Ruxandra Cesereanu

Babeş-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania

RuxCes@yahoo.com

 

 

Dystopian Reminiscences in the Romanian Contemporary Film

(Miserabilist Stances in the Films of Mircea Daneliuc, Lucian Pintilie and Cristi Puiu)

 

 

Abstract: This study analyzes the dystopian reminiscences outlined in the Romanian contemporary film, by exploring the cinematic work of three directors belonging to different generations (Mircea Daneliuc, Lucian Pintilie and Cristi Puiu), who assumed, to a greater or a lesser extent, the tenets of miserabilist neorealism – an “ism” that gained currency in Romania after the collapse of the communist regime.

Keywords: Romanian Contemporary Film; Neorealism; Naturalism; Miserabilism; Mircea Daneliuc; Lucian Pintilie; Cristi Puiu; Topos.

 

 

There is an undeniable dystopian component in the Romanian cinema produced after the collapse of the communist regime, even though it does not necessarily represent the option of the majority film producers and even though there is a visible difference from the responses that dystopian art generated in communism: allegory, parable, symbols and metaphors have well-nigh disappeared or, in any case, they have surely diminished and become less frequent, being replaced by a direct, blunt, neorealist discourse. At certain levels of the perspectives on marginality, the discourse is dystopian and miserabilist (highly naturalistic, but also prone to caricature). It is a discourse that marked, within less than a decade after the overthrow of the Ceaușescu regime, both Romanian literature (fiction, in particular, but also poetry) and the autochthonous cinema. These two forms of art have mutually influenced one another, albeit partially: while contemporary film has not infrequently assumed a narrative stance on all manner of acute and squalid poverty (human, economic, social or political), contemporary fiction has often assumed a cinematic style of narration.

The critics who have voiced, in more or less ample studies, their opinions on the miserabilist strand in Romanian literature include Ion Simuț, Mihai Zamfir, Dan C. Mihăilescu, Daniel Cristea-Enache and others. They have highlighted several key elements in the new realist post-communist literature: sordid pessimism, furious cynicism, the vulgar grotesque, existential nausea, the cruelty of perception, a penchant for everyday minimalism, a style steeped in slang or in defiant jargon, post-communist neorealism being grafted, in any case, on a neoexpresionist undercurrent. It is as if Louis-Ferdinand Céline had been reclaimed and reassumed as a model in the neorealist Romanian literature, but in a post-communist context (as Mihai Zamfir has insightfully pointed this out!). The human, social, economic and moral morass and the sheer amount of poverty under communism contaminated the perspective and vision of Romanian post-communist films, bringing to the fore lumpen characters, who are portrayed through magnifying lenses. This is the truly unique and innovative feature of films produced in the post-communist period, which dismantle the fabricated, artificial depiction of heroism in communist films. Something has radically changed: reality or neoreality has been zoomed in with a detailed, unhurried gaze, in slow motion, marked by a proneness for orality.

Contemporary Romanian film (the new cinema or the new wave) has already been the subject of extensive analysis, in synthesis books of considerable impact, authored  by Mihail Fulger, Alex Leo Șerban, Andrei Gorzo, Mircea Deaca and Doru Pop (in chronological order). In addition to these, there have been published several collective volumes, with essays on the films produced by the most outstanding Romanian directors of the third millennium.

Alex Leo Șerban, for instance, describes the directors of the new wave as “angry neorealists”[1] who cultivate an “unembellished, shocking, effective minimalism.”[2] Șerban points out the affinities between the minimalism displayed by the Romanian cinema and the Italian neorealism from the aftermath of World War II, but he uses minimalism in a technical sense, considering that the most appropriate term would be Romanian neorealism.[3] Alex Leo Șerban actually legitimizes the syntagm New Romanian Cinema (NRC).

When undertaking a panoramic or focal overview of the films produced by the new directors, Andrei Gorzo refuses such terms as minimalism, realism or miserabilism, for he regards these concepts as being “too general.” He also rejects the possibility (even if only symbolic) that the directorial brand sanctioned by Cristi Puiu (who is considered the reinventor of the Romanian cinema and the most poignant adherent of neorealism, and whose approach to this aesthetic trend has become a brand) might be derived from Lucian Pintilie, Mircea Daneliuc or Alexandru Tatos.[4] The definition that Gorzo gives of the New Romanian Cinema is dyadic. From a stylistic perspective, the NRC is about “an aesthetic formula predicated on the elevation of certain features of dramatic and directorial style to the rank of norms.”[5] From a biological (and chronological) viewpoint, the NRC stands for a new generation of filmmakers[6] (born between 1967 and 1975). Andrei Gorzo makes a nuanced and precise distinction between the NRC and the Romanian New Wave, as follows: the NRC is umbilically linked to several “stylistic premises shared by a number of films that have enjoyed international success. As a result of this success, these premises have come to represent the mainstream style in contemporary Romanian cinema,” while the Romanian New Wave is simply “a generation of successful filmmakers.”[7]

Doru Pop, the author of a synthetic and, at the same time, analytical foray into the new Romanian film directors, written directly in English, considers that their major influences go beyond Italian neorealism, including the New British Cinema, the French New Wave and the new generations of filmmakers in Central and Eastern Europe.[8] Unlike Șerban and Gorzo, Pop prefers the Romanian New Wave formula (even though he states that these filmmakers disavow this syntagm), because he perceives and legitimizes it from a philosophical-cinematic perspective.[9] Still, like Andrei Gorzo, Doru Pop emphasizes the divide between the Romanian New Wave directors and their predecessors, who have produced realistic films in the miserabilist vein (Mircea Daneliuc, Dan Pița, Nae Caranfil). The explanation he provides is different from that suggested by Gorzo. Thus, the Romanian New Wave does not depict “subhumans” (even though they are antiheroes) and does not exaggerate the miserabilist, neonaturalist effect, but presents ordinary, marginal people (antiheroes), who are held captive in a brutalizing quotidian routine.[10] The Romanian New Wave directors resort to a painterly naturalism, but reject dark naturalism, that is, miserabilism, resisting the hyperbolic caricature and grotesqueness of Daneliuc’s or Caranfil’s films, for instance.[11] An entire chapter in Doru Pop’s book tackles antiheroes and the notion of marginality, but I have limited myself here to some general considerations, relevant for the case study I am investigating. For Doru Pop too (as well as for Gorzo), Cristi Puiu is the symptomatic director of the new autochthonous cinema.

