeting Point Cinema, 15:00
Aurora
Romania, France, Switzerland, Germany, 2010, Colour, 181 min. Režija / Director: Cristi Puiu Scenarij / Screenplay: Cristi Puiu Uloge / Cast: Gelu Colceag, Catrinel Dumitrescu, Luminita Gheorghiu, Gheorghe Ifrim, Valentin Popescu, Ileana Puiu, Cristi Puiu, Valeria Seciu, Clara Voda
Publisher Editor-in-Chief Art Director Cover Photo Translation
Before Breakfast
Sarajevo Film Festival Izeta Građević Lejla Begić Vuletić Cristi Puiu in AURORA by Sorin Naine Alistair Ian Blyth (from Romanian to English)
Cristi Puiu Public Interview Friday, 23/08/2013 Meeting Point Cinema, 15:00
Three Exercises of Interpretation
France, 2012, Colour, 157 min. Režija / Director: Cristi Puiu Scenarij / Screenplay: Cristi Puiu Uloge / Cast: Ludivine Anbérrée, Marion Bottollier, Ugo Broussot, Anne-Marie Charles, Anne Courpron, Perrine Guffroy, Hillary Keegin, Nathalie Meunier, Barnabé Perrotey, Jean-Benoit Poirier, Diana Sakalauskaite, Patrick Vaillant
© Sarajevo Film Festival 2013
Tribute to Cristi Puiu | 3
Cristi Puiu was born on April 3rd 1967 in Bucharest. In 1992, after the fall of communism, he started studying painting at the Ecole Supérieure d’Arts Visuels in Geneva before going into filmmaking. During his studies, he made several short films and documentaries. After returning to Romania, he continued to paint, co-wrote scripts with Razvan Radulescu and directed his first feature STUFF AND DOUGH in 2000. This road movie, filmed with a shoulder-held camera in an almost documentary style, was invited to the Directors’ Fortnight (la Quinzaine des Réalisateurs) in Cannes and won prizes at festivals, notably in Thessaloniki (Greece). In 2004 he won the Golden Bear at the Berlin Festival for his short film CIGARETTES AND COFFEE. THE DEATH OF MR. LAZARESCU is his second feature and the first part of the series SIX STORIES FROM THE BUCHAREST SUBURBS. Cristi Puiu lives with his family in a district of Bucharest where “peoples’ main preoccupation is how to make money under the table and not discussing Spanish baroque”. This is the basis of his inspiration. 4 | Tribute to Cristi Puiu
“The only proof of respect you can show the viewer is to tell him how the world appears to your eyes from the level of your kitchen window.” An interview with Cristi Puiu by Mihnea Măruţă
Mihnea Măruţă: Why are people scared in front of the camera? Cristi Puiu: We set great store by our image, which is manufactured by our own brain, but we don’t seem to be aware of it. And although the image we have of ourselves is vague, that is, not definitely circumscribed, it inhibits our expression. The thought that there might be a serious risk if we reveal ourselves, the thought that life goes on and that it will have to be lived tomorrow and the day after, causes us to limit our freedom of expression to the image of ourselves that we have manufactured. What risks does the camera bring to this image? The image is recorded. There doesn’t necessarily have to be a film camera, because the same thing also happens on the stage. The audience records you in their minds, in a way, and here an authentic, un-manufactured fear arises. If we set out from the question “what might happen to you tomorrow if you offer yourself up?” then things are all of a sudden much simpler. I say “all of a sudden”, because this is what I experienced myself. I have no arguments. I just realise that “nothing bad will happen if you offer yourself up”. On the contrary, you will start breathing anew. We constantly create suits of armour for ourselves… That’s what we do, inevitably. But isn’t this to do with the famous principle that every observer has an effect on the behaviour of the person being observed? What is it about the film camera in particular? It’s because it’s obvious how an ordinary person, not necessarily an actor, changes when you thrust a microphone in his face on the street, in other words when you film him. He becomes a completely different person because he knows that his image is going to be recorded. And what kind of person he becomes? Well, he becomes the person he would like to be remembered as such by the viewers. Isn’t it pardonable in a way? That’s not what the discussion is about; a lot of things are pardonable. If it can be explained, demonstrated, it can be understood and then accepted or not. But when a person encounters a limit situation, when he has nothing left to protect, nothing left to lose, when he no longer takes into account the day after, he comes to understand that he was on the wrong track... because the image of himself that he trusts it’s not a true one but the one that has been manufactured by his brain who tried to protect him from the others. He, then, realise that keeping on protecting this image doesn’t really rime with his fundamental need for truth. How do you make him…? Well, you can’t make him. Therein lies the problem.
How do you make him? The only way I have succeeded, when I have succeeded, doesn’t even depend on me, on my ability to persuade others. The only way I have known how to do it is via words: we talk, discuss, look at every facet and tell stories. And there are fortunate situations when certain stories remove the other’s inhibitions and drive away his fears. But maybe I’m wrong, I don’t know... Anyway, what I can tell you is that this is how it works in my case. And most of these liberating stories, I found them to be in the Scriptures. I didn’t have to look too far. Interesting… It is very hard to talk about them in today’s world, because we live in a hyper-Cartesian universe, where rational thought rules our souls and where things only exist if they can be scientifically demonstrated. Although each individual knows that he enters a special relationship with the world, by unsuspected channels, which he can’t identify with any precision. And because it is impossible to identify them, he will always adhere to rational thought. Do you know why? George Wald, a Nobel-winning American biologist, put it like this: “There are only two possibilities as to how life arose. One is spontaneous generation arising to evolution; the other is a supernatural creative act of God. There is no third possibility. Spontaneous generation, that life arose from non-living matter was scientifically disproved 120 years ago by Louis Pasteur and others. That leaves us with the only possible conclusion that life arose as a supernatural creative act of God. I will not accept that philosophically because I do not want to believe in God. Therefore, I choose to believe in that which I know is scientifically impossible.” This is more or less what happens. Of course, people don’t naturally think in this way; they’re regimented. And as long as there is a generally accepted idea of truth, an official trend, they will rally to it. What I have noticed with actors is that they always work according to the following equation: A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. I learned that at school, from my parents, from books, I’ve based my whole life on it, I can’t relinquish it, because that would mean losing my stability… You ask them to empty themselves, and they try to put on an additional mask… Well, emptying themselves, I don’t know... Here is another thing that isn’t understood, and I’m referring strictly to the cinema: as soon as we talk about the person in front of the camera, who isn’t an actor, but somebody who takes on that status, then he’s not there to reveal himself as he really is. It’s outrageous to say so. Because you don’t know who you are; you don’t know very much about yourself. You are in front of the camera to experience a given situation in the present moment. And then, as soon as you get rid of the observer that is yourself, your own observer, miracles happen. But not because you create them. You create the condition. You say: I let myself be carried away, I let myself be…
Tribute to Cristi Puiu | 5
You go through film school, art school, whatever, and after you finish, the only worthwhile thing you can do is to forget all you have learned. School means regimentation. Most people don’t do so, because school gives them stability, a degree gives them stabil-
But how are we to define the moment when a person sheds his mask? But he doesn’t shed his mask!
ity. Being a doctor isn’t a profession. There are people who are passionate about it, who fathom the depths of the world that is the biological organism... But there are also people with medical degrees who have sent more people to their graves than they have saved. But all the same, you go to the doctor and you give him credit, because he has a degree behind him. The same goes for all professions. In every field there are people with a calling. But the ones with a calling are outside the schema dreamed up by the structures of power. It’s an administrative thing; we call them those names – he’s an actor, he’s a doctor – we put them in cubbyholes and we find ourselves back in this world. If you meet an actor who has made the journey, he’ll tell you exactly that: there is no such thing as the profession of being an actor.
Sometimes he manages to shed it. There’s no shedding of masks. You’re placed in a special state that makes you resonate with a transcendental dimension. And then you are pervaded, suffused with life, the body vibrates, the eyes vibrate. That is where life is. Without being aware of it when you are doing it. You just are. And this is my highest ideal. The person you will be in front of the camera has no connection with the person you are in real life. You are in a special state. Such things depend on the actor’s cookbook and lots of expressions can be falsified. People are deft; the devil is deft. The devil can take on any likeness…
What does an actor tell you after such a moment, after he “offers himself up”? Most say: “Now you’ve explained it to me, I understand, and I did it well.” And I say: “You’re sure? Let’s do another take!” So, after several awfully bad takes he is really confused. He thought he got it, but now he has to assume that he didn’t... Or he did got it for a while and now he lost it... I tell him: “It’s not you who finds the door! The door finds you. What you can do is just wait, listen and pray…” But, you see, whenever the discussion reaches this point, people are quick to judge you… You practise a kind of humility, which I think must seem very odd to them… It seems odd because you’re immediately labelled, you’re very quickly reckoned to be a kind of missionary. Well, I am not. And it’s true that there are very many false prophets out there... I am a viewer. I look at things and ask myself questions. And I’ve arrived at answers, which are undoubtedly provisory, because they are directly connected with what I know up to now. And I’m talking strictly about the short journey I have made, not about books… Ah, it’s important when you got confirmations from other people, be they poets, or dentists, or physicists, or what have you... It’s reassuring to find out that you are not completely lost. That’s why I felt less alone when in an interview of David Bohm I came across the idea that perception is an extension of thinking and that in fact ready-made thoughts are a pitfall of thinking, that they turn into filters that prevent you from seeing the world. Phenomena are happening in front of you, but you can’t put them in a box, and you’re always looking for a box to put them in. I’ll tell you something that happened to me: when I was little, my aunt, my father’s sister, came from England and there was a family get-together, you know the sort of thing: children, off to bed! But we didn’t want to go to bed. And my aunt – whom we love very much – came into our room and said: Best stay here, let the old farts be, what do you want, to stare at them? And she reassured us, and at one point she said: I’ve put a poisonous toad under the bed: if you get out of bed, it’ll bite you. I was six or seven and she always used to go on about that toad of hers, as a joke. When I was ten, in March 1977, the earthquake came and shook the house. I was in bed with my brother, my sister was in the other room practising Vivaldi on her violin, driving us out of our minds, and the bed began to move, the lampshade… And the first thing that came into my head was that it was my aunt’s toad under the bed. I had no other explanation for the bed moving. The first thing! Obviously I then discounted that explanation, but my brain first went for the answer it already had. It’s very simple; everything happens like that. Most of the time, actors make mistakes because they look at what other actors do and resort to a kind of imitation. They try to be De Niro in TAXI DRIVER, or some other actor in some other film… There’s really no need. Of course, some of them have thought that maybe I’m mad. I was talking to one actress: “I’m begging you. God made you beautiful. There’s no need to add anything from yourself.” And I lost my temper, I shouted: “How can you do such a thing?” I was hopping mad. I talked calmly, calmly, calmly, until between two takes I started yelling: “Aren’t you ashamed of yourself? Where do you come off with such pride, with such arrogance? You don’t need to add anything at all; it’s perfect the way you are. Nothing bad is going to happen, your head’s not going to fall off your shoulders…” Isn’t there a paradox here? Why make a film and try to recreate reality? I don’t recreate reality. Aren’t you looking for the naturalness that exists in reality? I’m not looking for naturalness. I’m not interested in naturalness. I don’t know what it means.
