Forest of the Hanged, by Liviu Rebreanu

Liviu Rebreanu’s 1922 novel Pădurea Spânzuraţilor is dedicated to his brother Emil.  It was partly inspired by Emil’s execution for spying and desertion during the First World War while serving in the Austro-Hungarian army.  His death is paralleled by the fate of the main character, Apostol Bologa.

 Bologa is a Romanian fighting for Austria, a subject in its sprawling multi-ethnic empire.  Many serving in its army had divided loyalties, pitted against soldiers from the same background but on the other side (Romania fought the Central Powers off and on during the conflict).  Born in Transylvania – then Hungarian, later ceded to Romania under the provisions of the 1920 Treaty of Trianon – Bologa finds himself in the war more or less by accident, to impress a young lady, and possessing no strong patriotic motives.

 The titular forest of the hanged is a dark foreboding place where executions are conducted, the bodies left as a warning to others.  The novel opens with Bologa participating in a military tribunal and the subsequent hanging of a Czech officer, and ends with his own, giving the narrative a circular structure.  Initially he considers he is doing his duty, even exceeding it by testing the rope for the Czech’s execution.  Yet witnessing the death starts Bologa on a journey of introspection.

 He is not a physical coward and is wounded in action, his convalescence giving him time for reflection.  Coming to doubt his previous certainties, he realises he could easily do what the Czech officer did in the same circumstances.  He acknowledges the pointlessness of war, and asks himself precisely what cause he is fighting for when people are all the same under the skin.  Unfortunately, deciding on a course of action is not easy.  He is an intellectual who is contemplative by nature and slow to reach conclusions, hence the novel charts at length his struggle to reconcile his duty with his moral sense.

 Transferred to the Romanian front, these reflections become urgent.  He finds he has more in common with those he is facing than with those he serves.  For the Austro-Hungarian high command there is no problem sending ‘their’ Romanians to fight soldiers of the same ethnicity because they should be loyal to the emperor, but as he faces his fellow Romanians, Bologa’s sense of priorities shifts, reaching crisis point when he is again ordered to sit on a tribunal, holding life and death in his hands.  Appalled at the prospect, he walks haphazardly towards the Romanian lines, with severe consequences.

 This is not a novel about armies in battle, rather it charts Apostol’s inner turmoil.  It is a spiritual battle, as evinced by Biblical echoes.  God is a constant reference: Apostol’s name is derived from apostolic; three men protesting their innocence are hanged on Easter Monday, with orders given for their bodies to hang for three days; twelve alleged deserters are caught in the woods; there are numerous references to lightness and darkness.  Rebreanu sees Bologa as a martyr, thereby exonerating his own brother Emil, as he explores the multiplicity of motives that take men to war, and the multiplicity of emotions they feel when they are there.

The Romanian Riveter

Since the European Literature Network’s The Riveter magazine’s launch in 2017 there have been eight issues, previous ones devoted to translations into English of Polish, Russian, Nordic, Baltic, Swiss, queer, and German literature.  The latest addresses the Romanian scene and bills itself as ‘the first ever magazine of contemporary Romanian literature in English.’  In fact, it focuses mainly on a particular area of Romania, Timișoara and Banat, though other parts of the country are covered.

With under 180 pages at the disposal of the guest editor, Tudor Crețu, director of one of Timișoara’s literary festivals, this can only skim the surface of Romania’s (and its diaspora’s) output.  The emphasis is on fairly recent works, mixing well-known names with some unknown outside Romania.  Crețu introduces the selection by explaining the evolution of Banat’s literary history before and after the 1989 revolution, an event in which Timișoara played a significant role.  He stresses the richness of the region’s cultural heritage, sitting on the hinge between Central and Eastern Europe and soaking up a wide range of influences.

The rest of the magazine mixes poetry and prose with reviews and more general commentary.  Many of the contributors, the poets in particular, will be unfamiliar to a non-Romanian audience, and some have never previously been translated into English, but there are a few familiar names such as Mircea Cărtărescu, Norman Manea, Ioana Pârvulescu and in particular Herta Müller, who needs no help with her career, though her inclusion is justified by her origins in Banat.