For Florin Poenaru, one of the theorists who espouses an activist, ideological stance on the Romanian contemporary film, the neorealism of the new Romanian cinema is not perceived in thematic or stylistic terms, but from a technical, strategic viewpoint, as a cognitive artifact: what matters is not necessarily the narrative the film conveys, but its imagery and “its possibilities not just to reflect reality, but also to conceive and problematize it.”[12]

 

*

 

In the sphere of literature, the critic who defines miserabilism most accurately is a miserabilist writer himself. In 2010, Dan Lungu published a text entitled “Carnet de scriitor” [“A Writer’s Scrapbook”] in the review Bucureștiul Cultural. One of the subsections of this text, which outlines a most welcome synthesis of the phenomenon under analysis, is entitled “‘Miserabilism’ or Post-traumatic Pessimism.” In Dan Lung’s view, post-communist Realism is explained and described as “post-socialist, post-traumatic, de-ideologized.”[13] Although Dan Lungu’s text was published after the release of the three films I will deal with in this concise study, pointing out the presence of miserabilist dystopian reminiscences in the works of three directors belonging to different generations (the films The Conjugal Bed, directed by Mircea Daneliuc, Terminus Paradis, directed by Lucian Pintilie, and The Death of Mr. Lăzărescu, directed by Cristi Puiu), Lungu’s argument is acutely and directly related to the impact that the new Romanian film has had both abroad and, via a boomerang effect, inside Romanian culture and on the contemporary mentality.

What are the features of miserabilist reality, in the opinion (not just artistic-literary, but also sociological) of Dan Lungu? The list of these features is condensed: “caricature, mockery, sarcasm, caustic humor, the absurd or the bizarre.” From a social point of view, the focus is on marginal humans and “larval existence,” some of the characters being “mutants.” The style is rudimentary, wallowing in slang, but it suits the world of these antiheroes (as Dan Lungu dubs these marginal, peripheral characters). Perceived from outside, this world is accused and criticized, but viewed from within, it is pervaded by the natural atmosphere of post-communism. What strikes the spectator (reader) is the directness of the style and essence of this world, its antielitism and minimalism, as Dan Lungu insists. These antiheroes are outcasts in society, depicted face-forward, without labyrinthine stylistic derailments or baroque entanglements. They are part of a post-communist realism which mocks communist realism through its very peripheral character, through its overall response of – literal, not philosophical or aesthetic – existential nausea. The abolition of censorship after the collapse of the communist regime has allowed this, but has also engendered a tendency to recuperate the mundane quotidianness of existence (at the level of vision, language, action and style). Dan Lungu believes that the miserabilist realism of Romanian post-communist literature is part of a natural process of “lexical democratization.”

In the previous paragraph, I synthesized and used the entire theory about miserabilism assumed by Dan Lungu, as I fully agree with his approach and demonstration. I do have, however, some polemical takes on certain ideas he advocates. Thus, social miserabilism (materialized through poverty, disgust, despair) also existed during communism and was actually extended into Romanian post-communism, even though communism prohibited explorations of this neorealism. The ghettoization of the population in communism also contaminated post-communism, as a direct legacy of the previous regime. Excessive references to the peripheral and to the marginal also existed under communism, but they did not become key issues in art, being allowed extremely rarely to become part of the accepted social landscape and only in order to suffer amendments and penalties (in films like The Reconstruction, for instance). De facto, the state of peripherality, marginalization and ghettoization was perpetuated from the previous regime straight into post-communism, which has been marked by a collapse of prudish or protective screens. The intimate (domestic), sordid space that is constantly present in the Romanian post-communist film is, with or without quotation marks, a remnant of the Gulag, a degrading, suffocating, punitive communist coop. In other words, the new wave does not invent ghettoization, the lumpen state and abjection, but extracts them from behind a screen.

 

*

 

The Conjugal Bed (1993) is one of the first films produced after the collapse of the communist regime that is permeated by a miserabilist outlook and style. The emphasis is laid on a space that is almost abject, a space that morally encapsulates the spirit of the transition period, at the outset of post-communism (and does not necessarily reveal the poor souls of those inhabiting that space). The cramped, Babelian apartment in The Conjugal Bed is an alienated and alienating, pathologized microcosm: there is no difference between the bedroom, the bathroom and the kitchen, as the entire place is infected by an immediately apparent promiscuity. There is no longer any distinction between the closet and the kitchen or the bed. Everything is exposed in plain sight, poured out, vitiated; doors do not close, squalor and promiscuity moving from one room to another. Daneliuc insists on filming the pathetic and damaged furniture for a globalizing effect: the theater where Vasile, the protagonist (excellently played by Gheorghe Dinică), is the director proves to be yet another squalid, dilapidated space, just like the apartment back home. The damaged toilet at the cinema is the very image of post-communistRomania, which was through and through dependent on the vicissitudes of communism: overflowing toilets, spilling filthy, liquefied excremental matter. The furniture (the table, the chairs, the wardrobe) is also used to provoke the abortion ofCarolina, Vasile’s pregnant wife (he is a man who pathologically invents this type of aggression). Thus, the furniture becomes a forceps, a polymorphous instrument of abortion (even though it is botched attempt at that). The same apartment is adapted to become a shabby film studio for a porn film, the conjugal bed serving as the focal point of this plateau of concentrated kitsch. Contaminated by the grimy space that is instrumented in a pornographic sense, Vasile tries to hang himself, filming everything on the apartment-set; everything takes the form of hemorrhaging psycho-human effluvia: Carolina’s macabre hanging attempt, the nails driven into the head of his pregnant wife (who failed to abort her child with the help of the furniture) and, finally, Vasile’s concrete and definitive suicide by hanging, behind the stage in the cinema. Fifteen years later, the same apartment will host the grotesque intercourse of Decebal (the half-wit child of Vasile andCarolina, who could not be aborted) and the prostitute Stela (the woman for whom Vasile had been willing to give everything up).