6 | Tribute to Cristi Puiu
You said two days ago: “A carpenter is beautiful when he is working, he is natural, he is himself.” I’m exaggerating now, but in the extreme, why don’t we use a hidden camera to capture life? Do you know what a hidden camera is for? It’s something a lot of people don’t understand. In real life we lie. The hidden camera will record our lies, never the relationship with the transcendental. Herein lies the problem. In real life we lie. Most of the time. Of course they’re not big lies, but they alter your behaviour. If you come to be identical with yourself and don’t mould yourself to the person in front of you, then there is a serious risk, of which each of us is aware: the risk of hurting the other. And you don’t want to hurt the other for no reason. And so you ease off yourself; there are small concessions you make. Some people make very big concessions, others smaller ones, but in one way or another we falsify ourselves somehow. The hidden camera might be viable when the individual is alone with himself in a space where he feels protected, at home, let’s say, where every object is in its right place, a world he can control… But what you get in this case is incomplete, because the individual is placed only in a relationship with his own mind. But, again, this is stealing, not filming. Isn’t it arrogant to say that those rare moments in filming achieve a relationship with the transcendental? I don’t have any other word for it. The most honest thing would be to say that it is not possible to put into words. It’s just a feeling, and I connect that feeling to something higher than the human. That’s all, and of course I may be deceiving myself. But that feeling exists and it doesn’t have any connection with great revelations or sweeping gestures. It’s connected with “Good day!” with “Thank you for the meal!” with a man who waits, sees, smiles... Life is happening. A person enters into a relationship with the world. And this is what I try to explain to the actors. It’s something American actors have understood but apply very badly, because it’s very mechanical: looking. When two people look at each other, something happens. The two of us here, as we talk, we’re looking at each other; something is happening. If you go to the theatre, you’ll observe that most actors don’t look at each other… You’re familiar with the mediaeval theory of the spirit, of the pneuma, which is released through looking. The theory of universal sympathy, of all things resonating… I believe that all things resonate. There was something I was never clear on when I was little. It’s a story I never dared tell in public until I was much older, because it seems so stupid. I’ll tell it now and people can think what they like. I was never clear on why dogs look you straight in the eye. I never understood why. Why do they look in your eyes? They could look anywhere else at all. But if you kick or caress a dog, it looks you in the eye. There is a communication that occurs via the eyes. All kinds of behaviourists and researchers will turn up with an explanation now… But that dog knows something. So looking is very important, as you well know. If you look someone in the eye it can be perceived as a form of aggression. You know what they say: don’t look a tiger or a lion in the eye… And that’s what I think is going on with dogs. Something is happening there. In any encounter, at a fundamental, basic level, we all know that something happens when eyes meet. I choose to call it this, to speak of the transcendental, because it seems to me that the world we’ve gradually constructed – and the boom was probably the industrial revolution and the centring of discourse about truth on science – it seems to me that it has led us to a dead end, despite the fact that each of us experiences a special relationship with a dimension impossible to circumscribe, about which very many have borne witness, but which seems to depend on the realm of religious anecdote. You know what they say: mankind didn’t understand lightning and so he explained it in religious terms. That’s nonsense…
Aren’t you increasingly isolated because you are moving into this realm? I don’t know. I hadn’t noticed. I have noticed that when I speak in such terms, a whole host of obstacles appear, which I wasn’t aware of. It’s only natural: the Church Fathers say that the stronger you are, the more strongly you will be tempted… Yes, but you realise that when I talk about such things, I’m talking as a sinner… We all are… Yes, but I take all my shortcomings as such, as shortcomings. I’m not going to explain my shortcomings and failures from the viewpoint of some justification or other. It’s very complicated, because we will always opt to listen to the one who has been tried and tested. The man’s a saint, he’s done such and such… And so then the things he says are valuable. I identify myself as a sinner and so the things I say lose substance. That is, it looks like speculation on the part of the one interested in dominating. There’s a large pitfall here: when you say such things, you place yourself in a highly debatable position. And then you try to say things in such a way as to reach the addressee as if they hadn’t come from you, but rather discovered by him. Like the Socratic method… Yes, probably, but not that far. Because in fact I’m interested in getting out of this loop in the conversation, but it’s very hard. You can end up structuring things extremely well, but they will come to be structured like a beautiful object, which is the discussion, and when we come to the doing, in the relationship with the other, it’s as if nothing has happened. It’s like the words were brought there solely for the purpose of the discussion. Let’s return to humility. Isn’t there a risk, when you marvel at such mysteries, of entering a kind of blockage? Yes, it happens. Cyclically, you enter a kind of blockage. I refer to what you said about there being subjects you don’t dare touch. And I think that there are not many people who think the same way. Why, for example, is the subject of the anti-communist resistance in the mountains one that is “superhuman”? They might say to you: “all the more reason for somebody taking the risk and doing it.” That isn’t the problem. I’m prepared to take the risk, but it’s the same as Alexandru Paleologu1) put it: courage isn’t when you recklessly throw yourself into battle, but when you take account of all the risks, all that awaits you, and only then do you enter battle. So you’re aware and, despite the fact that death awaits you, you still go. You see: I didn’t know that such things went on in Romania. In our family we never talked about the communist prisons. After the fall of Ceaușescu, I think that Humanitas was the first publisher to bring out testimonies from the communist prisons. And I came across those books, which threw me off the rails. They seriously unbalanced me, to the point of tears. So much so that I started questioning people in my family, about whether I had relatives… And I didn’t have anybody who had been in a communist prison and that seemed to me very… crap. After that I went to see my family in Botoșani and my Aunt Nuța told me: “Uncle Vasile was imprisoned by the communists.” And I started to ask about it, but it wasn’t anything major. Uncle Vasile had been the constable in a village in Botoșani and he used to beat up the communists. And when the communists came to power, they gaoled him. So there wasn’t any higher cause. It was nothing but a case of revenge. And when I read Twenty Years in Siberia by Anița Nandriș-Cudla2), I wept. And since then, whenever a new edition comes out, I buy ten copies to give to people. And I can’t understand why the book isn’t in the school syllabuses… That’s also valid for Elisabeta Rizea’s3) account… What struck me is the simplicity of the message: “We worked, we were ordinary people, and we couldn’t understand why they were taking it all away from us. We deserved to keep something from our work, because even so it was very hard…” Yes, very simple common-sense things. You can’t even speak of the devil in such a context, not even in jest: people will say you’re mad. I want to understand the mechanisms, I want to understand what happened to those people, because I’m interested in telling the story, but at the same time I have to be honest towards myself. Because I can’t say just anything. If I end up saying how I believe things were, then that has to be included in the mass of the communication, because it’s the view of somebody alien to the events. You said you have conducted interviews with former prisoners… Yes, in 2000 I did a video installation with Ștefan Constantinescu, an old friend of mine,
who lives and works in Sweden. We received the money not from the Romanian state, as we expected, but from the Swedish state… Why did you stop there? You said that in your discussions with them you felt that you couldn’t even… I was embarrassed. I didn’t even know how to put the questions… But they were not bothered by that at all. And I asked them the questions apologetically: you know, I’ve read that, I don’t know… I took a lot of precautionary measures not to offend them, although they were not easily offended and understood that the questions were legitimate. There were a few meetings that threw me off the rails, again. It was exactly like when a tram comes of the rails. When Gavril Vatamaniuc4), the hero of Bucovina, came, he was incontinent; he was fitted with a tube and smelled of urine. It gives me gooseflesh when I think of it. And when he entered, he was so radiant, despite the smell of urine… It gives me gooseflesh. With that smile of his... He was so radiant. And he told me about how they had beaten him, without a trace of a desire for vengeance. And he spoke with such understanding… And he spoke about things so atrocious… For me, this is the most striking thing: that they have reached the level at which they no longer want vengeance. Yes, a more concrete example of “turn the other cheek” I have only seen in a few of such people as these. Such generosity of forgiveness… How do you explain it? I don’t know. I think that it is the journey that counts. We could talk about it for days on end, but that journey has to be made. All of us are wise when we’re on the side-lines. Vatamaniuc told me he was ill and had to go to the infirmary, and they told him that to get there he would have to pretend to be epileptic… They had to test his Babinski reflex, in the sole of the foot. They tap you with a key and your toes clench, but apparently not if you’re epileptic. And he told me they didn’t do it with a key, but with a razor for opening glass phials. They cut the sole of his foot. And he said he didn’t so much as flinch. And he was delighted at that success, which I find to be so atrocious… He didn’t even question the fact that it was unjust for him to be there. It was just what happened, and he crossed that threshold, it was an ordeal that he overcame. But not in a “look what I’ve been through!” sort of way, but like that: “I got to the infirmary and they treated me, and I was pleased”… In fact, he ended up in that state because they had beaten him; he said that his kidneys were dislodged… And after that you say: “Well, I liked that story so much I’m going to make a film…” And of course, that’s what I thought too. You get the impression that if you have been to school and you want to make films, then the sky is the limit; you can write about anything at all, make films about anything you want… And if you’re not honest with yourself, you take it for real. Alright, we’ll tell this story. And what do I tell the actors? What do I tell the actors? How can they act like the man in prison? What do I tell them? Watch Steve McQueen in Papillon? What can I tell them when I know absolutely nothing about it? And then the only way you can talk about those things is to reach such an abstract level that you bring the essence of the idea into your own world, your own journey, and you tell your own story, in order for the idea to reach the viewer. But this is forgetting again those people who suffered in the communist prisons. Is betraying them for a second time. That’s the way I see it. Because of that I have a huge problem when Zefirelli or Mel Gibson or others come and talk about the life of Christ. Get out of here and go back to bed! What utter rubbish! Tell me your story, don’t hide behind an icon... These guys were not aware of the fact that there is no other meaning to narrative cinema than building up a parable. What are the elements of the parable? You know them, you’re familiar with them, just open your eyes. Tell your own story, about how you see the world from your own kitchen window. This is enough already, because you are testifying and this is the most valuable thing you can possibly do in order to help the others open their eyes. And then the devil’s advocate comes and says: “You’re not going to make the film, because you raise too many difficulties, and somebody else will do it and make a mockery of the story…” Which is what happens with a lot of stories. What’s best? Don’t the hair-splitters do harm because that way they let the people who don’t look at every facet of the problem present their superficial versions? Yes, it’s true, but at the same time I could answer the devil’s advocate by referring directly to Jesus. He that hath ears to hear, let him hear… It’s a journey you yourself have to make… Tribute to Cristi Puiu | 7
The eternal dilemma: the good sit on the side-lines and analyse and meanwhile evil takes to the arena. And so we come to politics… We come to politics, inevitably, but if you are genuinely responsible and tell the story,
sponsible when you make a mistake? The choices are always yours. But of course that’s a very uncomfortable position. What do you do? Your whole life is turned upside down.
