It is almost useless to introduce Andrei Gorzo, given his important stature in the local cultural sphere. He is unquestionably the most important contemporary Romanian film critic and is appreciated as such in spheres that go way beyond those of the film industry, even the local one: soon, he participated in an international panel at Viennale which brought together some of the most important critics of around the world, in a discussion about the state of the art of criticism in these troubled times for the profession. Why troubled times? As you will find in the first part of our discussion, film criticism is facing a difficult existential crisis. And  Gorzo’s aim is to analyze in his latest volume, which was newly released at the Gaudeamus book fair : Viața, moartea și iar viața criticii de film (The death, and again the life of film criticism, Polirom), a volume unlike any other in the local publishing landscape, a deeply self-reflexive endeavor. Gorzo looks both at the history and the state of the film criticism in Romania and its leading figures, whole also he critically re-evaluating films such as Toni Erdmann (2016, dir. Ade or The Death of Mr. Lăzărescu (2005, dir. Cristi Puiu) – one of the films that stood at the basis of the extremely influential theories that he elaborated in Lucruri care nu pot fi spuse altfel (Things that cannot be said otherwise (2012, Humanitas).

In this first part of the interview, we discuss about the state of of contemporary film criticism, about its current crises and their root causes, but also about certain tendencies of local critical discourses. In two weeks, we will continue our discussion by talking about the legacy of Alex. Leo Șerban, Andre Bazin and Gorzo’s favorite author, Graham Greene.

I would start by quoting Radu Jude (who quotes Agamben): the map and the territory. In the introductory chapter of the book, you paint make a map of contemporary Romanian film criticism.

By and large, yes.

What is the composition of this map composed and what is its territory? And what are the directions, the important debates in contemporary film criticism, to the extent that they can actually be called thusly?

We have this paradoxical situation where, on the one hand, we have critics and theoreticians which have come along in recent years – from Victor Morozov and Flavia Dima to Christan Ferencz-Flatz – who are much, much more informed than the critics that were active ten, twenty years ago. These are some very, very good writers who are very informed and have a very rich cinephiliac background. On the other hand, of course, there is a problem with the local institutions of film criticism, meaning, the places where critiques are being published. I think the public is much more fragmented nowadays, but at the same time, the crisis of the Romanian cultural press (and of the Romanian press in general) has been completely devastating. No daily newspaper, or, at least, a daily website or platform has no columns for criticism anymore – and it’s not just about film, but also theater and literature. And as for the cultural magazines, there are some who are holding on to their positions, such as the Observatorul Cultural or the Dilema Veche, and there are some recent admirable initiatives, such as Scena9, which publishes critique, but there are very few such texts nonetheless, and this is dramatic. And, besides, many outlets simply republish press releases nonchalantly. So, what is being presented as a commentary or speech about cinema is openly publicity, they don’t even try to hide it.

To summarize, on the one hand, we have very good critics, on the other hand, film criticism, as a profession (at a popular level, not an academic one – that is another discussion) was largely cannibalized by advertising.

In the book you elaborate upon these aspects, about how advertising has captured much of the territory of criticism after the economic crisis, which also determined the crisis of the written press in Romania.

Yes, but the written press and the cultural press were literally pulverized by the crisis. These institutions have proven themselves to be very fragile. If we take a look at the situation of the field fifteen years ago, we can notice that, back then, there were all kinds of newspapers (and here I refer to the daily newspapers) that were extremely ambitious, such as Cotidianul and Gandul, which came out with packaged books and had all sorts diverse of columns where very smart people used to contribute. There seemed to be a large investment in the press: a cultural press, an incisive commentary press. And all of this suddenly disappeared, as if it never existed in the first place. Of course, this is very bad, especially for the audience. It’s dramatic.

Obviously, if you write and publish a lot of critiques, you give shape to an audience that becomes accustomed to it, which accepts it as a legitimate type of discoruse and so becomes interested in it. This audience can even be refined, so, it can begin to compare between the opinions of different authors and so. But, if critique is eradicated, people risk losing their habit of consuming a speech about cinema that neither extremely publicitary, festive or humorous.

Beyond economic circumstances, why do you think these institutions have proven to be very fragile?