Space is essential in Daneliuc’s films, because it stands for the psyché: not only at the individual, but also at the collective level. Romania, freshly plunged into post-communism, is like Vasile’s grotesque apartment: dependent on or downright addicted to pestilence, a topos that is irretrievably contaminated by the sordidness of communism. It is not by chance that the motto of the film The Conjugal Bed is taken from Petre Ţuţea, a skeptical or even cynical mind of the transition, as well as a former political prisoner during the first stage of Romanian communism: “we are not lost as a people. Perhaps God will have mercy on us and kick us in the ass.” The squalid nature of space is not necessarily restricted to The Conjugal Bed, because Daneliuc also used memorable sequences of this type in a few films he made under communism: the autistic, cramped dorm rooms or the restrictive cabins in The Cruise (1981), or the dilapidated, damp hospital wards reeking of liquefied burial chambers in the cinematic parable Glissando.

With Terminus Paradis (1998), Lucian Pintilie also adopts a miserabilist perspective (even though he is the senior of the Romanian directors, with a different background and tastes than his younger fellow directors or even than the eternal rebel Daneliuc). True, the grotesque slum in Why Are the Bells Ringing, Mitică? (1981) did not necessarily portray the slums of Caragiale, but Romania itself as a communist slum, and the sordid and pathetic rooms in The Oak (1992) – be they hospitals, apartments or houses – bluntly charted the restrictive and punitive space of the infested Gulag during the communist period. In Terminus Paradis, however, Pintilie places a hyperbolic bet on miserabilism, having been catalyzed by the script compiled by three prose writers, two of whom were already major authors adhering to the miserabilist strand: Răzvan Popescu and Radu Aldulescu. To these was added Răzvan Rădulescu, who, while being a diversified and nuanced writer, is also known as a neorealist screenwriter (an adjunct of the directors belonging to the New Romanian Cinema).

In my opinion, Terminus Paradis is the glue and the link between The Conjugal Bed directed by Daneliuc, and the end of miserabilism, represented by The Death of Mr. Lăzărescu, Cristi Puiu’s famous film. The life of Mitu Cafanu (the main character, played remarkably by Cornel Cașcaval) is umbilically connected to his dilapidated, bidonville-type apartment. The deterioration is extreme and it is filmed thoroughly as such. Everything is peripheral, the apartment is barren, there are the remains of a dismantled kitchen and the block itself is located in a Bucharest slum. And yet, up to a point, this gregarious and damaged space is also a space of shared love between Mitu and Norica, however squalid it may appear. In fact, all the other topoi in the film (Gili’s pub, the rooms in the barracks, Gili’s home, the escape wagon) are just as abandoned (orphaned), filthy and destitute. Mitu is a swineherd, but he is not contaminated by his job; instead, the all-encompassing, generalized contagion comes from the restrictive, punitive, stifling and rotten space. Contagion comes from the decomposed marginality that has invaded everything. Through this film, Lucian Pintilie manages to adapt perfectly, in thematic and stylistic terms, to post-communism and even to miserabilism, regardless of whether he does so out of a desire for competition against his younger confreres, or simply from an expert directorial instinct (professionally trained and armored).

With a script written by Cristi Puiu and Răzvan Rădulescu and directed by the former, The Death of Mr. Lăzărescu (2005) represented the end to miserabilism along the lines initiated by The Conjugal Bed, on the theme I examine in this text (the film is, however, multifaceted and much more complicated, including in meta-cinematic terms, than the theme I approach here). First, the kitchen is cosmic (or ironically and grotesquely raised to cosmic dimensions). It belongs to Dante Remus Lăzărescu (played with exceptional talent by Ioan Fiscuteanu) and encapsulates the banal life of a man who is suffocated by objects and things, because he is alone, isolated, an “orphan,” without umbilical cords to connect him to the world in which he lives and which has forgotten, or even abandoned him. He is an aborted character, in the sense that he is expelled from the world, before actually dying. The telephone itself is found in this microcosm of the kitchen, which has been turned into a boudoir, a bathroom, and a dining room (up to a point – as all the other spaces are secondary). Cristi Puiu’s directorial gaze is obsessed intentionally (tendentiously) with things and leftovers, as if they were the main characters – which they actually are, because they anticipate the cadaverous state of the protagonist and because they condense an agonizing death and presage disintegration. The furniture is indigent and anguishing, deliberately cramped and punitive; in the kitchen, man has become an object alongside all the other objects. Then the bedroom takes over the topographical role and becomes the world itself, more specifically, an adaptedBabel tower: sheets, chaotic rags and linen layers, debris and some cats (instead of people). The state of the human being (the title character) as an inanimate object is preserved in the psychopomp ambulance and in the dehumanizing hospitals. The bureaucracy is the new Gulag, the carceral universe resting on the grotesque mechanisms of the administration and in the absurdity of the medical institution. With Cristi Puiu, a detail can become the focus of a moral accusation, with multiple ramifications; the repetitiveness of details (the kitchen and the bedroom are filmed using leitmotif and counterpoint techniques) and the repetitiveness of mundane objects (man himself having been reified) outline a decomposed space, in which even the psyche (or the soul) is decomposing, trapped in a pre-corpse state. Cristi Puiu demonstratively portrays this process of decay, teaching a lesson on the anatomy of decomposition.

