Masquerade/Mascarada (2001)

Masquerade is a 52-minute film directed by Cornel Gheorghiță documenting winter celebrations in Moldova.  Rituals with deep roots in the culture of the region, though echoing rich folk traditions elsewhere in Europe, they celebrate the end of the old year and the promise of rebirth, a reaffirmation of life over the persistence of death.  They provide a sense of control when confronted with the unknown, such as fear the dead wander the earth in the darkest days of the year.  A sensitive narration locates the festival within the broader context of memory, to emphasise the way it offers a thread of continuity which helps to bind local identity.

Villagers dress in outlandish costumes and wear frightening masks that would scare off Death himself.  There are symbolic representations of different types of people and animals, notably the goat and the bear.  Youngsters dress in bear skins, a band plays enthusiastically and loudly.  Drink may be taken (we are told part of this region was once called Bacovia, from the Latin ‘Bacchus’ and ‘via’, ‘the path of Bacchus’).  The procession of young males makes sure to visit the homes of unmarried females.  Everyone has a high old time.

In many places these customs have disappeared in the face of urbanisation, industrialisation and the fragmentation of communities, and when the procession is seen winding through city streets it looks incongruously domesticated: these are profound mysteries that should be confined to the pastoral landscape.  But wherever they are performed, it is possible to see the enthusiastic participation by villagers in pagan festivities elements of which may not have been unfamiliar to the Dacians.  Staid Christianity takes a back seat.

Does this harking back to the past have a future though?  To the urban eye the events can seem unnervingly alien, the energy involved even aggressive (and the slaughter of a pig is disturbing), but one would like to think the enthusiasm of the participants, including the children, is an indication that, however much traditional ways of living are diluted by modernity, these customs will continue for as long as the villages remain populated.

However, it would be interesting for a comparison with the situation now, two decades after Cornel Gheorghiță filmed on the streets of rural Moldova, to see if that is the case.  The musicians and craftsmen all look rather old in the tooth and there is no guarantee their skills will be passed down to a new generation.  One also wonders how these ceremonies are faring elsewhere in the region.

The biggest danger is probably depopulation by young people in search of a better life elsewhere, breaking the cultural chain.  It would be a shame if these traditions were lost, but much of their power comes from the exuberance contrasting with the dullness of routine daily life, and these days such a life is not the inevitability, nor necessarily quite as dull, as it once was.  Whatever the fate of the old practices, this is a beautiful, if stark, film, and a valuable ethnographic record.

The film is available on the Cinepub platform.

Never Mind the Balkans, Here's Romania, by Mike Ormsby

British expat Mike Ormsby’s Never Mind the Balkans, Here's Romania, copyrighted 2015 (though apparently first published in Bucharest in 2008 and with an acknowledgements page dated 2012, so who knows), consists of a series of vignettes exploring facets of Romanian life.  As a journalist he knows how to get those he meets to open up, and he is always amiable and interested.  A lot of his material results from conversations with cabbies (the taxi being his preferred mode of transport), and his wily self-serving building manager in Bucharest is also a good source of anecdotes.

Ormsby comes across many kind and warm-hearted people and has close friendships, but while he has huge affection for the country he is conscious of its flaws.  He wryly recounts the petty annoyances he experiences every day, finding that often personal respect, and respect for social and legal institutions, are in short supply.  There is selfishness and philistinism, toleration of squalor and discomfort, and a relaxed attitude to animal welfare standards.  Naturally there are plenty of brushes with bureaucracy, shamelessly exhibiting corruption and inefficiency.  Instances of terrible driving crop up regularly.  Ordinary Romanians are fully aware of the defects but cannot see a way to change the situation, so shrug and get on with life as best they can.

On the other hand, Ormsby finds much to admire about the country.  In particular he shows the Carpathians to be breathtakingly beautiful.  He has travelled widely, including stints in Africa, so he does not view Romania from a narrow perspective but rather with a cosmopolitan eye.  Despite his criticisms, it says something for his love of the place that he has stayed on, though he moved from Bucharest to Transylvania where he lives with his Romanian wife.

The tone remains light even when he is clearly exasperated by what he encounters every day, but you sense frustration life is not better this long after 1989.  These snapshots suggest that at least at the time of writing the old mindset still lingered, and while there are hints in the book that things are improving, it is a slow process.  Hopefully in the not too distant future Ormsby’s dispassionate snapshots will read like an historical depiction of a vanished past.

