Jessicachandler's Weblog

4 Months, 3 Weeks, & 2 Days and the emergence of Romanian cinema’s new wave

jessicachandler — Sun, 14 Sep 2008 17:30:54 +0000

As Europe opened its geographical borders to a new bloc of Eastern Europe at the start of the year, it also hailed a new cultural era, the dissolution of cultural boundaries beckoning a new wave of European cinema. Whilst some of the most interesting filmmaking in Europe at the moment is taking place in the Balkans, Romania is the first Eastern European country to have its own new wave of cinema rise to prominence on an international scale. Silenced and constricted by years of totalitarian rule under Nicolae Ceausescu, Romanian cinema was until recently considered to be of little importance or interest on the international scene. The attention of the world of cinema, searching for a diversion from the increasingly infectious and vacuous blockbuster trend, has turned in curiosity towards those countries whose artistic voice has been silenced for such large parts of recent history. Films such as Cristi Puiu’s The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, Corneliu Porumboiu’s 12:08 East of Bucharest and, from this year’s London Film Festival selection, Cristian Mungiu’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks, & 2 Days and Cristian Nemescu’s California Dreamin’ have prompted the emergence of Romanian cinema on to the world stage. And with Mungiu’s remarkable film taking cinema’s top prize this year, winning the Palme D’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, a ‘new wave’ of Romanian cinema is fuelling much excited discussion amongst critics.
Under Ceausescu, Romania was kept largely hidden from the outside world, and much of its art remained insular by necessity. Filmmakers had little political or artistic freedom. The country did have a state film studio, but its resources were channelled into films that approximate to barely veiled propaganda. The films were certainly not marketable to an international audience, nor intended to be, but were contrived for local audiences. However, the façade of happy and prosperous lives they portrayed was sharply juxtaposed to the reality of the lives of most viewers. Like all totalitarian regimes, cinema was exploited as a powerful propaganda tool, and the censorship of the arts restricted any real development of a cinematic movement.
In December 1989, twenty-four years of increasingly totalitarian rule were finally ended. Perhaps the new emergence of this reflective cinema’s concern with recent history is part of the process of recovery – the culmination of long-awaited freedom of expression, and a desire to tell the world what happened, to tell the stories of those who suffered. History and trauma inevitably undergo this process of purgation. A period of silence may immediately proceed the transition to freedom, followed by an acceptance, and a desire to express and understand. The atrocities of the holocaust have prompted a whole genre of filmmaking in an attempt to understand and to remember, and in our increasingly frantic and nervous commercial world, it has taken only a few years for the experiences of 9/11 to make it on to the big screen. The Romanian ‘new wave’, if it may be characterised as such, is a response to a period of severe repression, and the frustration and pathos of the films are part of the process of remembering and articulating – a purging of all those years of subjugation.
It is perhaps misleading to label this emergence of Romanian cinema as a ‘new wave’, for this suggests a unity that does not apply. There is no cohesive style or endeavour by which to group these films, and any stylistic similarities reflect an expression of shared experience, rather than a Dogma-like manifesto. There is no doubt that experiences of Ceausescu’s totalitarian rule dominate the mood and subject-matter of many of these new films; however, we must also be alert to the role and power of international film-distributors, and should consider the probability that the films that make it outside the borders draw on similar issues for a reason, not necessarily entirely reflective of the national scene. And for now, perhaps this is what the world is interested in – the expression and recounting of experiences that were confined to the distant world of journalism nearly 20 years ago.
In a recent article on Romanian cinema for the BFI’s Sight & Sound magazine, Nick Roddick describes the new wave films as ‘cinematic humanism in its purest form’. He cites 2005’s The Death of Mr Lazarescu as the film that ‘launched the Romanian new wave’. Directed by Cristi Puiu, the film, which is set on a single night, follows its protagonist’s struggle as he is moved from hospital to hospital, hampered by the inefficiencies of bureaucracy, desperate to receive treatment for a rapidly worsening medical condition. It is darkly comic, alert to the tragic humour that endures amidst the callous neglect and careleness of a system that has lost all notions of honourable value and humanity. Its meticulous attention to detail, long, static camera takes, bleak colours and extraordinarily naturalistic dialogue establish the film in its rightful place at the core of the Romanian new wave. Simplicity and honesty are imperative, and the result is the creation of a film with a poignancy and affection that is quite unique, and deeply moving.