The domestic space, the room, the apartment are also obsessive in Aurora (where the script was written just by Cristi Puiu, and where he is not only the director but also the leading actor); here, Viorel’s unfinished house is the most direct way to indicate autism, the character’s mental disintegration. Viorel’s wandering through apartments and houses (some unfinished, others crammed with objects or people, overcrowded, as their owners are upstarts) or his roaming in the streets, through warehouses and basements chart a map of his spiritual hell, deliberately explored, especially since the protagonist is also a living corpse from an emotional point of view: his breakdown has already taken place, and he is an “ghoul” who wanders through the world to punish the living who have hurt him or downright “killed” him within.

Andrei Gorzo defines Cristi Puiu as a follower of Bazianism and of the reality principle,[14] but disavows the qualifiers minimalist and minimalism (considered inappropriate and fallacious) for a film like The Death of Mr. Lăzărescu, a complex production that problematizes and subtly reinvents the cinema.[15]

Doru Pop refuses the concrete (and applied) idea of miserabilism as a label for the films of the new Romanian directors; instead, he detects in their works a major dose of deliberate black humor. For Pop, miserabilism was a dominant feature of the autochthonous cinema only during the period immediately following the collapse of the communist regime (in Mircea Daneliuc’s films, for instance), when vulgarity and extreme violence were central means and themes.[16] In his analysis of the iconography of the kitchen space and of the eating process (filmed in ultra-slow motion, sometimes) in relatively recent Romanian films, Doru Pop believes that they outline a poetics of the New Wave predicated on the retrieval of ordinary and small human gestures (considered ignoble or petty in the previous period).[17]

I am not the only analyst who has drawn attention to Cristi Puiu’s insistence, in The Death of Mr. Lăzărescu, on a space diagnosed as squalid hell. Petre Rado has noted the excessively filthy setting in Lăzărescu’s apartment, who, before dying, travels through the infernal circles of everyday post-communist reality, overtly marked by dilapidation, grime, concupiscence, even abjection.[18] Andrei Gorzo contends that the objects and the rooms in The Death of Mr. Lăzărescu amount to an individual and collective history that can only be comprehended from the inside, remaining completely indecipherable or enigmatic to an external gaze. Cristi Puiu “masterfully creates spaces that are utterly impregnated by the partially accessible histories of the men who live in them – a kind of technique of field depth, applied not only to space and time – and succeeds in plunging ultra-rapidly into the intimate substance of these lives, which is both inviting and repulsive, threadbare and promiscuous, dull and suspicious.”[19] Laura Dumitrescu also highlights the “urban prehistory” in Lăzărescu’s apartment, which prefigures “a sensorial hell through baroque combinations of vegetable grime and feline scents.”[20] Similarly, in Aurora, Viorel’s apartment deconstructs itself, decays, emptying itself and voiding the character of his own self. This time, the apartment is not filthy (like that of Lăzărescu), but a dead, cadaverous home, in a psychological, non-sensorial sense.

This study has approached the miserabilist stances evinced by three well-known films with quasi-dystopian overtones, produced by Romanian directors from different generations, who have all exerted a major impact on the autochthonous cinema and achieved tremendous success, including at the level of the public reception. As stated in the premise of this text, these films are not dystopian in the consecrated sense of the term, but revolve around dystopian reminiscences whose purpose was to extend the fatal communist substrate (at the level of the collective and individual destiny) in post-communism, through the lenses of an –ism that was theorized and applied in art after the collapse of the communist regime: miserabilism (either overtly or covertly assumed, but never unconsciously adhered to!). Andrei Gorzo considers that there are radical (technical and stylistic) differences between Cristi Puiu and Lucian Pintilie or Mircea Daneliuc; Doru Pop believes the same thing, denying the presence of any miserabilist stance in the New Wave films; however, I have connected these three filmmakers in this analysis and highlighted their similarities in their approach to the dystopian worlds they depict. My own argument has been influenced, of course, by aesthetic (and affective) criteria, the three films existing in a triad and outlining a consistent mind-set among individuals and communities alike. These are not the only such sequences, for dystopian-miserabilist stances are also adopted in other films produced after the fall of communism), but to my mind, these films present emblematic case studies for the mentality of the people. The furniture (either abundant and degraded or, on the contrary, minimalist) aggressively colonizes the human, suffocating or emaciating the individual, and human spaces become eschatological spaces in the afterworld (filmed here, in this world), full of vicissitudes. It is a method that E. Ionesco (in the play The Chairs) or J. P. Sartre (in No Exit) employed through a reduction to absurdity, each in their own (ethical) manner, anticipating the dystopian way in which furniture and the domestic space were to be used against humans in Romanian post-communism.

 

Translated into English by Carmen-Veronica Borbely

 

 

Bibliography

 

Corciovescu, Cristina and Mihăileanu, Magda (eds.). Cele mai bune 10 filme ale tuturor timpurilor. Stabilite prin votul a 40 de spectatori. Iași: Editura Polirom, 2010.

Deaca, Mircea. Cinematograful postfilmic. Note și lecturi despre filmul contemporan. Timișoara: Editura Brumar, 2013.

Fulger, Mihai. “Noul val” în cinematografia românească. București: Editura Art, 2006.

Gorzo, Andrei. Lucruri care nu pot fi spuse altfel. Un mod de a gândi cinemaul, de la André Bazin la Cristi Puiu. București: Editura Humanitas, 2012.

Gorzo, Andrei and State Andrei (eds.). Politicile filmului. Contribuții la interpretarea cinemaului românesc contemporan. Cluj: Editura Tact, 2014.

Pop, Doru. Romanian New Wave Cinema. An Introduction. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers, 2014.

Șerban, Alex Leo. 4 decenii, 3 ani și 2 luni cu filmul românesc. Iași: Editura Polirom, 2009.