it will end up being coded for the majority. If you are responsible, you will never get out of that loop. If you are irresponsible, the story will be boundlessly vulgar: see Zefirelli, Gibson, and other operettas… I rejoiced when I read in DIARY OF HAPPINESS that Steinhardt5) (Romanian writer and monk, anti-communist political prisoner) speaks about JESUS CHRIST SUPERSTAR being the most beautiful film about Jesus. I rejoiced because I received a confirmation of my own opinion from a man I treasure and respect greatly. That was how it had seemed to me, but I never dared say it. How can this be the most beautiful film about Jesus? Are you out of your mind – a musical with hippies? Well, I think he is right.
Yes, I mean, isn’t somebody else always guilty? Well, yes, that’s the most convenient mechanism, the scapegoat. And if there isn’t one, you have to invent one. We all find endless excuses for ourselves. But I think that things are in plain view.
Apropos of Steinhardt, he also tells us: “Dare!” Petre Țuțea6) also said the same thing: the Romanian people is neither less talented nor less intelligent than others, but lacks daring. And dare what? Dare to say how you see the world. And then you certainly come to politics. Authority doesn’t require people to see accurately. Tell me what you see, with a director’s eye, when you watch talk shows with three people in a studio and a host who pretends to ask them… Behold the lie. Forgive them, for they know not what they do. Behold the lie. They all come with an agenda that doesn’t even belong to them. They haven’t got a clue, they don’t ask themselves questions, they don’t question themselves. That way you come to realise that life lasts no longer than the blink of an eye. Memory doesn’t matter any more by that reckoning. If I happen to die now, then I die in a context that is alien to my life and my plans and the image I’ve formed about this life. What am I doing here, sitting at a table, giving an interview, all these things pass… And we invest in all kinds of futilities. And nobody teaches us that neither medicine, nor technology, nor science will spare us from dying. And nobody prepares us for that last encounter. And nobody teaches us that we have to look and to set out on the journey. To look and listen. And to pray... The door that opens to the actor it opens because he is praying. He doesn’t pray in the standard way, he prays without knowing he is praying. But even if he doesn’t know, God hears and opens the door to him. And then you see how the actor loses his mind and starts thinking that he has succeeded by virtue of his own talent… I’m interested in how you view television from the visceral point of view… Viscerally, I haven’t watched television for two years. I don’t want to watch it any more. And when I do chance to find myself in front of a television set, it makes me feel ill. Physically. Physically! And you can’t even say to such a person: “You know, you might die tomorrow…” What levers do you have to budge such a person? It’s very hard. Because this is the model we live by. We’ve shaped the world in such a way that it will become progressively harder to find our way out of the labyrinth we’ve built. And we’ve built it with a great deal of intelligence. Unfortunately. As for me, because I talk a lot and I’m reactive, when the discussion enters this area I can’t help but invoke faith. And then we end up talking in an incredibly vulgar way, about whether God exists or not. That’s the most vulgar level of discussion. The only level from which a discussion of this kind can proceed would be: “what is God” or “in what way is God”, not whether He exists or not. At one point, I had such a discussion with somebody and he put forward the same old argument as always: “If God exists, then why are there so many wars, why is there so much evil in the world…” I say: “Doesn’t it seem strange to you that when something bad happens to you, you hold God responsible, and if something good happens, then it’s your own merit? If you hold Him responsible when something bad happens, then you ought to thank Him when something good happens. Or else hold yourself responsible when something bad happens. And nonetheless, that’s the way we operate. We’ve invented prizes! We’ve invented prizes! Prizes that bear all the insignia of royalty, of divinity: red, gold… It seems very grave to me when people hold God responsible. But look at your own life, look at your own family, at your relationship with the world: what is a good parent? Is it the parent who checks up on you, controls you, constantly makes decisions for you? Wouldn’t that be awful? If you got married and your mother climbed into bed with you and told you how you should make love to your wife? You wouldn’t want that. But why then do you demand it of God? Don’t you think a good parent gives you the freedom to choose? You’re free, he leaves you be, he puts his trust in you. So why then do you hold Him re-
8 | Tribute to Cristi Puiu
Alright, it’s a working hypothesis. Let’s not be certain that it’s like that… Yes, it’s a working hypothesis. But do you know why I think that things are in plain view? Because it sometimes happens that I enter into resonance with the world, for a fraction of a second. I’m struck by a feeling of “that’s how it is.” Without thinking, without going through the process of questioning the existence of God, without being in that sauce. I’ll be walking down the street and… bang! It’s a kind of instantaneous awakening. And then the recoil. We all experience such things, but we erase them, we sweep them under the rug, they don’t suit us. You don’t want to question yourself, because your life would be turned upside down for a very simple reason; if that’s how it is, then you don’t have to go far: you have the Ten Commandments. Who wants to go there? That’s torture. There’s no need to spend your time in libraries to discover the meaning… No, sir: they’re clear. They’ve been put there, so obey them. And you do that, you force yourself, you focus your entire being, you do it today, and the next day you wake up with a feeling of wellbeing, you relax, and you start to err once more. And so, yes, Steinhardt was right that for a Christian the greatest torment is that you have to start from scratch every morning. Nothing you did yesterday counts. Nothing. But you end up thinking like an accountant: “I did a good deed there…” You tot them up: “I can allow myself that, because I did that…” M.M.: “I’ve still got some life left,” like in computer games… Exactly, and you don’t know when death will come and it catches you unprepared, and it finds you in disarray. When my grandmother told me such things… You know, I was an ardent communist when I was little. I would come home from school and I didn’t eat until I did my homework, like in the slogan: “no labour without bread, and no bread without labour.” But that didn’t mean I reached the other shore. I used to have arguments with my grandmother, who was a very religious woman, the kind who kept an icon in the corner and made daily prostrations… I used to tell her that we were descended from the apes and she would say: “Cristian, you’re wrong, you’re speaking sinfully…” What does “speaking sinfully mean”? Is your change connected with the fact that you have become a husband and father? It is connected with that, but the number one change was when I encountered the testimonies from the communist prisons. And then, there are these two books that I discovered after the falling down of the communism that disturbed me. The first one is TWENTY YEARS IN SIBERIA by Anița Nandriș-Cudla, a simple woman with no university degrees. And it wasn’t her story that touched me, but her innocence. It didn’t touch me, it pulverised me. I recommended the book to my students. They probably think I’m mad, because they’re there to learn scriptwriting. And what do I do? I give them to read the story of a nobody told by a nobody. And then there is Heinrich Zimmer’s book, THE KING AND THE CORPSE: that too was a trigger, it awakened in me a series of questions connected to the tools you can work with. It’s not the stories they tell that are important, but the way they relate to the stories and try to decode them. Up until then, my brain had been formatted in such a way that the encounters I had had with the authors who shaped me necessarily led to answers strictly connected to this world. Even Kafka. Even Dostoevsky. Which is to say, all those references to God functioned in my mind like parables: how can we make this world function? Well, Heinrich Zimmer and Anița Nandriș-Cudla brought about a change. But things turned out like that because being isolated at the time, in Switzerland, where I was studying, I didn’t have anybody to talk to about these books, to dissect them. I ruminated on them and turned them over in my head. That was very bad for me, because I needed another person to pick them apart with, to look at them with. I know that I’m incapable of being alone, of finding the answer by myself. Let’s talk about your idea that an author is only allowed to talk about rules, because we don’t know anything about the exceptions, about the unpredictable, about the black swans. That’s how it seems to me. It seems to me that there is a phenomenon (which is probably connected to the survival instinct): the brain has to deal with the cosmos that is our organism. And as I understand it, it has been set to do everything it can to keep the or-
ganism alive. And when you start asking serious questions, at a given moment the brain gives you the wrong answers. Because if you ask those questions, you start suffering from insomnia and that affects the health of the body as a whole. And I’ve noticed this
would be one with the television. That focus of his would be insane, he would be inside it. Except that it was embarrassing…
when I write, and I search, and I write, and in the end I discover. And then I go to bed relaxed. And when I get up the next day, in fact it was rubbish. And I ask myself: how can this be? What did my brain give me here? This was from some film; that was from somewhere else… From the storeroom of the memory, the brain serves up manufactured formulas… I read Arsenie Papacioc7) and he talks about the state of the continuous present …
Wasn’t it dangerous… Yes, and that’s exactly what happens to artists: involvement of body and soul. And in fact it’s a balancing act, you walk a tightrope and at any moment the passion can send you to hell. It’s just a matter of one step to the side. And then I realised that this was the answer: whether conscientiously or not, jurisprudence calls the murderer the “author of the crime”. Author. Author! Author of the text, author of the painting… They’re contiguous. What the murderer does is to intervene brutally in the order of things, in our history. And what the large-scale murderers do, Hitler, Stalin, Mao…