Providing further perspectives, Alistair Ian Blyth discusses translations and their publishers and the significant contributions he has himself made, not only working on Romanian literature but also Moldovan; and Susan Curtis of Istros Books looks at the publishing of translations from Romanian, with well-deserved plugs for her own efforts to promote Romanian writing to English-language readers.

The Riveter aims to celebrate the best of European literature, and assist accessibility, to which end lists of selected poetry and fiction by Romanians (in German, Hungarian or French as well as Romanian) that have appeared in English since 2010 provide a useful source for further investigation.  The Romanian Riveter celebrates a national literature which deserves to be better known internationally.

Fata care mănâncă pizza / Girl Eating Pizza (2015)

Adrian Cârlugea, Bogdan Coste and Ion Indolean’s Fata care mănâncă pizza (Girl Eating Pizza) is a five-minute short film shot on a Romanian street corner in which an unseen director choreographs the entrances, exits, and actions while in frame, of people, vehicles and the occasional pigeon.  Except it becomes apparent that in fact these are general passers-by going about their daily business with a voice-over making it seem they are being directed to perform the gestures they are making anyway.  The concept is lifted (with acknowledgement) from The Girl Chewing Gum, a 1976 short made in London by John Smith.  Both films nod to the French New Wave and in particular Francois Truffaut’s La Nuit américaine, were shot on random, though busy, corners, and utlise limited camera movements.  The films’ titles are taken from small moments which pass quickly and would not stand out unless drawn attention to, the young lady eating pizza as she walks echoing the earlier girl chewing gum.

 There are obvious differences of course, not least the Romanian street’s greater attractiveness compared to Smith’s grimy Dalston Junction. The modern film is in colour and apparently recorded on a phone, though thankfully the image is stable, whereas Smith’s is black-and-white 16 mm.  The former also observes the unities, whereas Smith eventually claims to be standing in a field 15 miles from Hackney and switches to a 360-degree pan of a rural landscape to conclude his film.  Most significantly, in terms of style it could be argued that Fata care mănâncă pizza is purer in following through its intention than is The Girl Chewing Gum.

 That is because Smith quickly abandons the deception he is conducting proceedings, by panning up to a clock and pretending to direct the speed of the hands, and giving rapid-fire lists of ‘instructions’ no assistant director could follow.  He breaks the link between voice-over and events, and therefore the assumption of cause and effect; we see the narration had to have been added afterwards and he is describing what has happened, not giving orders.  Eventually he abandons the pose of director altogether and makes up stories about passers-by (a man is going home, another robbed a post office and has a gun), including surreal elements (references to a blackbird with a nine-foot wingspan, a man with a helicopter in his pocket).

 Cârlugea, Coste and Indolean, however, maintain the illusion that they are dictating the mise-en-scène longer, the cumulative implausibility being how one would organise so many actors and why one would want to.  But when the camera pans to the right to show a busy main thoroughfare full of pedestrians and traffic (echoing Smith’s pan to show the queue outside the Odeon cinema) they cannot convince they are able to synchronise the landing of a bird on a distant building and the appearance of a priest, just as Smith cannot convince that his pigeon wrangler is able to organise specific flight paths through the frame.  Even so, Fata care mănâncă pizza concludes by implying the shot has been ruined by a careless camera movement and needs to be redone.

 Smith is rightly celebrated for the trick he plays on audiences used to the idea of the auteur commanding the action like a monarch (instead he is subservient to it), and for demonstrating that originality need not be constrained by resources.  Irrespective of the experimental film conceit of pretending to control the arbitrary, once we realise we are not watching fiction we can appreciate the documentary aspect of both these films.  Such ordinary scenes have their own fascination which grows stronger as they recede in time.  Supplementing such pleasures, Smith, Cârlugea, Coste and Indolean remind us that those who claim to govern may only give the impression of being in charge while life swirls, unheeding, around them.