 

 

Notes

Ruxandra Cesereanu

Babeş-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania

RuxCes@yahoo.com

 

 

Dystopian Reminiscences in the Romanian Contemporary Film

(Miserabilist Stances in the Films of Mircea Daneliuc, Lucian Pintilie and Cristi Puiu)

 

 

Abstract: This study analyzes the dystopian reminiscences outlined in the Romanian contemporary film, by exploring the cinematic work of three directors belonging to different generations (Mircea Daneliuc, Lucian Pintilie and Cristi Puiu), who assumed, to a greater or a lesser extent, the tenets of miserabilist neorealism – an “ism” that gained currency in Romania after the collapse of the communist regime.

Keywords: Romanian Contemporary Film; Neorealism; Naturalism; Miserabilism; Mircea Daneliuc; Lucian Pintilie; Cristi Puiu; Topos.

 

 

There is an undeniable dystopian component in the Romanian cinema produced after the collapse of the communist regime, even though it does not necessarily represent the option of the majority film producers and even though there is a visible difference from the responses that dystopian art generated in communism: allegory, parable, symbols and metaphors have well-nigh disappeared or, in any case, they have surely diminished and become less frequent, being replaced by a direct, blunt, neorealist discourse. At certain levels of the perspectives on marginality, the discourse is dystopian and miserabilist (highly naturalistic, but also prone to caricature). It is a discourse that marked, within less than a decade after the overthrow of the Ceaușescu regime, both Romanian literature (fiction, in particular, but also poetry) and the autochthonous cinema. These two forms of art have mutually influenced one another, albeit partially: while contemporary film has not infrequently assumed a narrative stance on all manner of acute and squalid poverty (human, economic, social or political), contemporary fiction has often assumed a cinematic style of narration.

The critics who have voiced, in more or less ample studies, their opinions on the miserabilist strand in Romanian literature include Ion Simuț, Mihai Zamfir, Dan C. Mihăilescu, Daniel Cristea-Enache and others. They have highlighted several key elements in the new realist post-communist literature: sordid pessimism, furious cynicism, the vulgar grotesque, existential nausea, the cruelty of perception, a penchant for everyday minimalism, a style steeped in slang or in defiant jargon, post-communist neorealism being grafted, in any case, on a neoexpresionist undercurrent. It is as if Louis-Ferdinand Céline had been reclaimed and reassumed as a model in the neorealist Romanian literature, but in a post-communist context (as Mihai Zamfir has insightfully pointed this out!). The human, social, economic and moral morass and the sheer amount of poverty under communism contaminated the perspective and vision of Romanian post-communist films, bringing to the fore lumpen characters, who are portrayed through magnifying lenses. This is the truly unique and innovative feature of films produced in the post-communist period, which dismantle the fabricated, artificial depiction of heroism in communist films. Something has radically changed: reality or neoreality has been zoomed in with a detailed, unhurried gaze, in slow motion, marked by a proneness for orality.

Contemporary Romanian film (the new cinema or the new wave) has already been the subject of extensive analysis, in synthesis books of considerable impact, authored  by Mihail Fulger, Alex Leo Șerban, Andrei Gorzo, Mircea Deaca and Doru Pop (in chronological order). In addition to these, there have been published several collective volumes, with essays on the films produced by the most outstanding Romanian directors of the third millennium.

Alex Leo Șerban, for instance, describes the directors of the new wave as “angry neorealists”[1] who cultivate an “unembellished, shocking, effective minimalism.”[2] Șerban points out the affinities between the minimalism displayed by the Romanian cinema and the Italian neorealism from the aftermath of World War II, but he uses minimalism in a technical sense, considering that the most appropriate term would be Romanian neorealism.[3] Alex Leo Șerban actually legitimizes the syntagm New Romanian Cinema (NRC).

When undertaking a panoramic or focal overview of the films produced by the new directors, Andrei Gorzo refuses such terms as minimalism, realism or miserabilism, for he regards these concepts as being “too general.” He also rejects the possibility (even if only symbolic) that the directorial brand sanctioned by Cristi Puiu (who is considered the reinventor of the Romanian cinema and the most poignant adherent of neorealism, and whose approach to this aesthetic trend has become a brand) might be derived from Lucian Pintilie, Mircea Daneliuc or Alexandru Tatos.[4] The definition that Gorzo gives of the New Romanian Cinema is dyadic. From a stylistic perspective, the NRC is about “an aesthetic formula predicated on the elevation of certain features of dramatic and directorial style to the rank of norms.”[5] From a biological (and chronological) viewpoint, the NRC stands for a new generation of filmmakers[6] (born between 1967 and 1975). Andrei Gorzo makes a nuanced and precise distinction between the NRC and the Romanian New Wave, as follows: the NRC is umbilically linked to several “stylistic premises shared by a number of films that have enjoyed international success. As a result of this success, these premises have come to represent the mainstream style in contemporary Romanian cinema,” while the Romanian New Wave is simply “a generation of successful filmmakers.”[7]

Doru Pop, the author of a synthetic and, at the same time, analytical foray into the new Romanian film directors, written directly in English, considers that their major influences go beyond Italian neorealism, including the New British Cinema, the French New Wave and the new generations of filmmakers in Central and Eastern Europe.[8] Unlike Șerban and Gorzo, Pop prefers the Romanian New Wave formula (even though he states that these filmmakers disavow this syntagm), because he perceives and legitimizes it from a philosophical-cinematic perspective.[9] Still, like Andrei Gorzo, Doru Pop emphasizes the divide between the Romanian New Wave directors and their predecessors, who have produced realistic films in the miserabilist vein (Mircea Daneliuc, Dan Pița, Nae Caranfil). The explanation he provides is different from that suggested by Gorzo. Thus, the Romanian New Wave does not depict “subhumans” (even though they are antiheroes) and does not exaggerate the miserabilist, neonaturalist effect, but presents ordinary, marginal people (antiheroes), who are held captive in a brutalizing quotidian routine.[10] The Romanian New Wave directors resort to a painterly naturalism, but reject dark naturalism, that is, miserabilism, resisting the hyperbolic caricature and grotesqueness of Daneliuc’s or Caranfil’s films, for instance.[11] An entire chapter in Doru Pop’s book tackles antiheroes and the notion of marginality, but I have limited myself here to some general considerations, relevant for the case study I am investigating. For Doru Pop too (as well as for Gorzo), Cristi Puiu is the symptomatic director of the new autochthonous cinema.