Which in any case we don’t understand… Which in any case we can’t understand and which in any case I adapt to what I think the present might be. To put it more simply, you have to be sober and aware. Somebody says: “I’m afraid of flying…” Another says: “Have a drink…” How can I drink? I mean: how can I cloud my mind and if I die, if the plane crushes, to be drunk and not to be awake when that singular event occurs? How far we are pushing the limits of our cowardice... Let’s go back: you were saying that we shouldn’t talk about accidents, in the sense of things going off the rails… When I made AURORA and researched what it means to eliminate another person, a friend of mine, a prosecutor, took me to meet murderers. There is no answer to the question, but they all said that their minds went dark. I’m talking about people who murder spontaneously, in a fury… And then it seemed to me that in fact the only thing I can say about murder, about killing your fellow man, is that it is not part of this world. It is as if you were walking among the hills of your life and all of a sudden you come to a precipice, a black abyss. And on the edge a gust of wind takes you. I see it more mathematically, with tangential universes… That’s another way. But the fact remains: it’s not of this world. And you don’t know what happened. I extend this to exceptional circumstances, for the good or the bad. Those exceptional circumstances are deviations from the straight path. I don’t think we’re in a position to talk about them. As people or as artists? There isn’t a language articulate enough to allow you to translate that event, the accident that intervenes in the order of things. It’s vanity. Stories are the only way you can talk about it, but a very serious risk arises, that the story you are telling be centred on that exceptional event… It sucks you in like a whirlpool… Yes, it’s a temptation. You possess a truth that others do not possess. And when you set about telling it, you see that in fact it’s hollow. What risks are involved in setting about telling a story? You see that in fact it is nothing. It is the illusion of truth. You induce in other people the illusion of truth. What personal effects did AURORA have on you? Because you went into that mysterious region… I was very ill. I can’t even put it into words. During filming or afterwards? During and afterwards. There was a lad on the set who filmed a making-of documentary. He did a very bad job. He put a great effort into it, but that was all he was capable of filming. The result was fifty hours of footage, but very confusing. Who is going to edit something like that? I asked some friends to cut it, to get whatever material they could out of it. And after a time they came back with five hours of film. I watched it and from the very first frames I burst into tears. It was horrible. I saw myself there, all alone, gloomy. Different from the way you see yourself in the film proper? Yes and no. In fact the story in the film can be read in various ways, but there is a level of the story that is specific to me. I asked myself the question: what does it mean in fact when a man goes in that direction? What does it mean? What does it resemble? What do I know about such things? And the only answer that came to my mind was: me at work. When I am at work, especially when I am painting, I am one with what I am doing. And I am like a tram running along the rails. And I discovered in myself the same tics as my father’s. When the television went on the blink, he would set about repairing it, and he
The mind can’t comprehend it… The mind can’t comprehend it. But on a small scale, the scale of the individual, when it works like that, it’s exactly like the one who goes over to the “dark side of the Force.” And the artist does the same thing… The same thing. Except that his interventions in history are of the soft kind. Being a creator is a very dangerous thing… The artist kills versions of reality. He imposes one and kills the others. He fascinates people, many follow his lead, and then the alternatives disappear… Exactly. He works with witchcraft… It’s magic. Yes, but it’s very dangerous. And then we come back to the Scriptures, because you shouldn’t meddle with such things. Yes, I think that’s the way things stand. And so it doesn’t surprise me that commercial cinema, which is centred on the exceptional, leads to madness. The events those films narrate to us are exceptional events led by exceptional characters. They don’t happen in your own back yard. You know, when I got into cinema, I discovered that it attracted me; I did it out of curiosity, to see what it was like. And gradually, the cinema won me over. I would watch a certain kind of film, where the author’s achievements were obvious: achievements that related to his imagination, the intelligence with which he solved certain dramatic, visual situations, and so on. And at one point I discovered Cassavetes, and I said: “what bad filmmaking!” But it didn’t give me any peace. I had watched A WOMAN UNDER THE INFLUENCE, a fellow student lent me it, and I said: “What a stupid film!” But when I woke up the next day, I felt that I had to watch it again, and I watched yet again a few hours later. And all of a sudden I discovered – again, emotionally – why I had an issue with the cinema and that what Cassavetes does isn’t cinema. It’s something else. He offers himself up, in the flesh and blood, a confession. And so I become interested in cinema just in this form, as a confession. And gradually, my attention shifted to direct cinema, observational documentary, people who tell a story about this world preserving in their utterance the wonderment and assumption that says: “I know that I do not know,” “I look and I wonder and I wonder,” “look at what I have seen, I will tell it to you also.” And not: “look, this is how the world is working.” And that encounter also procured for me a potential answer to the question that is present whatever the direction art might take you – what a good film means, what a bad film means, what a good painting is, what a bad painting is. Cassavetes once said: “the director had to set out from the assumption that he knows nothing.” Manufacturing a film is questioning the world. It’s wonderment. And I said: “yes, this is the answer. Good films are those by directors who wonder, who wonder alongside you, and bad films are those by directors who tell you how things are. How to talk about the author, then? Once, I talked to my students about the absence of the author. The person who writes is not the author; he labours, he puts words on paper, but he is not the author. I write scripts, I make films, I know what it means: but I know it is not I who is the author. It’s merely an administrative matter; somebody has to do it. For example, when you write, it happens that you’re caught inside the labyrinth of the words. And you go out, you meet up with some friends, you talk. And at the table somebody tells something that releases you from your blockage. That’s why it’s significant when authors express their thanks in the final credits. Because there are great many important people caught in the creative process, often without being aware of this. So it’s merely an administrative matter. But most people fall into that trap and they end Tribute to Cristi Puiu | 9
up believing that they are creating “ex nihilo”… But we know this is not true. It’s not like that. You are just an intermediary agent, a middleman. That doesn’t tarnish your merit... And having placed yourself in the position of listening is the achievement of a lifetime. That’s why I think the French saying is accurate: “se mettre à l’écoute.” Because it’s a specific condition: you place yourself in the position of listening. It’s not a spontaneous act on the part of your brain. You hear things: some are resonating, others don’t. And for the want of a better word, people have called it “inspiration”. The question is who is inspiring you? It’s like in the parable that Richard Feynman told when he was recollecting his experience in the Manhattan Project. He says: “This is the key of knowledge. With it you open the gates of heaven. But I have to tell you one other thing: with the same key you open the gates of hell.” I have a friend, a poet, who says that sometimes he is unable to finish a poem for a lengthy period because the words never rise to the heights of his vision. And so he keeps looking for the right words. Are you ever afraid, before you start shooting a film, that it might not rise to the heights of your vision? I’ve never thought about it in such terms, but now you put it like that, the answer is yes, there is a fear… He is afraid because words attract the real. Which is to say, there is a risk that you might express things – through poetry, but also through film – that subsequently might happen. At the risk of seeming somewhat outmoded, I think that the main problem of the present time is that it centres the discourse on the author, as the inventor/creator of worlds. I think that the author is nothing but a messenger, and the problem arises when he becomes contaminated with the extremely toxic idea that makes him think of himself as a demiurge. I call this disease demiurgitis. I don’t think it’s a matter of a risk, but of a kind of responsibility. I think that the author should be constantly watchful, awake, present. When I am working, always seeking and striving to articulate, something gets unblocked at a given moment. And then, thinking back to what happened, to what I put down on paper – we’re talking about a screenplay – I realise that the things that seem genuinely important to me are the ones I haven’t put down. When you’re working, you end up opening doors. They open because you have been praying. But it is not prayer in the traditional sense, on your knees and holding a book, but a kind of torment, a kind of torture. You knock and they open to you? Yes, if they open to you. If they don’t open to you, it means you haven’t knocked. It’s not as if you are in control. You’re not. The only thing you can do as an author is to come up with the questions. But that’s not easy, because most of the questions you articulate lead nowhere. And not because intelligence doesn’t help you, but because the brain keeps us at a distance from the truth. Why do I think this? Because the things we discover might force us completely to reconfigure our outlook on the world… The might destroy our whole supporting structure… Yes, and take us to the brink, imperil our existence. But the brain also has the function of preservation. I say the “brain”, there is probably a brain in each cell, but regardless of the model we resort to, I think that there is a preservation instinct, which keeps us alive. And then the torment to which you are subjected when you start work comes from the conflict that occurs inside you, when you question the world, and the brain does all in its power to protect you. And where does the fear come in? In this situation, the fear is just the explanation we apply to the feeling we have experienced. And we do so only after the fact. You look for an explanation and you say “fear”. When you are confronted with the blank sheet of paper and you start to write, there is a fear, a kind of terror, but more often than not this terror, which is material, comes more from what we think might happen when the text or the film will encounter the other, the reader or viewer, and people will change their opinion of us and judge us. And then there is a fear of losing the other, of losing the viewer’s love. This might explain why very many authors, both filmmakers and writers, end up straitjacketing themselves in a given formula, which they repeat ad infinitum, and all they do is to copy themselves. It is the fear of moving outside verified, comfortable limits. You made such and such a film, people liked it, and so you don’t ask any more questions, all you do is multiply the same formula, using different stories. We’re talking about things that have a connexion with the dark side of the author’s world, and which, for the sake of convenience, I shall call the “devil”. This fear is fabricated. If you question it, you’ll
10 | Tribute to Cristi Puiu