4 Months, 3 Weeks, & 2 Days is another example of cinematic humanism at its very finest. Also confined to the events of a single day, the film is about two young female students living in an all-female dorm in the communist 1980s. The timid, absent-minded Gabita is pregnant and wants an illegal abortion. Her uncertainty and procrastination surrounding the risks of arranging this (the film’s title marks the stage of Gabita’s pregnancy when the abortion is carried out) lead to her friend Otilia taking charge, as the girls embark on a series of desperate, degrading exchanges in order to attain the abortion. The film reveals the affects of Ceausescu’s oppressive bureaucracy: nothing comes for free, and the loyalty of the friends is placed in striking contrast to the callous self-interest of the film’s other characters. Both girls are forced to sell their bodies as part of the abortionist’s negotiations, reflecting the frequent impossibility of anything getting done without sordid corruption to set it in motion. The dark, colourless buildings of Bucharest form the backdrop to the film. It is bleak, dismal, and void of hope, drawing on the emotions of intimate personal experience to reflect upon an era in which everyone’s lives were blighted by a system in which the rights of the individual were enveloped in a haze of bribery and corruption. Like Puiu’s film, the camera often remains still for long takes, allowing the action to move across the screen. The effect is one of enhanced realism – the camera does not exploit its capabilities, but rather relies on simplicity, imitating the gaze of our eyes. We observe, rather than penetrate, and the naturalism of the performances is supported by camerawork that refuses to operate any effects that would remind us that this is a film, not reality. Editing is minimal, and there is no music, for this would disturb the realism of the film. The lighting is dim, dingy and the colours are drab and cold. It is uncompromising, austere and startlingly honest.
This film contains one of the most memorable dinner-party scenes I can remember seeing since John Huston’s The Dead. Otilia is obliged to attend her boyfriend’s parents’ dinner party, while Gabita is left alone in a hotel, waiting for the unsafe and unreliable treatment of the abortion to take effect. The suspense of this scene is intensely unsettling, as we fear for the life of Gabita. Throughout the scene, Otilia tries desperately to escape, but is trapped by the foolish, dismissive discussions of the middle-aged company. Their insistence on reminding her of her youth and supposed inexperience make the reality of her situation painfully poignant. Society’s failure to understand or listen to its youth is a tragic mistake, and the young people in this film attest to the damaging affects of a culture in which the products of a history of repression are ignored. The performance of Anamaria Marinca as Otilia provides the film with its greatest power. Her conviction, honesty and unaffected emotion give the film its most startling effect of reality. The camera is reluctant to turn away from her, and the story is told almost entirely from her perspective. It is often her face alone that tells the story. The film never feels rehearsed or preordained – everything is natural, uninhibited and real: we could almost be watching a documentary.
As part of the London Film Festival, the film’s director Cristian Mungiu will be joining a panel of other prominent figures in the Romanian film industry for a discussion advertised under the title: ‘Romanian Cinema: The Next New Wave?’ Using the current Romanian situation as a ‘case study’, the panel will debate issues of what constitutes a ‘national cinema’, questioning whether the new wave is just a current fashion or of more lasting importance for the country’s national heritage. Reading Nick Roddick’s BFI article, I was quite amazed to learn that in the whole of Romania there are only 65 cinema screens. Surely the survival and legitimacy of a wave of national cinema is dependent on the enthusiasm of its own people? As filmmakers continue the struggle to scrape together minimal funding to put the green light on a film, I can’t help but feel that we are perhaps being overly enthusiastic in proclaiming this new wave with such confidence. Are these films so distinctly Romanian that their importance is their nationality above anything else? Or are these filmmakers simply the most publicised practitioners of a trend that reflects a re-examining of cinema across Europe? After all, has Ken Loach not been making films just like this for many years? In my opinion, the most exciting thing about this new wave is that it opens up the possibilities of cinema on a global scale. Big budgets are irrelevant, big names are undesirable: simplicity, honesty, and fearlessness are everything. Art is the expression of a culture, a country’s means of communication with strangers, and Romania is rightly taking its turn in telling the world its story.