For Florin Poenaru, one of the theorists who espouses an activist, ideological stance on the Romanian contemporary film, the neorealism of the new Romanian cinema is not perceived in thematic or stylistic terms, but from a technical, strategic viewpoint, as a cognitive artifact: what matters is not necessarily the narrative the film conveys, but its imagery and “its possibilities not just to reflect reality, but also to conceive and problematize it.”[12]

 

*

 

In the sphere of literature, the critic who defines miserabilism most accurately is a miserabilist writer himself. In 2010, Dan Lungu published a text entitled “Carnet de scriitor” [“A Writer’s Scrapbook”] in the review Bucureștiul Cultural. One of the subsections of this text, which outlines a most welcome synthesis of the phenomenon under analysis, is entitled “‘Miserabilism’ or Post-traumatic Pessimism.” In Dan Lung’s view, post-communist Realism is explained and described as “post-socialist, post-traumatic, de-ideologized.”[13] Although Dan Lungu’s text was published after the release of the three films I will deal with in this concise study, pointing out the presence of miserabilist dystopian reminiscences in the works of three directors belonging to different generations (the films The Conjugal Bed, directed by Mircea Daneliuc, Terminus Paradis, directed by Lucian Pintilie, and The Death of Mr. Lăzărescu, directed by Cristi Puiu), Lungu’s argument is acutely and directly related to the impact that the new Romanian film has had both abroad and, via a boomerang effect, inside Romanian culture and on the contemporary mentality.

What are the features of miserabilist reality, in the opinion (not just artistic-literary, but also sociological) of Dan Lungu? The list of these features is condensed: “caricature, mockery, sarcasm, caustic humor, the absurd or the bizarre.” From a social point of view, the focus is on marginal humans and “larval existence,” some of the characters being “mutants.” The style is rudimentary, wallowing in slang, but it suits the world of these antiheroes (as Dan Lungu dubs these marginal, peripheral characters). Perceived from outside, this world is accused and criticized, but viewed from within, it is pervaded by the natural atmosphere of post-communism. What strikes the spectator (reader) is the directness of the style and essence of this world, its antielitism and minimalism, as Dan Lungu insists. These antiheroes are outcasts in society, depicted face-forward, without labyrinthine stylistic derailments or baroque entanglements. They are part of a post-communist realism which mocks communist realism through its very peripheral character, through its overall response of – literal, not philosophical or aesthetic – existential nausea. The abolition of censorship after the collapse of the communist regime has allowed this, but has also engendered a tendency to recuperate the mundane quotidianness of existence (at the level of vision, language, action and style). Dan Lungu believes that the miserabilist realism of Romanian post-communist literature is part of a natural process of “lexical democratization.”

In the previous paragraph, I synthesized and used the entire theory about miserabilism assumed by Dan Lungu, as I fully agree with his approach and demonstration. I do have, however, some polemical takes on certain ideas he advocates. Thus, social miserabilism (materialized through poverty, disgust, despair) also existed during communism and was actually extended into Romanian post-communism, even though communism prohibited explorations of this neorealism. The ghettoization of the population in communism also contaminated post-communism, as a direct legacy of the previous regime. Excessive references to the peripheral and to the marginal also existed under communism, but they did not become key issues in art, being allowed extremely rarely to become part of the accepted social landscape and only in order to suffer amendments and penalties (in films like The Reconstruction, for instance). De facto, the state of peripherality, marginalization and ghettoization was perpetuated from the previous regime straight into post-communism, which has been marked by a collapse of prudish or protective screens. The intimate (domestic), sordid space that is constantly present in the Romanian post-communist film is, with or without quotation marks, a remnant of the Gulag, a degrading, suffocating, punitive communist coop. In other words, the new wave does not invent ghettoization, the lumpen state and abjection, but extracts them from behind a screen.

 

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The Conjugal Bed (1993) is one of the first films produced after the collapse of the communist regime that is permeated by a miserabilist outlook and style. The emphasis is laid on a space that is almost abject, a space that morally encapsulates the spirit of the transition period, at the outset of post-communism (and does not necessarily reveal the poor souls of those inhabiting that space). The cramped, Babelian apartment in The Conjugal Bed is an alienated and alienating, pathologized microcosm: there is no difference between the bedroom, the bathroom and the kitchen, as the entire place is infected by an immediately apparent promiscuity. There is no longer any distinction between the closet and the kitchen or the bed. Everything is exposed in plain sight, poured out, vitiated; doors do not close, squalor and promiscuity moving from one room to another. Daneliuc insists on filming the pathetic and damaged furniture for a globalizing effect: the theater where Vasile, the protagonist (excellently played by Gheorghe Dinică), is the director proves to be yet another squalid, dilapidated space, just like the apartment back home. The damaged toilet at the cinema is the very image of post-communistRomania, which was through and through dependent on the vicissitudes of communism: overflowing toilets, spilling filthy, liquefied excremental matter. The furniture (the table, the chairs, the wardrobe) is also used to provoke the abortion ofCarolina, Vasile’s pregnant wife (he is a man who pathologically invents this type of aggression). Thus, the furniture becomes a forceps, a polymorphous instrument of abortion (even though it is botched attempt at that). The same apartment is adapted to become a shabby film studio for a porn film, the conjugal bed serving as the focal point of this plateau of concentrated kitsch. Contaminated by the grimy space that is instrumented in a pornographic sense, Vasile tries to hang himself, filming everything on the apartment-set; everything takes the form of hemorrhaging psycho-human effluvia: Carolina’s macabre hanging attempt, the nails driven into the head of his pregnant wife (who failed to abort her child with the help of the furniture) and, finally, Vasile’s concrete and definitive suicide by hanging, behind the stage in the cinema. Fifteen years later, the same apartment will host the grotesque intercourse of Decebal (the half-wit child of Vasile andCarolina, who could not be aborted) and the prostitute Stela (the woman for whom Vasile had been willing to give everything up).