see that it doesn’t rest on anything. If people are quick to judge you on your successes and your failures, that’s their business. If that becomes so important to you that it perverts your path, then it’s serious. Of course, there is a reaction of rejection, there is a reaction of reserve, but films, books, all those objects resulting from the questions an author asks himself, ought to lead to dialogue. In the most fortunate case, those object end up becoming a pretext for entering into a dialogue with the other. Would you like the viewer to create his own meaning when he sees your films, that is, to “work at it”, or would you like the viewer to resonate with the idea you had in mind when you shot a given frame? Both. When you’re filming, you take into account a whole host of things. Some are connected only to the visual, others to the acoustic space, others to the acting… strictly technical matters: what the people in the frame are saying, the meaning of the objects in the image, etc. You take these things into account, but there are very many others that elude you, and then the role of the viewer becomes very important. If the viewer ends up decoding the meaning of a statement from your film in a slightly or completely different way, and if he conveys it to you, then that is an opportunity for dialogue that shouldn’t be missed. But I’d like to show you something, to make clearer what I’m saying. (He goes to the bookcase and fetches a book) It’s the opening statement of André Gide’s novel, PALUDES: “Before explaining my book to others, I expect others to explain it to me. To desire to explain something in fact means to limit the meaning. For, if we know what we meant to say, we don’t know whether we have said more than that. We always say more than that and what interests me most is what we have added unwittingly, the part of the unconscious I would like to name God’s part. A book is always collaborative, and the book will be all the more valuable the smaller the scribe’s part and the greater God’s part. Let us everywhere wait for the public to reveal what is in our works.” This is a book I read when I was sixteen or seventeen. It is the book thanks to which I discovered Gide and I am still very attached to it. In fact, my education came from a great number of short novels: Gide’s PALUDES, Ștefan Agopian’s8) TEXTBOOK OF OCCURRENCES, Camus’s THE STRANGER, Mateiu Caragiale’s9) RAKES OF THE OLD COURT, Sabato’s THE TUNNEL, Tolstoy’s THE DEATH OF IVAN ILICH, and lots of other small books. So, the viewer’s main merit would be to help you find out about yourself something other than you know. If things go harmoniously, if there is fair play, I mean, then the dialogue that arises becomes an opportunity to encounter what the human might be, what the human is, what God might be and is. This is what happens to me with people who are close to me. I talk to friends about my films and I discover new things, which I had no idea about, and which only they were able to see, and therefore things I didn’t put there and over which I had no control. This seems to me the only important thing in cinema: the dialogue that ensues once the film is there. Maybe it’s because of this that I am attached to films that are glorious failures… Tell me about some glorious failures. At TIFF (Transylvania International Film Festival, held in Cluj), at the launch of the DVDs of Lucian Pintilie’s10) films, I said that he had taught me that cinema is much more than that, As much as I know of the way Pintilie worked, he was always dominated by a sense of urgency and it seems to me that, yes, his films are glorious failures. His idea is very lofty, but the films never rise to the heights of the idea… As we were saying at the beginning... There is a trace of the idea in his films; there is the mark of authentically consuming thought. But the films pale, without the presence of Pintilie; they are inarticulate. Why? Because his plan is loftier, because the plan is beyond him, the author, and that’s what makes them beautiful. They are glorious failures, but without him seeking to demonstrate anything in particular thereby. He is quite simply consumed by his own thoughts… Of all your films, is there one film in particular that you regard as a glorious failure, in the sense that it didn’t rise to the heights you would have wished? That’s a question I can’t answer unless all of them are in fact failures. Or is it too soon? No, it’s not too soon. In a certain way they’re all failures. At least, this is what I hope. But I think that everybody would answer the question in the same way. Maybe I’m very
optimistic, but I don’t think there’s any filmmaker, any author, who would say: “look, I expressed myself here, this was me here…” I think that there are… Then I feel sorry for them. What I was saying relates to the author’s aim, how high he hoists the flag. And you hoist it very high. What you think is something like this: Every person lives in his own mind, there is no encounter between two minds, mine and the viewer’s, unless it takes a miraculous form, and therefore all that I can do when I film is to observe people. Yes and no... I tend to think that what is happening inside a director’s brain while making the film is from far much more complex that the film itself. For me, films are, or should be, the side effect of a question that cannot be answered. And then the stakes are very high, because you’re nonetheless trying to create that encounter, you want the viewer to intersect with your mind at least a little… Yes, but it is a little bit more complicated. There’s an example I give to my students: when you write a love letter to somebody, you don’t telephone that person, him or her, every five minutes to ask: “Do you think it would be better if I said it like this…?” She or he does not exist while you are writing. There is no addressee. There is no viewer. There is only you and your confession. When I do this, all I’m looking to do is put myself down on paper. It’s an incredibly difficult thing, because the engine stalls as soon as you have articulated the question: “Who am I?” I’m putting myself down on paper, but who am I in fact? And above all, who am I in this story? When you are working, you question yourself and you question the world, but at a given moment the engine mysteriously restarts and you begin to write… And the things seem to come from elsewhere… inspiration… But the other, the reader, the viewer, will only start to exist when what you had to say has been put on paper or on celluloid. It is only then that the viewer appears. Only then does he begin to exist for the author. The only proof of respect, admiration and trust you can show the viewer is to say everything you think, everything you think about yourself, about the cosmos, and about what you are doing. You tell yourself. Then, and only then, the encounter can occur. Very many people say: “But you need to take account of the viewer.” You don’t need to take account of the viewer. Which is to say, don’t try to give the viewer what you think he is expecting from you. You won’t succeed, because that kind of thing is impossible. You can’t enter the other’s mind. The mind of the viewer, in this case. It’s a vanity to think that you know what the viewer is expecting from you. You need to know only one thing, that what you are doing when you make a film is to tell the story of this world, experienced by every single cell that composes you. If you manage to do that, it’s enough. Tell the other how the world appears to your eyes, viewed from the level of your kitchen window and you will trigger the dialogue. And the other, the viewer, when he enters into this dialogue with you, will say: “Yes, but from my window I can also see two branches of a tree that seems to belong to a weeping willow. Maybe you can’t see it from yours because it faces south.” This is the only way a dialogue can come into being. These are the boundaries of the dialogue. If the dialogue is a battlefield in which everybody is trying to demonstrate to everybody else that only he is right, then all hope is lost; we’re doomed. I’ve always said that mankind’s only genuinely important inventions have been dialogue and friendship. And, of course, perhaps I’m wrong. On the subject of “Who am I?”: when you shoot a scene, who do you think is the one who is observing? Let’s take your first film, STUFF AND DOUGH: the camera is set up inside the car, behind the two friends. Through whose eyes is the viewer looking? The witness. Who is the witness? Because it’s not Cristi Puiu… It is and it isn’t. Who is the invisible witness? If film weren’t a convention, there would be nobody there in real life. I’m asking you this because you said of STUFF AND DOUGH that you couldn’t put the camera in front of the windscreen, like in American films, because a person couldn’t be there… I said a lot of things at the time, when I was working on STUFF AND DOUGH, because the observer’s presence had to be defined. I defined it at one point – perhaps in an exaggerated or pretentious or sinful way, but that’s how I defined it: “The one who sees is the angel.” If there had been a person in the van, it would have meant that the protagonists, the ones in front of the camera, would have had to see him, to enter into a relationship with him. And so I said: “You can’t enter into a relationship with him, because he is the
angel: he is present, but you can’t see him.” Was it easier for the actors after you told them that? I don’t think so, because they took it as a figure of speech. But to conclude, the witness is the author. And the author is not an angel. And at the risk of seeming radical, most viewers don’t understand what they are looking at when they watch a film. They think they are watching an event unfolding before their eyes, when in fact they are only looking at the way in which the author looks at the story he is telling. In other words, the viewer is viewing the author’s view. He is merely the witness of what the author bears witness to. I’m interested in how you think when you are working… When I’m working, I don’t really think. When I look at the events taking place in front of the lens, at what the actors are doing, at the way in which objects are moving, I am in another dimension. I listen to my intuition. When I listen to it. It’s the only connexion I have with the ineffable. Intuition, inspiration, the ineffable, the unrepeatable. Of course, there is also the rational thinking... And it helps me when I try to articulate that the truth is elsewhere… It helps me when I try to say what I think the world is not. I think that people who write, who make films, who paint, who compose music, are aware of the fact that they are not and cannot be in control… that they do not know what the world is, that they cannot distinguish good from evil. What is the criterion when I say: “It’s no good, let’s do another take”? It can’t be quantified. There are obvious errors, which anybody in the crew can spot – a microphone is showing within the frame, an actor fluffed his line, and so on. But I say that it is good – and I rarely do so – when the camera manages to record life. If somebody were to ask me: “How can you tell whether that take had life, whereas that one didn’t?” I would be able to cobble two or three things together by way of explanation, but I wouldn’t be able to put the essential into words. I won’t be able to say how I realised or what were the criteria according to which I was able to identify the presence of life in a take, but I can recognise it when it occurs. Because of this, from the position of the first spectator of the events taking place in front of the lens, I can say that only on very few occasions have I happened to record life. I am talking now strictly about narrative film, which is what I do, that is, films with stories. There are a lot of reference points that you have to take into account as a director: the story, the presence of the actors, what clothes they are wearing, the light, the position of the camera, etc. If you end up controlling every one of these details – let’s say you have a mind comprehensive enough to take account of all the details – what you get won’t be life. Then can we say that what happens in montage is that you cut based on “life? It’s my only criterion. A viewer who doesn’t have specialist knowledge won’t understand why you cut a sequence that takes only a few seconds, for example a man going from one room to another in a flat, but in another shot you let things roll for whole minutes without any different angles or close-ups… For example, like you did in your most recent film, THREE EXERCISES, where four people talking around a table are filmed from the same angle for about fifteen minutes. This is the kind of questions people ask. I think that when people ask this kind of questions they haven’t found the right position in which to sit. It’s very important how you sit when you watch a film and what your expectations are. Nobody enters the cinema inexperienced. He enters with all kinds of ideas about what cinema is, about what acting and imagery are. Even if things aren’t formulated clearly in his mind, he has reference points. There are films that he has liked a lot and consciously or unconsciously he tries to repeat the experience of encountering those films, and then he will criticise the films that are outside the boundaries of the model he has embraced. But if he genuinely makes the journey, he will realise that the films that at first bother or even exasperate him will in the end reshape his view of the cinema and maybe even the world. If a film bothers you it doesn’t necessarily mean it is a good film. In the collection of interviews Cassavetes gave to Ray Carney, he gives the following advice to young directors: “Do what you are, not what you want to be, not what you think you are. What you are is enough.” But there is a lot of work there, isn’t there? I mean: “Know thyself!” And later, in the making of LOVE STREAMS, he says that a director should set out from the premise that he knows nothing. The moment when he makes a film is the moment when he enters into a relationship with the cosmos. If you manage to preserve intact your ability to wonder, then there is a chance you will enter into resonance with the life taking place in front of the lens. I think that the ideal version for the filmgoer is similar to the ideal encounter. When I first Tribute to Cristi Puiu | 11