  

Fata care mănâncă is available on CinePub:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FkiwJVlF2qk&list=PLn0Jy9I2VIyRdOlNnOsu8TCaUSUDHrwzP&index=49&t=0s

Five Romanian Poets, by Lidia Vianu (ed.)

Translated and edited by Lidia Vianu, the 2020 collection Five Romanian Poets (Cinci poeți români ) was published by the Contemporary Literature Press at the University of Bucharest.  The five are Romița Mălina Constantin, Diana Geacăr, Emil Nicolae, Ioan Es. Pop and Floarea Țuțuianu.  They are winners of the 2019 Lidia Vianu Translates poetry competition, run by Vianu herself and aimed at choosing Romanian poems not only on their merits but for their translatability into English.

The writers provide short personal statements preceding their poems but the reader will need to look elsewhere for fuller biographical and bibliographical information.  There are between five and seven poems for each, appearing as parallel texts.  These give a flavour of their styles, but again a larger selection would have been welcome.  Translating them, Vianu says that she could have written the lines herself, so the choices are personal and not necessarily representative of the wider poetry scene in Romania.

Still, translation of Romanian poetry is not a crowded field, and Lidia Vianu is to be thanked for making these available to an English-language audience.  They all work well in translation, the best focusing on small gestures, domestic scenes, aging, and the passing of the generations.  There is little sense of political or wider social engagement, perhaps reflecting Vianu’s own attitudes.  Leaving aside issues of selection criteria, what we have here is a good introduction to these particular voices, and future competitions should cumulatively make accessible a significant body of Romanian poetry in English translation.

The e-book is available free on the Contemporary Literature Press website:

editura.mttlc.ro/five-romanian-poets-2019.html

The Beauty of Bucharest, by S J Varengo

[N.B. there are spoilers, but frankly this tripe deserves it]

Unfortunately, The Beauty of Bucharest is not a travel guide or hymn of praise to the Romanian capital, rather it is a vapid thriller that happens to be mostly set there.  As well as being simplistic in its plotting and entirely unoriginal, the novel plays into lazy clichés and stereotypes of Romania as a dangerous place full of corruption, organised crime, white slavery, cheeky grasping cabbies and incompetent law enforcement.

Over in Denver, Colorado, retired 50-something computer games developer Dan Porter has been happily married to his gorgeous sexy younger wife Nicole for twenty years.  To his intense astonishment one day he discovers she is an international assassin, head of an organisation called the Clean Up Crew (abbreviated by its members to CUC, possibly some kind of obscure sex-based joke by the author).

This surprising fact he learns when he opens the boot of their car in a supermarket car park to find a dead body in it, after which his wife not only confesses her secret life but enlists him in it.  He discovers Clean Up Crew is not actually a company cleaning up crime scenes after all, though they do do that – mostly their own – instead they ‘clean up’ bad guys, administering their own form of extreme justice to make the world a better place.  Now Dan knows what Nicole was really doing on those business trips.

While he is still reeling from shock, Nicole decides to take him on her next assignment, which happens to be in Bucharest.  The Beauty of the title is Ana Albu, a young supermodel who has been kidnapped by Bogdan Grigorescu, clearly the evilest man in the whole of Romania (and probably several adjacent countries), with the glowering manner and disgusting cigars to prove it.  Naturally he is very wealthy and occupies a large well-appointed palace in which he must rattle around.

Aided by sadistic Rosa Klebb-style six-foot blue-haired security chief Ileana Gabor, his organisation trafficks young women (after Grigorescu abuses them himself) to whoever wants to buy.  Ana will be his biggest score yet, to be sold for a huge amount of lei to, it is heavily hinted, an Arab potentate.  Nicole’s primary task is to kill Grigorescu, but she and Dan happily add the rescue of Ana to the to-do list, then find about twenty more desperate young women in need of their assistance.  As this book is the first of a series, there are no prizes for guessing how it works out.

As a supposedly top agent, Nicole shows herself to be not quite the expert one might expect, despite being portrayed as powerful and assertive, and with over twenty years’ experience.  Apart from allowing her husband to find the body in the boot, he saves her life more than once during their expedition, and she would never have penetrated Grigorescu’s well-defended palace without his skills learned from games development.  Despite her being the boss, once he gets over his shock at finding what Nicole does for a living, Dan shows he is pretty good at it.