Space is essential in Daneliuc’s films, because it stands for the psyché: not only at the individual, but also at the collective level. Romania, freshly plunged into post-communism, is like Vasile’s grotesque apartment: dependent on or downright addicted to pestilence, a topos that is irretrievably contaminated by the sordidness of communism. It is not by chance that the motto of the film The Conjugal Bed is taken from Petre Ţuţea, a skeptical or even cynical mind of the transition, as well as a former political prisoner during the first stage of Romanian communism: “we are not lost as a people. Perhaps God will have mercy on us and kick us in the ass.” The squalid nature of space is not necessarily restricted to The Conjugal Bed, because Daneliuc also used memorable sequences of this type in a few films he made under communism: the autistic, cramped dorm rooms or the restrictive cabins in The Cruise (1981), or the dilapidated, damp hospital wards reeking of liquefied burial chambers in the cinematic parable Glissando.

With Terminus Paradis (1998), Lucian Pintilie also adopts a miserabilist perspective (even though he is the senior of the Romanian directors, with a different background and tastes than his younger fellow directors or even than the eternal rebel Daneliuc). True, the grotesque slum in Why Are the Bells Ringing, Mitică? (1981) did not necessarily portray the slums of Caragiale, but Romania itself as a communist slum, and the sordid and pathetic rooms in The Oak (1992) – be they hospitals, apartments or houses – bluntly charted the restrictive and punitive space of the infested Gulag during the communist period. In Terminus Paradis, however, Pintilie places a hyperbolic bet on miserabilism, having been catalyzed by the script compiled by three prose writers, two of whom were already major authors adhering to the miserabilist strand: Răzvan Popescu and Radu Aldulescu. To these was added Răzvan Rădulescu, who, while being a diversified and nuanced writer, is also known as a neorealist screenwriter (an adjunct of the directors belonging to the New Romanian Cinema).

In my opinion, Terminus Paradis is the glue and the link between The Conjugal Bed directed by Daneliuc, and the end of miserabilism, represented by The Death of Mr. Lăzărescu, Cristi Puiu’s famous film. The life of Mitu Cafanu (the main character, played remarkably by Cornel Cașcaval) is umbilically connected to his dilapidated, bidonville-type apartment. The deterioration is extreme and it is filmed thoroughly as such. Everything is peripheral, the apartment is barren, there are the remains of a dismantled kitchen and the block itself is located in a Bucharest slum. And yet, up to a point, this gregarious and damaged space is also a space of shared love between Mitu and Norica, however squalid it may appear. In fact, all the other topoi in the film (Gili’s pub, the rooms in the barracks, Gili’s home, the escape wagon) are just as abandoned (orphaned), filthy and destitute. Mitu is a swineherd, but he is not contaminated by his job; instead, the all-encompassing, generalized contagion comes from the restrictive, punitive, stifling and rotten space. Contagion comes from the decomposed marginality that has invaded everything. Through this film, Lucian Pintilie manages to adapt perfectly, in thematic and stylistic terms, to post-communism and even to miserabilism, regardless of whether he does so out of a desire for competition against his younger confreres, or simply from an expert directorial instinct (professionally trained and armored).

With a script written by Cristi Puiu and Răzvan Rădulescu and directed by the former, The Death of Mr. Lăzărescu (2005) represented the end to miserabilism along the lines initiated by The Conjugal Bed, on the theme I examine in this text (the film is, however, multifaceted and much more complicated, including in meta-cinematic terms, than the theme I approach here). First, the kitchen is cosmic (or ironically and grotesquely raised to cosmic dimensions). It belongs to Dante Remus Lăzărescu (played with exceptional talent by Ioan Fiscuteanu) and encapsulates the banal life of a man who is suffocated by objects and things, because he is alone, isolated, an “orphan,” without umbilical cords to connect him to the world in which he lives and which has forgotten, or even abandoned him. He is an aborted character, in the sense that he is expelled from the world, before actually dying. The telephone itself is found in this microcosm of the kitchen, which has been turned into a boudoir, a bathroom, and a dining room (up to a point – as all the other spaces are secondary). Cristi Puiu’s directorial gaze is obsessed intentionally (tendentiously) with things and leftovers, as if they were the main characters – which they actually are, because they anticipate the cadaverous state of the protagonist and because they condense an agonizing death and presage disintegration. The furniture is indigent and anguishing, deliberately cramped and punitive; in the kitchen, man has become an object alongside all the other objects. Then the bedroom takes over the topographical role and becomes the world itself, more specifically, an adaptedBabel tower: sheets, chaotic rags and linen layers, debris and some cats (instead of people). The state of the human being (the title character) as an inanimate object is preserved in the psychopomp ambulance and in the dehumanizing hospitals. The bureaucracy is the new Gulag, the carceral universe resting on the grotesque mechanisms of the administration and in the absurdity of the medical institution. With Cristi Puiu, a detail can become the focus of a moral accusation, with multiple ramifications; the repetitiveness of details (the kitchen and the bedroom are filmed using leitmotif and counterpoint techniques) and the repetitiveness of mundane objects (man himself having been reified) outline a decomposed space, in which even the psyche (or the soul) is decomposing, trapped in a pre-corpse state. Cristi Puiu demonstratively portrays this process of decay, teaching a lesson on the anatomy of decomposition.