encounter a person, I look at him with affection and I am open to receive what he reckons would be best to give me. And I think that he will always do so from the best intentions... But, again, I’m not the best example... I deceive myself quite often... Anyway, if you are suspicious when you take your seat in the cinema, you will fail to encounter the film. If you sit down and you expect to be served up the cinema you’re familiar with, then you will always flee from unknown territory and you won’t have an encounter with the one who has a different view about life and cinema. What are you looking at when you encounter a person? - I don’t have any programme. I was brought up in a working-class district and there were all kinds of discussions about what kind of women you liked. Some liked blondes, others brunettes; some liked them skinny and with big tits. I never went in for that. But that’s not my own merit. It is just my structure: I don’t rely on phisical criteria. And when I like somebody, it happens because of a lot of mysterious reasons. So, when I meet a person, I’m eyes and ears. What about when an actor is auditioning? Exactly the same thing: I wait for him to speak to me, and if he starts “acting”, then I have a problem. When actors come to audition, I couldn’t be more open. I’m not saying I’m the most open man on the face of the earth, but I’m as open as this convention allows. Regardless of how I frame the situation, the actor, whoever he might be, will be conditioned by the fact that he is coming to an audition. He is coming to somebody who is going to “evaluate him”, which is terrible, awful. I take care to tell them all what I think about auditions, schools and exams, that I couldn’t give a shit about them, that they don’t matter, and “let’s see how we read this text.” But it would be childish to think that they will be relaxed after that. Some come to auditions to test their self-esteem. There are a lot of them, more than I can handle. Let me take the best example, at least in terms of your choices. What has Luminița Gheorghiu got that other actors haven’t got? A lot of things. I studied in Switzerland, and when I came back to Romania I found myself in a completely unfamiliar place. I wrote the screenplay for STUFF AND DOUGH with Răzvan Rădulescu, we submitted it to the National Cinematography Centre, it won, although we weren’t expecting it to win, and then came casting. I wanted very much that Luminița should play the mother of the main character, but I didn’t have the courage to phone her, because I was embarrassed. I had such great admiration for what she did in THE MOROMEȚI and I said to myself that she would never agree to be in a debut film. But my assistant, Stelian Stativă, said that that was childish, that all actors want to act… and so he phoned her. And that was how Luminița came to be in the film. And it was a joy to see her work… The way in which she relates to the cinema and to life, her curiosity and relaxed manner, her loyalty… It’s rare to have on your side a person you know will follow you to the ends of the earth. You don’t encounter such people every day. But it was also a bad thing, because my encounter with Luminița shaped my expectations. She imbued me with her way of being and I start having the same expectations from the other actors I met later on. Not all of them were loyal, not all of them were curious, not all of them were relaxed and prepared to go with me to the very end. And then I had great disappointments, because, as I’ve said, the only thing that interests me in cinema is the ineffable, the unrepeatable. And those people, the actors, caused me the greatest suffering… In what way? Betrayal, cowardice, fear, completely absurd reference points – “If I do this, what will my mother say?” or “What will my boyfriend say?” The actor’s craft has got nothing to do with your image of yourself, with preserving that image. On the contrary, it forces you endlessly to bring that image into discussion. When you, the actor, play Hamlet today and The Sozzled Citizen [from the play A Lost Letter by Ion Luca Caragiale] tomorrow, that is a perpetual questioning of your image. But most of them want to remain straitjacketed in an image the public has liked and applauded at a given moment. And so you end up with such terrible cases as Al Pacino playing Al Pacino, Depardieu playing Depardieu, and so on. When and why do they ossify? I think it’s when the plaudits come, the awards, the prizes… I don’t know how far actors are aware that praise, recognition and applause are poisoned chalices. According to the cliché the actor has to be an “empty vessel”. Do you agree with that? I’ve heard of that but I don’t know what it means. If by empty vessel you mean tabula
12 | Tribute to Cristi Puiu
rasa, then I don’t agree. When I tell actors: “I’d like us to obtain such and such,” they will answer only from the viewpoint of their own experience, their own life. So, you need the vessel to be as full as possible in order for there to be a change. I don’t know what happens in the theatre, but on the film set, the director’s only function is to say “no”. It functions like a series of traffic signs: no entry, turn right, and so on. That’s all the director can say. He can’t create your character for you, he can’t give you talent, he can’t make you be present. All he can do is be on the ball and say the things he thinks are important or necessary at a given moment. The things the director says are just as legitimate as those the actor says, but every dialogue needs to take place in a climate defined by trust, respect and admiration. Why admiration? Be it only because the person in front of you is alive. That is a big thing. Because some say: “But what has he done?” And maybe he hasn’t done anything noticeable. But isn’t enough that he is a human being? And all this is not coming from me but from Hal Hartley. In his film TRUST the woman arrives in the situation of saying to the man: “Yes, on the condition that you love me.” He says: “Yes, but on the condition that love means respect and admiration.” And she says: “Yes, but also trust.” And that seemed right to me. It’s the same relationship on the film set: it can’t happen without respect, admiration and trust. Tell me the name of a foreign actor who in your opinion hasn’t ossified. It’s very hard to say, especially given that I think an actor cannot do more than three separate roles. Why? Three, four… it’s a manner of speaking. Because it’s a very dangerous craft and if you don’t protect yourself, your brain will do it for you, and it won’t let you play around too much with your own identity. It protects you as soon as you choose your own roles – if you’re lucky and you’re a great enough actor to be able to choose your own roles, like De Niro, let’s say. And does De Niro play himself? I would say yes. After a certain point in his career? After a certain point in his career. From his career you can extract a few characters: Travis in TAXI DRIVER, Jake La Motta in RAGING BULL, the character in AWAKENINGS… And, please, notice that I’m talking about one of the greatest actors today... But when I say that an actor can play no more than three separate roles, I’m referring to the fact that in each role there exist the reverberations and promises of a possible universe, but these very rarely end up acquiring solid substance. And this happens because an actor’s life also continues outside the stage or the screen, and his brain does everything possible to protect that life. But this is good news: if you manage to play three separate roles in your career, that’s a big thing. As Géricault said: “If only I had created at least one painting in my life, but I did not create a single one…”. Whoever says Géricault is falsely modest is stupid. People live, love, do things. We all strive to do things… Even if we know that all we will leave behind are bibelots, with which, those that will come after us, will decorate their existence. Should the director feel affection for the characters? Of course, but it can’t be achieved by just pressing a button. I wouldn’t need more than two hours a day for the course of one week to explain to people what the film director’s craft is. Something exists without which the miracle of the encounter with the other on the film set could not take place, and then as a direct result the miracle in the cinema auditorium, when the viewer encounters the film. What I am talking about is love of people. And this can’t be taught in school and it can’t be learned. Either you have it or you don’t. If you don’t have it, maybe an event might happen to awaken you from your slumber. Maybe this is why I react violently to films in which there are characters that the director has condemned from the outset… This is connected to the fact that you don’t like fairy-tale characters of the prince and princess type… I’ve got a problem with the fact that they’re fixed, unchanging. The good part is that the reader brings nuances: he understands more from the story than the story seems to allow. But in reality, the minds that dreamed up the stories relied on the intelligence of the people that were going to listen to them. Those minds knew what Hitchcock would later discover, and namely that the viewer is more intelligent than the author. That’s what I
find edifying about the fairy tale, and I refer especially to the Romanian ones, because I’m more familiar with them.
camera, in my mind I went back to the people who have vanished from my life. I sought to enter into a dialogue with them, to hear them, in fact.
But people need the character who triumphs against all the odds… I don’t know how much they need that. What moves me in fairy tales is the extraordinary trust that their creators – or the communities in which they were invented – had in the reader or listener. The stories are starkly simplified if you compare them to the modern novel, for example, but none of the people reading it will reduce the fairy tale to the words from which it has been fashioned. They will immediately sense that behind it there is infinite richness. That’s one thing that’s been lost and which has been misunderstood by Disney and co. Disney films, apart from the fact that they’re propaganda films, have managed to hijack the identity of the fairy tale. Today, for most people, fairy tales are synonymous with Disney. I haven’t got a problem with fairy tales, but with the way in which they are passed on and the way in which children are trained to react to them. Without having done any research into it, I would like to believe that in the countryside, when parents or grandparents told a fairy tale to the children, the discussion afterwards was longer than the story. The encounter with the fairy tale didn’t end with “and they all lived happily ever after…” I don’t think the stories were told without interruptions – “why was that?” “what does that mean?” I say this because my daughters interrupt when I tell them fairy tales and because I used to interrupt my mother when she read them to me.
Why? It was the only thing that made sense to me at the time. All the other things seemed devoid of meaning. Those who have departed were the only one who could be a support and a partner to me, the one telling that dark story. The character is called Viorel. I wanted to give him a car number plate with the letters VIO, but that would have been tantamount to treating the viewer as an idiot. Because VIO is an anagram of IOV [= Job, in Romanian]. When I was writing the script, I kept thinking: “Who is this character?” I had to have a basis, otherwise the story would not have been worth telling. And little by little it became very clear to me that the character was an anti-Job. VIO. Understand? All that God took from him was his wife, following a divorce. That was all it took and Viorel slide downhill, to the bottom of hell. God keeps taking away from Job... And He is taking everything except his life. For Viorel it was only a divorce, but it was enough to tumble him into the eternal darkness.