The Creative Treatment of Actuality

jessicachandler — Sun, 14 Sep 2008 17:28:01 +0000

The elegantly refurbished and artistically rejuvenated BFI Southbank has turned its attention to the art of the documentary film. Stranger than Fiction: Focus on Documentary, is the banner under which a series of programmes have been assembled to showcase a selection of films that belong to this increasingly important and prolific cinematic form. The first of these seasons looks at ten documentaries from different parts of the world whose impact affected a measurable change upon the societies they examine. Mark Cousins, the series’ curator, decided to “set aside questions of aesthetics to ask an empirical one: which films have had a demonstrable impact on the social, legislative or political climate in which they were made?” Is the role of aesthetics redundant in the field of the documentary, and is it possible to assess the impact of any created work when its artistic component is assumed to be obsolete? John Grierson, widely considered to be the ‘father’ of the documentary, defined the form as ‘the creative treatment of actuality’. The camera’s selective abilities, enabling the multiplicity of ‘reality’ to be presented in manageable form, facilitates a portrayal of its real life subject in which subjective manipulation is disguised as objective observation. We are presented, therefore, not with an unmediated reflection of the world, but the reshaping of ‘actuality’. The documentary film, which claims to represent the real, is by definition of its medium an artistic creation.
The documentaries selected to form this season have ‘shaken’ the world by means of skilful persuasion, demonstrating the ways in which film may be used as a powerful and immediate propaganda tool. Michael Moore, whose Bowling for Columbine (2002) made the top ten, is considered by numerous critics to be essentially a skilful propagandist. The immediacy of the social and political issues he addresses invites our sympathy and compassion, but this does not mean that his films are unbiased, or even entirely honest. Films have the power to influence and persuade, and the viewer of any documentary must be conscious throughout of the motivations of its creator. Documentaries will always be subjective, and the truths they present must be considered as part of a larger truth which the eye of the camera has closed its shutter upon.
It is misleading to believe that high-impact non-fiction films are always liberal or humanitarian. As Leni Riefenstahl’s Wagnerian epic The Triumph of the Will (1935) demonstrates with unsettling assurance, visual manipulation and the reconstruction of reality may be used successfully with catastrophic consequences. Commissioned by Hitler as a cinematic record of the 1934 Nazi Party Congress in Nuremberg, the Führer glows with all the grandeur and mystery of a deity, in a film constructed to aggrandise his presence to unearthly proportions. Aesthetics are the source of the film’s vitality and command. The Convention itself was planned as spectacular film propaganda, so that while, as Riefenstahl’s asserts, nothing in the film did not really happen, it was the advent of the film that caused the events to occur, in a staged spectacle planned meticulously in order to facilitate the creation of what would become one of the Nazi’s most important pieces of propaganda.
Hossein Torabi’s film of the 1979 Iranian Revolution, For Freedom (1979), is still shown in Iran every year on the anniversary of Ayatollah Khomeini’s victory. Torabi captures the mass rallies and fervour of the people, in a film planned as a victory celebration. Of the ten films selected, it was this that I found least persuasive, and hardest to relate to: interestingly, Torabi insisted that when filming, ‘there was too much emotion and excitement to care about styles’. Aside from cultural unfamiliarity, it was the artlessness of the film, the lack of construction, of staging even, that was its crucial weakness. If a film is to comprise of little more than impressive crowd scenes and speeches, there must be a design and structure to underscore its treatment of reality: Grierson knew what he was talking about. For Freedom lacked the persuasive power imparted by construction and creativity. Torabi simply set out to document a turbulent and formative period in the history of his country – undoubtedly a brave and valuable undertaking. But the lack of craft was all too evident; I didn’t feel I had learnt anything, and found myself uncomfortably bored even whilst I knew I was watching scenes from a crucial moment in recent history.
On the other side of the spectrum lies Erol Morris’s The Thin Blue Line (1988). The documentary, which sparked numerous miscarriage-of-justice films, concerns the murder of a Texan policeman and two suspects, one guilty but acquitted, the other innocent but scapegoated under the shortcomings of a corrupt justice system. It is a highly stylised film, with beautifully re-staged enactments of the murder like a film noir, layered with a richly evocative score by Philip Glass. The investigative nature of the film assisted in the eventual reprieve of the innocent suspect: the artistic power to unsettle and provoke indignation should not be underestimated, and Morris’s film is a crucial example of the importance of documentaries in addressing issues that have been silenced by bureaucracy.