The domestic space, the room, the apartment are also obsessive in Aurora (where the script was written just by Cristi Puiu, and where he is not only the director but also the leading actor); here, Viorel’s unfinished house is the most direct way to indicate autism, the character’s mental disintegration. Viorel’s wandering through apartments and houses (some unfinished, others crammed with objects or people, overcrowded, as their owners are upstarts) or his roaming in the streets, through warehouses and basements chart a map of his spiritual hell, deliberately explored, especially since the protagonist is also a living corpse from an emotional point of view: his breakdown has already taken place, and he is an “ghoul” who wanders through the world to punish the living who have hurt him or downright “killed” him within.

Andrei Gorzo defines Cristi Puiu as a follower of Bazianism and of the reality principle,[14] but disavows the qualifiers minimalist and minimalism (considered inappropriate and fallacious) for a film like The Death of Mr. Lăzărescu, a complex production that problematizes and subtly reinvents the cinema.[15]

Doru Pop refuses the concrete (and applied) idea of miserabilism as a label for the films of the new Romanian directors; instead, he detects in their works a major dose of deliberate black humor. For Pop, miserabilism was a dominant feature of the autochthonous cinema only during the period immediately following the collapse of the communist regime (in Mircea Daneliuc’s films, for instance), when vulgarity and extreme violence were central means and themes.[16] In his analysis of the iconography of the kitchen space and of the eating process (filmed in ultra-slow motion, sometimes) in relatively recent Romanian films, Doru Pop believes that they outline a poetics of the New Wave predicated on the retrieval of ordinary and small human gestures (considered ignoble or petty in the previous period).[17]

I am not the only analyst who has drawn attention to Cristi Puiu’s insistence, in The Death of Mr. Lăzărescu, on a space diagnosed as squalid hell. Petre Rado has noted the excessively filthy setting in Lăzărescu’s apartment, who, before dying, travels through the infernal circles of everyday post-communist reality, overtly marked by dilapidation, grime, concupiscence, even abjection.[18] Andrei Gorzo contends that the objects and the rooms in The Death of Mr. Lăzărescu amount to an individual and collective history that can only be comprehended from the inside, remaining completely indecipherable or enigmatic to an external gaze. Cristi Puiu “masterfully creates spaces that are utterly impregnated by the partially accessible histories of the men who live in them – a kind of technique of field depth, applied not only to space and time – and succeeds in plunging ultra-rapidly into the intimate substance of these lives, which is both inviting and repulsive, threadbare and promiscuous, dull and suspicious.”[19] Laura Dumitrescu also highlights the “urban prehistory” in Lăzărescu’s apartment, which prefigures “a sensorial hell through baroque combinations of vegetable grime and feline scents.”[20] Similarly, in Aurora, Viorel’s apartment deconstructs itself, decays, emptying itself and voiding the character of his own self. This time, the apartment is not filthy (like that of Lăzărescu), but a dead, cadaverous home, in a psychological, non-sensorial sense.

This study has approached the miserabilist stances evinced by three well-known films with quasi-dystopian overtones, produced by Romanian directors from different generations, who have all exerted a major impact on the autochthonous cinema and achieved tremendous success, including at the level of the public reception. As stated in the premise of this text, these films are not dystopian in the consecrated sense of the term, but revolve around dystopian reminiscences whose purpose was to extend the fatal communist substrate (at the level of the collective and individual destiny) in post-communism, through the lenses of an –ism that was theorized and applied in art after the collapse of the communist regime: miserabilism (either overtly or covertly assumed, but never unconsciously adhered to!). Andrei Gorzo considers that there are radical (technical and stylistic) differences between Cristi Puiu and Lucian Pintilie or Mircea Daneliuc; Doru Pop believes the same thing, denying the presence of any miserabilist stance in the New Wave films; however, I have connected these three filmmakers in this analysis and highlighted their similarities in their approach to the dystopian worlds they depict. My own argument has been influenced, of course, by aesthetic (and affective) criteria, the three films existing in a triad and outlining a consistent mind-set among individuals and communities alike. These are not the only such sequences, for dystopian-miserabilist stances are also adopted in other films produced after the fall of communism), but to my mind, these films present emblematic case studies for the mentality of the people. The furniture (either abundant and degraded or, on the contrary, minimalist) aggressively colonizes the human, suffocating or emaciating the individual, and human spaces become eschatological spaces in the afterworld (filmed here, in this world), full of vicissitudes. It is a method that E. Ionesco (in the play The Chairs) or J. P. Sartre (in No Exit) employed through a reduction to absurdity, each in their own (ethical) manner, anticipating the dystopian way in which furniture and the domestic space were to be used against humans in Romanian post-communism.

 

Translated into English by Carmen-Veronica Borbely

 

 

Bibliography

 

Corciovescu, Cristina and Mihăileanu, Magda (eds.). Cele mai bune 10 filme ale tuturor timpurilor. Stabilite prin votul a 40 de spectatori. Iași: Editura Polirom, 2010.

Deaca, Mircea. Cinematograful postfilmic. Note și lecturi despre filmul contemporan. Timișoara: Editura Brumar, 2013.

Fulger, Mihai. “Noul val” în cinematografia românească. București: Editura Art, 2006.

Gorzo, Andrei. Lucruri care nu pot fi spuse altfel. Un mod de a gândi cinemaul, de la André Bazin la Cristi Puiu. București: Editura Humanitas, 2012.

Gorzo, Andrei and State Andrei (eds.). Politicile filmului. Contribuții la interpretarea cinemaului românesc contemporan. Cluj: Editura Tact, 2014.

Pop, Doru. Romanian New Wave Cinema. An Introduction. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers, 2014.

Șerban, Alex Leo. 4 decenii, 3 ani și 2 luni cu filmul românesc. Iași: Editura Polirom, 2009.

 

 

Notes