Speaking of things that are beyond the story, which can’t be seen, why are you increasingly fascinated by silences? And you say you like Hitchcock, but you choose not to do closeups… I think that Hitchcock did them ironically, with distance; I don’t think he took them seriously. He knew it was a trick. I choose silence because of a question I always have in mind, probably from painting… If I look at the corner of this table, we have a coffee filter, some bottles of ink, a teaspoon, some envelopes and a host of other objects with no apparent connexion with each other. An inexpressive agglomeration. But if I keep on looking and I enter into a resonance with what is happening beneath my eyes, with these objects alien to each other, then at a given moment I will come to see them, and I will come to understand that they are telling the story of my life. And it will move me. And I will know exactly where to place the camera. And I will wait like a fisherman for life to spring into view. The question is: “what do you mean to say by that?” You look at things, but you don’t see them. You don’t see them! You don’t see them because you don’t register them. In order to register them, you have to look at them and give them time. The risk is that by making this journey you will end up weeping. Normally, you will avoid that; you will protect yourself. But if you look at the corner of this table today, and you look tomorrow, and you look after a while, at one point you will see it. You will see it! And then you will choose, because you have seen. This is what happens to me. Is this the explanation for the silences in AURORA? So that the viewer will register and become one with the character? I don’t know. That’s the viewer’s business. In AURORA there were a lot of problems because it was my first time in front of the camera and I asked myself a lot of questions about acting. I kept telling the actors that the only thing that counts is presence. And I asked myself how I could be present, and the only thing I was able to do, throughout the performance, was to go back to my own memory, to be in my own mind. And I thought of my father, who was dead, I thought of my grandfather, who was dead, of myself as child in my relationship with these people who were dead and who were close to me in the past. And who had vanished from my memory, because I go back to them more and more rarely. And the question arose: “why don’t I go back to them any more?” I travelled back into my memory, into my recollections if what my life around those people who loved me had probably been: parents, grandparents, brothers, uncles, aunts. Did you go back to them in order to be closer to the thought of death? No, absolutely not. It hasn’t got anything to do with death. The only valid pointer I gave the people behind the camera was: “the camera’s gaze should be that of a parent looking at his child who has just learned to walk.” You don’t look from a distance, because the child is always in danger of falling and breaking his teeth. You look at the child as if you are always on the point of catching him, picking him up, saving him. I told them: “His father died long ago, he is in heaven, he is looking at his child and he sees how he is moving towards perdition, but he cannot intervene.” And every time I was in front of the
Why did you decide to place the moment he decides to kill at a point before the film begins? Wasn’t Viorel’s fall a cinematic moment? I think the devil comes on tiptoes. So softly that you don’t realise it, let alone other people. So it’s not a single moment? I don’t think it’s a single moment. But does it occur before the film begins? The version I initially conceived and which was shown in Romania opens with him in the factory. It was very important that he should be in the factory, for various reasons. It’s all the symbolism contained in a factory: the world of the powerful man who creates objects, to which can be added the connotations acquired by factories under communism, with the exploited worker; the mendacious slogan about solidarity: “workers of the world…” And then there is the man-machine, man placed at the centre of the cosmos, omnipotent man, etc. It was in that space that Viorel’s encounter with the devil takes place at some point. In the version I sent to Cannes the moment with Viorel and Gina in bed seemed more important to me, because it centred the plot of the film on the idea of the couple. But that was a mistake. When the characters start to talk for the first time, the viewer encounters a story told by Gina, Viorel’s current partner. In Viorel’s mind, the story acts as a confirmation that he has to kill. As a sign. The story happened to me with my eldest daughter: when she was five, she came to me and said: “Daddy, when the hunter pulled Little Red Riding Hood’s grandmother out of the wolf ’s belly, she was naked wasn’t she?” “How could she be naked?” “But didn’t the wolf dress up in her clothes?” In my adult mind, the characters worked as symbols and my daughter took them literally. And she was the one who was right. In Viorel’s mind, the story acted as a confirmation, because his problem is connected with the identity of others, with lying, with what people say and what they do, with appearance/essence… But paradoxically, he slides down the slope of evil pushed by a higher thought, that of justice. At the police station, he says he shot his ex-wife’s notary, because it was too painful for him to say he was his wife’s lover. And, at a certain point in the film, he is pressing his stepfather not to wear his father raincoat anymore... Against this background of betrayal, he interprets the observation that comes from a child, connected to the fairy tale of Little Red Riding Hood, as a verdict coming from an angel: “The child, who is innocent, pure, says it.” And he falls. On that uncertain morning Viorel receives the confirmation. And as a result of a mistaken interpretation he chooses to become the “hunter”. Another thing that moves me is the story of the bag Viorel carries. I told Andreea Popa, one of the production designers who worked on the film: “I want Viorel always to be carrying a 1970s vinyl airline carryall. Find me something like that, but don’t let it be an Aeroflot or Air France one.” And Andreea came one morning and said: “I’ve found the bag you want. Don’t tell me you don’t like it, because I begged a man in the metro to let me buy it from him. I gave him the money and he put his things in a plastic bag.” And I said: “Alright, show it to me.” And that’s the bag in the film, with the number 64 on it. And I said: “This is the bag.” And then when I was doing the montage and I kept seeing 64, 64, 64, I looked it up on the Internet to see what else it meant. And there were a lot of things I didn’t know, and which overlapped not only with the character, but also what happens in AURORA. Tribute to Cristi Puiu | 13
What kind of things? Whenever I spoke to the crew about Viorel, I would say that he is a guy who lives in his own mind and who, not being prepared to negotiate through dialogue what he believes
What was it like for him to appear naked in the film? It was hard. When I filmed the scene when he wets himself, he was more or less clothed and there was a lot of other action going on in the shot. But at the end, when the nurses
about the world, is left with very few options: either he abandons the world by committing suicide or lives as a recluse in the mountains or tries to alter the world. And I said to them: “Look, for example, at how Nero burned down Rome, things that happen on the wider scale of history…”
undress the character for the operation, Fiscuteanu said he needed to drink a palinka. And he drank half a litre of palinka. And then, because I thought the scene was a difficult one, I asked his wife to play the role of one of the nurses, and for her to wash him… And that is how Fiscuteanu’s wife came to be in the film, at the end. The brunette nurse is his wife.
Didn’t Nero burn Rome in the year 64? Yes, I saw that afterwards: Nero burned Rome in 64. Then there is a host of other more disturbing things. In the Dictionnaire Infernal there are 64 demons. And I started to feel a little afraid. Another thing I hadn’t thought of is that there are 64 squares on a chessboard… You attracted the real… Or there was a risk of attracting the real. In fact you don’t attract it. When you work, you begin to resonate. The things are there; they are present. You are just the messenger. It may happen that things go places you don’t want them to go… The things exist in a potential universe and you risk bringing them into ours… But you don’t bring them; you articulate them. They are told to you and you pass them on, to the people who gather in the cinema… I know what you are saying; it is what I tell people close to me: “Don’t summon evil, don’t summon the devil.” Something like what you are saying happened to me during THE DEATH OF MR LĂZĂRESCU. At one point, when Lăzărescu arrives at one of the hospitals, the nurse from the ambulance goes into the doctor’s room and leaves him in the corridor. He is on the stretcher, and in the distance the relative of a patient is running and crying. My mother and my father were among the extras. And I said to Fiscuteanu (the actor who played Lăzărescu): “In ten or twenty seconds you’ll hear crying, lift yourself up on your elbow, turn around, and look at my father.” “But why should I look at him?” “Because I want you to. Just look at him and then lie back down.” Fiscuteanu wasn’t very convinced about what I was asking him to do, but he did it. That was in 2004. In 2006, Fiscuteanu died, and in 2007 my father died. And I thought a lot about that scene… I constantly think about it… But does it mean anything? Does that event have any meaning or is it just my need for meaning that dreams up meanings? What if it is just fear that is to blame. Fiscuteanu died of cancer. Did he have it during the filming? He told me he didn’t. His wife was evasive. She said: “It’s not important whether he’s ill. He had cirrhosis, he treated it with herbs, he is not very well. But if he doesn’t act, he’ll be very ill. This role is very important to him…” And she tried very hard to persuade him. He told me he wanted to play the role, but then he said: “You don’t know how many times I wanted to leave the set.” It wasn’t very easy to work with him; he was a very, very, very stubborn man. But I am too: as a result, there was friction, but we didn’t fall out. We’d stop filming and discuss each millimetre of the text. For example, there’s a shot when he is taken out of the ambulance, he has to be taken into a hospital, and the camera was up close to him. And he had a very tearful face. And I asked: “Mr Fiscuteanu, what are you acting here?” And he said: “Puiu, I listened to you, and now I’m listening to myself. A man senses when he’s dying.” “I don’t think he senses it.” “Yes, he does! Listen to me!” “Alright, let’s say you’re right, but my character doesn’t sense it, and so stop playing the victim.” He was mixing things up and he would have killed the character. Exactly like Frank Capra said: “I thought it was drama when the actors wept, but later I realised it is drama when the audience weep.” It’s as if you were underestimating the audience… Yes, it’s as if you were stealing their hope. Was the deterioration of the way Lăzărescu pronounces words, including his own name, in the script? Yes, and it was very difficult; we worked very hard at that. We went to Luminița Gheorghiu’s husband, who is a dentist, and he made something for Fiscuteanu to put in his mouth, so that he wouldn’t be able to articulate properly. He had to slur and to articulate his words wrongly. Did he pick it up quickly? No, it was hard.
14 | Tribute to Cristi Puiu
What did you drink to be able to appear naked in AURORA? I didn’t drink anything. Because you too have said it was difficult to get undressed… Yes, it was very hard for me, but I did it because it was about a man who had to be shown as naked as his mother made him. Behold the man! And not a man to be put in a photograph, as the people who make adverts do: the perfect body… Man is beautiful warts and all. If you show nudity for nudity’s sake, you’re on the wrong path. I think we grant it an importance it doesn’t possess. It’s a cultural residue. People wear clothes, don’t they? Why is nudity beautiful only when we’re talking about the bodies of ephebes or nymphs? Why isn’t it beautiful when we’re talking about the nudity of the man on the street? Of course it was hard for me to do it, because I’m shy. I’m not a nudist, that’s how shy I am. And I know that shyness, in this case, is questionable at the very least. But in AURORA it’s not a question of that, but of framing an image of man in his most intimate intimacy. Focussed on his body, examining his body, soaping himself, bent like a question mark over his own sex… The story in AURORA is the story of a man focussed on himself. It is the story of insanity, of absolute madness, when nothing and nobody other than you exists. He intervenes in the history of others and in his own history with the ease lent by his being positioned at the centre of his own mind. You were saying that there are two options when you don’t succeed in reconciling yourself with the world: either you withdraw to the mountains or you alter the world, in this case through murder. Have you ever considered the option of withdrawing from the world, for example by becoming a monk? Yes, of course. I think we all do it. Of course I have thought about it. In any case, it’s an exercise in which I have always come up against an obstacle: solitude without books, solitude without music, without anything, without the possibility of finding refuge, or hiding away. Even in an empty room it is hard to want to be alone with your own mind. Because probably not even your mind wishes to be alone with you. The story in Aurora is also the story of the author. For that reason, the plot of the film is altered if the viewer looks at the character as an author. I don’t think it’s accidental that the same word is used for the author of a film, the author of a novel, and the author of a crime. Criminals intervene in history the same as novelists and filmmakers do, except that the latter do so in a soft way. A filmmaker says: “the world is not like that, this is how it is or how it ought to be…” What status of existence do you give those imagined worlds, in comparison with reality? I think the distinction is made sooner for administrative reasons… in other words, knowing on what shelf of history films should be placed. Or perhaps we can’t even see the world except through the labels we put on things… And so I don’t think the discussion about the real/reality/realism is a serious one. It sets out from the statement that says an objective reality exists, regardless of how we relate to it, regardless of our perceptions. I don’t think things are like that. As far as art is concerned, I don’t think realism exists. Or else everything is realism. Because we can see that there are works whose substance is mainly drawn from the world outside the author’s mind – and then we term them realist, naturalist, etc. – and works whose substance is mainly drawn from inside the author’s mind – and then we call them surrealist, oneiric, fantastic, etc. But even if the things that come from your mind and your imagination can’t be superposed upon what you see with your eyes, what you can touch and feel, they nonetheless belong to your mind, and your mind exists in this world, in this reality we always speak of and regard as being objective. You know, this discussion connected to reality is connected with a question that somebody once put to me: why do I make fictional rather than documentary films. The thing that interests me in cinema – I don’t know whether I have mentioned this – is intimacy. Although it might sound strange, you can’t obtain intimacy using a cinematic technique contiguous with observational documentary, because once the camera is there, the peo-
ple in front of it alter their behaviour. The only way you can document intimacy is by using the imagination. Paradoxically, the imagination helps you to construct the real intimacy that you then record using the camera. Although I believe that the imagination
relate to the world? Is her gaze different? I posed the question like that because I think that this it could be possible without the dramatic structure.
is the word we use to describe that resonance that makes out of us messengers. Intimacy has nothing to do with a man and a woman in bed. As we have been talking here now, we have constructed a kind of intimacy, without intending to. We have been talking about things we don’t display on our faces. The voice recorder functions like a film camera. It is an external observer, and I am talking to you in a certain way, taking into account certain demands of the Romanian language, because I know that what I say will be included in a text that will say certain things about me. But that text will say what I have chosen to say, and with great care. But I am much more than the way I’m talking now with you. Because I choose to say certain things and not to say others, to what extent am I untrue? I’m not to such an extent as might appear at first sight. My brain is also present at this discussion and is trying to protect me. When a film says something about our world, it is sooner the result of a sort of anthropological research carried out by the filmmaker using the film camera as a scalpel. But above all it says that the ineffable - the filmmaker unconsciously catches, allowing it to breathe inside his film - is not telling us just the story of this world. So, I’m asking myself, how reasonable is for us to speak of reality?