Captives, by Norman Manea

Captives (1970) was Norman Manea’s first novel, written in opaque prose that mirrored the difficulties of coming to terms with everyday reality in a repressive society, and it makes no concessions to the reader.  The novel tracks life in post-war Romania, with its legacy of trauma, omnipresent surveillance and lack of trust, its petty bureaucracy, the fear of falling foul of a regime which considers private life to be its business, the unreliability of surface appearances, and lack of autonomy.  Romania is depicted as a fractured place that had spun from fascism to communism, always at the behest of larger, stronger powers.  Survival means accommodation, even when this entails hypocrisy, an effort unfortunately resulting in psychic damage.  A key motif is the necessity of amnesia to be able to cope with the present.

The narrative is divided into three sections, ‘She’, ‘You’, and ‘I’, and follows three characters who collectively reflect Romania’s recent history and demonstrate the dismissive way the individual is treated.  ‘She’ is Monica Smântănescu, a struggling French and piano teacher frustrated by the rudeness of her clients.  She refers to Handel’s Chaconne in G Major, a piece comprising continuous variations, which symbolises the circular nature of her life and those of others who are trapped and not able to develop.  ‘You’ is the daughter of a Romanian army officer, Captain Zubcu, who fought for the Nazis and returns suffering from PTSD.  He cannot free himself from his experiences, possibly including war crimes, and commits suicide by throwing himself into a vat of liquid metal.  His daughter experiences extreme grief, plus the pain of a broken love affair with the narrator.

‘I’, the narrator, is an engineer looking back on his early political activities, his mind eventually unravelling after fruitlessly attempting to do what is required of him by the state.  There is a suggestion he is a Jewish Holocaust survivor, though this is not made explicit.  He describes his childhood years, and his extreme adherence to the party, his political orthodoxy more to demonstrate a sense of superiority than the result of ideological inclination.  As a member of the Pioneer Organisation he is keen to root out incorrect opinions, particularly his friend Sebastian Caba’s.  Later Caba becomes his boss at the engineering company.

The three sections are not discrete but shift and blend, throwing up connections which may or may not be correct.  The oblique narrative spirals round in addressing social conditions and their psychological impact, forming a hermetic container reflecting airless times that feel damp, grimy and stressful.  We can never be sure who is a reliable narrator and we may read about the same event from differing perspectives.  If people cannot be honest with themselves, how can they be honest with others?  The result is a fracture of personality, reflected in the novel’s style.  Social interactions are low and dishonest and the appropriate response to an absurd situation is absurd behaviour.  Whatever the differences in the three characters’ experiences, they are all captives, both externally through the political repression circumscribing the citizen’s rights, but also internally, by consenting to it.

Manea’s introduction to the 2015 English translation supplies some background to the novel’s creation.  It was intended as a gauntlet thrown down to the regime: far from embodying the values of the New Socialist Man, his characters would be depicted more realistically as ‘vulnerable, weak, and defeated individuals’, ‘wounded outsiders.’  It is a helplessness reinforced by the use of the passive voice, with agency often difficult to assign, thereby becoming diffuse and externalised.  Manea admits that the experimental form he adopted is challenging and was influenced by the Nouveau Roman (presumably including the emphasis on the fallibility of memory), but justifies it by citing Faulkner’s observation that a writer should be judged by risks taken.  He refers to Kafka’s In the Penal Colony, with ‘additional local ambiguities, corruption, double-talk, and double-dealing.’

Translator Jean Harris’s afterword outlines the challenges she faced, notably the novel’s allusive language to describe ‘unhinged’ characters ‘cut loose from their moorings’, making the meaning sometimes impossible to pin down, and Manea’s tendency to avoid the use of pronouns.  She notes that some things are not said outright but hinted at, such as references to Jews, and survivor guilt influencing behaviour.  Significantly a very young Manea and his family were imprisoned in a concentration camp in Transnistria during the war.

Captives is a difficult read (Manea states he has made minor edits to the new edition for clarity, so heaven knows what the original was like) and it is remarkable the novel passed the censors, so far is it from socialist realism.  There may not have been anything specific the authorities considered subversive, but the cumulative effect is to show an oppressive (in its different senses) world off-kilter and unhealthy, creating alienation in its victims.  In a state that suppressed overt criticism, such indirectly expressed dissident writings were the best those who questioned the legitimacy of the regime’s behaviour could hope for, but Manea transcended the limitations to achieve a memorable, if frequently confusing, work of fiction.