At the novel’s heart is the relationship between the pair, and the implausible McMillan & Wife dialogue sinks any vestiges of credibility left by the ridiculous plot.  The sexual attraction between them too is laid on thickly to the point of absurdity; Nicole is frequently distracted from the life-and-death struggle by her high sex drive and her husband’s desirable bod, especially when he is in spandex.  However, a dark side is hinted at by the lurid description of her becoming horny seeing Dan blow Ileana’s brains out.  There are mysteries only to be divulged in the sequels.

It is hard to believe such a mission would have been given to a single individual, which it was before Dan was invited along, even with the help of a local fixer (who promptly gets himself killed anyway).  To guarantee a successful outcome for something this difficult surely requires a large team.  Nicole and newbie Dan manage to achieve the task with a degree of luck I doubt would occur in real life, though the whole idea of a secret organisation devoted to murdering criminals nobody else can touch is preposterous anyway.  Bucharest deserves better than this.

Andrei Farcasanu

Copyright Andrei Farcasanu

The British Journal of Photography website carries an article dated 26 August 2020 about Romanian Barcelona-based photographer Andrei Farcasanu.  He is one of two winners of the 2020 OpenWalls Arles photography ‘Growth’ category award for his Timeless Interventions set.

He handcrafts small lith prints, mostly of nature and inanimate objects.  The fuzzy coolness of the photographic process reminds us how our perceptual apparatus is a filter as much as it is a communication channel: the chemical bath reduces the clarity of the image, while our brain chemistry reduces the clarity of what we absorb from the world.

To me, the images in Farcasanu’s output are reminiscent of Maya Deren and Alexander Hamid’s 1943 Meshes of the Afternoon, a compilation of details abstracted from reality clutching at a broader meaning.  Farcasanu’s work to date though has a relatively narrow range, limiting the possible associations.

He arranges his photographs thematically, but the themes are imposed retrospectively, indicating an arbitrariness to the grouping of some of them.  Monochrome provides a unity that would not have been possible with colour, and they are rescued from a charge of banality by the historical gravitas of black-and-white, plus no doubt the attractive printing.

The results are then dressed up in a philosophical framework; the BJP article refers to Farcasanu ‘drawing on the metaphysical philosophies of thinkers from Augustine of Hippo in the 5th century to Immanuel Kant and Albert Einstein,’ plus references to inspirations drawn from impressionist, expressionist and Eastern European painting and Eastern philosophy.

Throwing in what feel like random historical figures and art movements adds nothing to an understanding of these small images, though it is relevant Farcasanu has a PhD in photography, which would have entailed supplying a theoretical superstructure.  However, stabs at exaggerated profundity do his modest photographs, more style than substance, no favours.

Duminică (Sunday)

Apart from the beginning and end, Sînziana Nicola’s 2013 short Duminică takes place entirely in a car as, we eventually discover, a brother and sister are driving to a hospital, where a relative is dying.  Their emotional distance is signalled right at the beginning when she waits outside his block, smoking, and their greetings are perfunctory.  Much of the journey is taken up by the sister, for something to say, telling her brother about a strange experience she had when she went to an interview at ten in the evening and tried to take a taxi afterwards.

A man got in who neither she nor the driver knew, and when he suggested he take her home and she objected he became aggressive, leading to a row in the street.  When she took another cab, he and his friends followed behind, shouting.  As she haltingly tells her tale, her brother disapproves, obviously thinking she handled the situation badly and naively underestimated the danger she could have been in.  He blames her and her 'big mouth' rather than the people with whom she had the run-in.  Exasperated, he wonders who would be holding an interview at 10 o’clock, and asks why she didn’t call him.