Recently, the most important and widely marketed documentary films have carried anti-corporate messages. Michael Moore’s oeuvre has received unprecedented media attention, and Bowling for Columbine retains the power to shock and infuriate. Other examples of the anti-corporate documentary featured in this season included the Japanese Minimata: The Victims and their World (1972), following 29 families who sued the Chisso company for pouring methyl-mercury into the Japanese watercourse, and the British McLibel (2005), documenting the court case of two environmental campaigners as McDonalds tried to sue them under UK libel laws. A David and Goliath story of the individual vs. the corporation, the film itself was simple, low budget and unpolished; even the dramatic reconstructions directed by Ken Loach were a little cringe-worthy. But the film attested to the power of subject matter. Some documentaries are memorable for their captivating aesthetics; others purely for their compelling story and the weight of their argument.
John Pilger’s Death of a Nation: The Timor Conspiracy (1994) was screened alongside Michael Buerk’s 1984 BBC Report on Ethiopia, reaffirming the power of TV news reportage in its immediate exposure of crucial moments in current history. Pilger’s report, filmed covertly in a country that denied entry to all foreign nationals, revealed the atrocities of the genocide in East Timor. It was screened at the UN, and played a vital role in drawing the attention of the international community to events that had for so long been ignored. In turn, Michael Buerk’s short news report with its biblical scenes of mass starvation inspired Live Aid. Both Buerk and Pilger report with a sincerity and detachment that somehow increases the intensity of our own response. In these films, the sense of actuality prevails – artistry seems irrelevant when the evidence of such horrendous reality is unravelling before our eyes. We forget the camera, and assume our position as indignant and horrified observer of a distant reality.
Marcel Ophüls The Sorrow and the Pity (1969) is an epic two-part documentary about the French resistance to the Nazi occupation. Ophüls quietly dismantles the established view of the heroic anti-Nazi resistance, exposing collaborative fascist and anti-Semitic sympathies. Consisting almost entirely of interviews, interspersed with archive footage, the film provides a powerful reanalysis of a crucial period in modern history. The face of every subject is filmed with unsettling scrutiny; whilst revealing uncomfortable truths, we are allowed to understand the impossible circumstances with which each individual was confronted, in an account that exposes the truth without condemning it. Ophüls facilitates a kind of talking-cure exhibition, allowing his characters and his audience to understand and come to terms with a painful truth that must be acknowledged in order to be purged.
With the BFI making such ample space for the documentary film to take up residency, one must assume that this reflects a growing interest and demand on our part. An increasing number of fiction films are constructed like extended docudramas, where recent history is recognisably dramatised and we leave the cinema feeling just a little more knowledgeable and informed. Our thirst for the detachment of a cinematic experience portending to represent, if not be reality, is growing. Perhaps the traditional escape of the cinema is being overtaken by a desire to learn, to understand, and to be influenced. Technology has made the spread of information immediate, and so in a sense, perhaps we no longer have any excuse for ignorance. The documentary film plays a role somewhere in-between the news bulletin and the fiction film, and this role has ever increasing importance. With this change, where does the role of fiction lie? Will audiences still be satisfied with imitations of reality, with representative stories, when as compelling a tale may be told with the authority of actuality? Firstly, I firmly believe that there will always be a place for the symbolic importance, let alone the escapist enjoyment, of the fiction film. Surely, its role in our cultural world will never be obsolete. And here, again, we must remember Grierson: the documentary is ‘the creative treatment of actuality’, and an artistic form in its own right. The art of the cinema is changing, but this does not mean it is becoming less artistic; rather that the power of the medium to communicate is being productively exploited to portray realities of which we are too often unaware, and to which the lens of the camera is more perceptive. Those documentaries that have the ability to ignite change and re-shape the world, are those that manipulate history and reality with the most subtlety and command, allowing aesthetics to play a vital and formative role. Change is propelled by force, not reflection, and the documentary film aspires to epitomise Brecht’s famous dictum: “Art is not a mirror held up to reality, but a hammer with which to shape it.”