Would you be tempted to make a silent film, for this reason? I’m not tempted by silent films or films without stories. For me, the two go together. There are teachers at film schools who talk about cinema in these terms: “cinema doesn’t mean dialogue, it doesn’t mean stories…” But I don’t think it’s like that. Although what is said matters, it is the way in which it is said that counts for me. It is a question of the way in which the actor inserts himself into the character, into that highly concrete world. It’s not a fiction. If this happens, he can do anything: say “Hello” or “To be or not to be”, drink a glass of water, slay a dragon. If the actor inserts himself and exists in a character in that precise world in which the film grows, then as a result a door will open in the mind of the viewer. But acting is not like riding a bicycle. The same as any other human activity, acting is connected to what Steinhardt said about Christians: to be a Christian means starting from scratch every morning. Of course this is terrifying for most of us, because we choose to think that we learn and assimilate every lesson immediately and once and for all. Like riding a bicycle… But it’s not like that. Every morning you have to start from scratch. Because our mind keeps protecting our selves and it’s pushing its own agenda. Because the good deed you performed yesterday doesn’t count today. What you did well today won’t count tomorrow, and so on. Every morning you have to start from scratch… And there is something else: if you don’t start from scratch, all kinds of ready-made thoughts will devour your mind and gradually end up replacing it.
How do you reconcile real time with the very limited time you have in which to tell the story? Every story distorts because it is told after the fact. How do you place yourself inside the story, while remaining outside it? During the shooting and on film things happen that make me vibrate in a certain highly specific way. In a way so specific that it’s not something that can be found in any other encounter possible in this world. I don’t know who I am or what I am exactly, and nor do I know what it means not to know or whether the question is worth asking, but from time to time it happens that I encounter that which cannot be put into words, and that is sufficient for me. If you like, it is the criterion of truth for me. Resonance is the closest word. There is no diagram I can put down on paper and serve up to those interested in cinema. Very many of the people I’ve worked with have been taken by surprise when they saw me getting moved by things that seem to be so common, so banal. That’s why I keep on asking myself: Does cinema exists before pressing the REC button? Many directors of photography I’ve worked with place a very clear distance between who they are and what they do. And what they do is not who they are. Their performance has to impress, has to be grandiose. And has to have a function. An identifiable one. And, usually, this function is having more to do with money and fame than with filmmaking. It is not about testifying, it is about falsifying. But it is not just them, if this can help... I know a bunch of film directors who share exactly the same vision... Even worse, they are ready to feed all the propagandas, no matter the colour of the flag... It’s linked to what you were saying earlier, that people want confirmations. They want confirmations of their power, of the control they have over their miserable life. But we control nothing. And that is a viewpoint that bewilders most people… They have the feeling that they are losing their soul if they let loose. In fact it is only when you free yourself of that illusory control that you gain. Then you will see. And you will hear. And you will get in contact with your neighbour. And you will be alive... We can’t see the world because we focus our attention on our own bellybuttons. But what interests me is to what extent we can manage to integrate the statement I know that I do not know within a text, without it being stated as such. In what way are things constructed to allow you to capture other dimensions, the ones that are connected to approximation, the provisory, the perishable, the transient? I observe that the world is incomplete, that there are all kinds of temptations. And if you come to capture on celluloid at least fragments of it, this sensation of the world’s imperfection, and if the viewer then turns up with his “dewormed” brain, then something might occur when he encounters this provisory state, this approximation, this confusion… Something might happen to make the viewer encounter himself. Beyond cinema and everything else, I think that this is one of the faults of our age: we flee as fast as our legs can carry us from everything that reminds us that we are human and that we make wrong choices. How can you capture hesitation on celluloid? The hesitation of mind, not that of a gesture, which is visible for all to see. How do you capture on film the fact that a man is in a quandary? Let’s say this is how the film starts, with a man in a quandary. How do you film it? Does he say something or not say anything? In what way? These are the questions I asked myself as a student. Let’s say the scene opens with a woman. Is there anything there, beside the lines or the way she is dressed, is there something to tell us whether she is a mother or not? Is there a specific way in which mothers
Let’s finish on that note: you start from scratch every morning. Yes, that’s how I think it is. Every morning you have to start from scratch. Mihnea Măruţă is a Romanian freelance journalist. Born in 1969, he began with the media in 1990, as a reporter for a weekly newspaper called “NU” (No), founded by a group of students shortly after the Romanian revolution. He then worked for several local and national newspapers. He was editor-in-chief for two of the most important Romanian daily newspapers, “Cotidianul” (The Daily) and “Adevărul” (The Truth). He has a degree in Philosophy and he is passionate about new ideas, coming from literature, movies and... football. He is married, has three daughters and lives in Cluj-Napoca, the city which hosts Transylvania International Film Festival (TIFF).
1) Alexandru Paleologu (1919-2005) - Romanian writer, essayist and diplomat, descendent of a nobiliary family with roots in the Byzantine Empire, political prisoner from 1959 to 1964. 2) Aniţa Nandriş-Cudla (1904-1986) - a simple Romanian peasant born in the Bukovina region (now split between Ukraine and Romania). After the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, she and her three children were among the 13.000 Romanians from that region to be deported by the Soviet authorities in the Gulag beyond the Polar Circle. She returned home after 20 years and wrote her memories, where she never accuses anybody. The book could be published only after the 1989 Romanian revolution and received a Romanian Academy prize. 3) Elisabeta Rizea (1912-2003) - Romanian peasant, one of the symbols of the anticommunist resistance. Because she helped the group of partisans from her village, she was arrested, tortured and executed 12 years in prison. 4) Gavril Vatamaniuc (1924-2012) - leader of an anticommunist group of Romanian partisans who activated in the Bukovina region between 1949 and 1955. He was caught and stayed in prison until the 1964 general amnesty of political prisoners. 5) Nicolae Steinhardt (1912-1989) - Romanian writer and essayist of Jewish origins, political prisoner from 1959 to1964. He turned to the Christian Orthodox faith while in jail and became a monk in 1980. His prison memories, “The Diary of Happiness”, were published in 1990 and influenced a whole generation. 6) Petre Ţuţea (1902-1991) - Romanian philopher, economist and right wing politician, political prisoner from 1958 to 1964. 7) Arsenie Papacioc (1914-2011) - Romanian Orthodox monk, called “the Patriarch of Dobrudja”. Dobrudja is the Romanian region between the Danube and the Black Sea. 8) Ştefan Agopian (born in 1947) - Romanian writer and publicist. 9) Mateiu Caragiale (1885-1936) - Romanian writer and armory historian, son of the playwright Ion Luca Caragiale. 10) Lucian Pintilie (born in 1933) - Romanian film and theatre director, living in France since 1975.
Tribute to Cristi Puiu | 15
1
6
2
3
4
5
7
8
1 with my father at the seaside, during the ‘74 summer holiday. 2 with my mother, end of ‘67 or beginning of ‘68. 3 with my sister close to Santa-Claus, in december ‘70. 4 a day before the first school day of my life, 14th of september 1973. 5 I became member of the “Organization of the Pioneers”, autumn 1974. 6 with my brother, sometime in ‘71. 7 with my sister, sometime in ‘71. 8 a show at the kindergarten, in ‘72 or ‘73.
16 | Tribute to Cristi Puiu
Tribute to Cristi Puiu | 17
1
4
5
2
7
6 3 8
1 with my brother and my sister, in the summer of ‘86. 2 with my brother and my sister, in the summer of ‘77. 3 my brother - a photo I took in the winter of ‘95. 4 during my military service, in ‘89. 5 Anca, my aunt from England, beginning of the 70’s. 6 my father’s parents, beginning of the 90’s. 7 a photo my brother took of me in the summer of ‘92. 8 with my brother and friends, the summer of ‘87.
18 | Tribute to Cristi Puiu
Tribute to Cristi Puiu | 19
20 | Tribute to Cristi Puiu
1
2 7
6
3 4 5
8
1 with my daughter, Smaranda, in 2000. 2 with Smaranda in the summer of ‘94. 3 Zoe, our little daughter, in 2011. 4 Zoe’s tights. 5 my wife, Anca, with our two daughters: Smaranda and Ileana. 6 Anca and Smaranda in ‘94. 7 Bucharest 2007. 8 with Smaranda, Ileana and Zoe, January 2012.
Tribute to Cristi Puiu | 21
22 | Tribute to Cristi Puiu
6 1
2 8
3
4 7 5
1 with my daughter, Ileana, on the set of “Aurora”, december 2009. 2 Bucharest, January, 2011. 3 with Ion Fiscuteanu, on the set of “The Death of Mr. Lazarescu”, 2004. 4 on the set of “Cigarettes and Coffee”, 2003. 5 with Luminita Gheorghiu, on the set of “The Death of Mr. Lazarescu”, 2004. 6 Bucharest, February 2011. 7 on the set of “The Death of Mr. Lazarescu”, 2004. 8 with Smaranda, on the set of “Cigarettes and Coffee”, 2003.
Tribute to Cristi Puiu | 23
24 | Tribute to Cristi Puiu