Her response is that it was 'an unconventional events company', the interview a waste of time, and she can manage her own affairs.  Determined to finish the story, she becomes heated defending herself, one of those situations in which whatever is said is going to irritate to the other person.  Annoyed, he won’t allow her to smoke and turns off the music she puts on.  They subside, tired of the friction and an uneasy silence follows as he steers them through heavy city traffic.  He asks her for chocolate, which he had previously refused, a symbol of their truce.  We leave them standing outside the hospital entrance, smoking to postpone the inevitable.

This Sunday is definitely not a day of rest.  In less than a quarter of an hour we have been shown a situation common among siblings having little in common but bound together by family, so obliged to spend time in each other’s company.  This is an especial difficulty for the younger one, who risks being patronised.  Simply shot from the back seat, the viewer’s interpretation arises from their tone and body language as much as the words, signalling years of the big brother despairing of his undisciplined sister (tellingly he wears a seatbelt but she does not), and sister wondering whether she will ever be taken seriously.

This was Sînziana Nicola’s first film as director, and it won her a prize at the Stuttgarter Filmwinter – Festival for Expended Media.  It is available on Cinepub:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k163TPVFga4&list=PLn0Jy9I2VIyRdOlNnOsu8TCaUSUDHrwzP&index=53&t=0s

Adriana-Ioana Cosma

Copyright Adriana-Ioana Cosma

The July/August Journal of the Royal Photographic Society carries an article on half a dozen graduates who have been following BA or MA photography courses at British universities.  One of these is Romanian Adriana-Ioana Costa, who has been studying for a BA in photography at Edinburgh Napier University.  The project featured in the double-page spread (pp. 518-19) is Little Red One, about her grandfather: his nickname was Roşiştea, given by his mother when he was born as he had red hair, and he was known as Red in the village.  Pre-1989 he was a farmer, and afterwards an independent smallholder in Vărai, a village in the Maramureș.  He lived with his wife and mother-in-law (‘whose spirituality combined Orthodox-Christian rites with old pagan rituals’).  Cosma lived with them until the age of 5, and visited during holidays afterwards.

She started Little Red One in 2019 as she realised she had not photographed her late grandmother much and was grateful she could still photograph her grandfather.  Her efforts became part of her BA submission, though it is as much about the village, where she has noticed a growing tension in the past 20 years between modernisation and a desire not to change.  Like many places it is suffering depopulation, with Cosma told in January 2020 that only about 100 people were now living there (down from 275 in the Census of 2011), and no babies born for years.  Of those left, 42 were widowed and living alone, of which Cosma’s grandfather was one.  Yet Cosma says that while it is sad to see signs of decline, there is hope also, with the people keeping going and maintaining their faith.

Little Red One is one of the projects on Cosma’s website, but the others are not specifically about Romania.  However, her Instagram page has a wider selection of Romanian photographs.  There are some of the landscape around Vărai, but many capture still life, those moments suggesting permanence but that we know outside the photograph hold within them the seeds of decay.  Her grandfather appears in some of the photographs, but surprisingly never a close portrait (his red hair apparently gone).  It would be nice to see more of Vărai to have a rounded view, though the overwhelming feeling of these is indeed of decline.  There is more life on display in pictures from the 2019 Marmația winter festival, rural folk traditions transplanted to an urban setting.  They put one in mind of the Moldovan winter celebrations depicted in Masquerade and in Felicia Simion’s ethnographies, a more systematic attempt to record customs and folklore across rural Romania.

Bucharest Tales, by Lidia Vianu (ed.)

Published in 2014 by Contemporary Literature Press (the online publishing house of the University of Bucharest), Bucharest Tales is part of the New Europe Writers series, the aim of which is to collect stories and poems relating to a particular city (others are Tales from Warsaw, Prague, Budapest and Ljubljana).  New Europe Writers’ aim is to ‘capture the spirit of a united Europe.’  Much of the editorial work and translation was carried out by the University’s MA Programme for the Translation of the Contemporary Literary Text.

Editor Lidia Vianu describes Bucharest Tales as ‘a collection of stories and poems about old and new Bucharest, written by Romanian writers of two generations, and by foreigners who have come to know Romania and its capital,’ though while it provides a connecting thread, despite the title Bucharest does not always appear.  The book presents a mix of new voices and well-established writers such as Dan Lungu and Mircea Cărtărescu, and as there are over 50 contributions in about 260 pages most are short.  Some are extracts from longer works, such as Mike Ormsby’s chapters from Never Mind the Balkans, Here’s Romania.  Where appropriate the Romanian and an English translation are presented in parallel.  Contributions were not always originally written in Romanian: quite a few were written in English, and a couple are translated from other languages.

With so many voices there is bound to be a multiplicity of takes on Romania.  If there is an overarching theme it is interrogating past history and the changes it has wrought: these include the meaning of independence, the shift from monarchy to fascism to communism, then capitalism and the EU; and the processes of demolishing and rebuilding both society and the physical structure of the city.  Modernisation is considered a mixed blessing, bringing with it corruption, wide disparities in wealth, heavy traffic, homogeneous buildings with a loss of style, fringe beliefs – in general the atomisation of society.  City life can be surreal, and wry humour used as a coping mechanism.  There is some nostalgia for the old times, when people knew where they were even if they experienced shortages and less personal autonomy.

It is always valuable to be exposed to different perspectives, but Bucharest Tales would have been improved by including more Romanian writing and less by non-Romanians.  The latter may be valid as a depiction of Bucharest, but it does not always have the feel of an insider’s lived experience.  A few of the contributors, judging by their biographical details, have had little connection with Romania, making one wonder to what extent the selection was based on easy availability of material and permission issues.  Even with those qualifications, the prose aspects are generally engaging, though some of the poems feel weak in comparison.  Nearly all the writers included were still alive at the time the anthology was compiled, which reinforces the contemporary feel and Makes Bucharest Tales a useful window on that contradictory city.

București NonStop / Bucharest NonStop

București NonStop, directed by Dan Chișu (2015), intercuts a number of stories over the course of a night, linked very loosely by a small 24-hour convenience shop (the titular NonStop) opposite a block of flats in a dingy part of Bucharest.  The shopkeeper, Achim, watches people drift by, his cynical exterior hiding a compassionate heart.  Unlike in Clerks (1994) the shop is not the focus, though one suspects the influence of the name Quick Stop Groceries in Kevin Smith’s film on NonStop, and Achim’s back-to-front baseball cap echoes that worn by Silent Bob.

The heart of the story is the block itself and a handful of its residents.  A prostitute who wants to leave the city to see her child is driven to one last trick before she goes to the railway station without giving her pimp his 50% cut.  A pair of low-level criminals who scam motorists by staging accidents have to charge their battery before setting off.  A taxi driver who comes to collect the prostitute lends them his cables.  While waiting for her at her appointment he suspects her of intending to skip and phones the intimidating pimp, leading to violence.

A cheating boyfriend tries to get his girl back but cannot get into the building to express his contrition, despite his best efforts; his mobile’s battery has expired and at his wits’ end he begs a reluctant Achim for help.  In her flat the girlfriend is being consoled by, and torn between, two friends, one of whom thinks she should dump him, the other arguing he should be given a second chance.  The errant lover throws stones at her window, but some fall against the window of the flat below in which, the best realised of the strands, an elderly couple bicker, nagging away at old hurts.

Through all this, Achim is a stable point in the little shop, acting different parts as circumstances require: offering advice, berating or helping those who pass before his window.  As dawn breaks the stories are resolved, for better or worse (with poetic justice in the case of the scammers, reconciliation for the estranged lovers, an act of contrition towards the prostitute by the taxi driver, and an abrupt conclusion to the old couple’s long marriage).  In the final shots the camera looks down on NonStop far below as life continues around it, the new day promising fresh dramas on this small stage.

For some reason the film is billed as a comedy, but while it has its amusing moments the general tone is compassionate but unsentimental.  The one unredeemed character is the pimp, a boorish, bullying, hypocritical family man who abandons a wedding to exercise his power over a helpless woman.  Otherwise, in its unflinching look at characters who have not always behaved well one finds selfishness and sadness, but in some of them also kindness, generosity, and a desire for connection.

The subtitled film is available on Cinepub.