I don’t know if there are any other criteria. They might have proven to be so fragile because they did not have a strong tradition. For us Romanians, film criticism never flourished – before 1989, of course, there were some very good things. There was certainly something very good about the fact that Tudor Caranfil or others could mold our local film culture using the shows which ran on the National Television station, where they had millions of people in their audience: by juxtaposing, for example, the sequence of the ball in Jezebel with the one in Gone with the Wind, with millions of people were watching this little lesson about cinema. And that is something that could only have had a good influence. But otherwise, even then, our film critique wasn’t something noticeably incisive in its commentaries, debates, there was nothing unique about the commentators who come up with ideas, concepts or methodologies. This does not mean that there were no prominent talents or voices back then: the world still remembers Ecaterina Oproiu and does so rightly. She was a sensitive critic, with a very nice literary style, who also built a school of thought around her – but, again, before 1989, there was not much in our criticism.

And after the Revolution there were some very interesting moments – like the one in 1993, when Alex. Leo Serban published “About a cinema that does not exist”, an article in which he basically discredits the entire post-communist film production at that time, meaning those films that were made in the first 2-3 years after the Revolution. It was certainly an important moment – and the fact that so many people were outraged after he published this article, some even asking for his exclusion from the Critics Association, shows how little the film industry and the world of Romanian film critics were used to with this type of article, which in the French press has an important tradition. It is not healthy if you only write this way, of course, but there must be a tirade from time to time in which you take it upon yourself, with the risk of seeming unfair and unfriendly, of putting everything through sword and fire. In the 1950s, Truffaut and the Cahiers du Cinema editorialists published this type of text once every few weeks, scorching the earth! The fact that so many people got so personally involved after the appearance of the text [“About a cinema that does not exist”] is significant: it shows that the local traditions regarding the discourse about cinema were rather complacent and prudent – and if critics were indeed raised, they would not give any names, they would remain very vaguely formulated. Alex. Leo Serban didn’t do that: he gave names, titles.

In fact, this argument is present in the two volumes which you have coordinated for Tact Publishing: “Politicile Filmului” [The Policies of Film] and “Filmul tranzitiei” [Films of the transition].

Yes – the first book is about the New Romanian Cinema and the other is about the films of the nineties, but the real battlefield is comprised of the Romanian cinema hailing from the communist period. There is a real dispute in regards to what we do with these films, about how we look at them and try to taxonimise them; things are not at all simple in this debate and it is a very sensitive area. But coming back to Film magazine: I recently read a text which was published there, an article about Mihnea Gheorghiu, who is a very controversial personality and therefore a delicate topic, and their solution was to write a festive text that avoids posing any problems – to ask questions, to acknowledge them. And that kind of article doesn’t really mean anything, actually.

So there is a tradition of complacency, which is the one that Alex. Leo Serban rebelled against in 1993 and we can see it going on, just like before, also nowadays. There are also newer developments, such as this growing acceptance of advertising in the territory of cultural commentary. For example, I’m thinking of a few recent dossiers from the Dilema Veche: one about Morometii II and one about TIFF. Of course, there are legitimate topics for a dossier, but while I was working at Dilema Veche, a dossier treated it thematic like it would have treated a problem. So, the subject was turned on many faces, it was approached from multiple perspectives. But the dossier about Morometii was clearly an advertorial, one that calculated to coincide with the release of the film in cinemas and, on the other hand, the film would have probably helped to sell the respective issue of the magazine. As for the dossier about TIFF, which, of course, is a very important phenomenon and an important institution of Romanian culture, they danced around issues such as: “What is TIFF?”, “What has it become across the years?” “How did it develop and how could have it be developed otherwise?”, “What kind of cinephile taste did it create?”, or any other related questions, such as questions regarding curatorship, or cinephile politics, or politics in general. But that was not the case in this dossier, which was purely advertorial and celebratory, while also taking the opportunity to sell Tudor Giurgiu’s newest movie, Parking, which was released immediately after the festival ended. The dossier included an interview with Marin Mălaicu-Hondrari, who is the author of the novel that was the basis of the script, in which the tone was equally complacent: he said things like “I hope Parking proves to be an immortal love story,” bla bla blah.

My fear is that when you risk writing a negative chronicle on something that is so promoted and publicized you will find yourself called as a hater, for people to ask what is with you, to accuse you of having a personal problem! Because the world is accustomed to having this kind of discourse and they end up being illegitimate – I find it very worrying. It is a symptom that a certain culture is unhealthy.

Because (as you mentioned in the book) many film critics who are looking for work are practically forced to work with partisan institutions in order to have an income some may even experience closed doors as a result of publishing critical articles, or, at least, are being asked a lot of questions. It is something that I have experienced myself.

In Romania, film critics can’t make a living out of writing articles. Before 1989, one could live from this activity – but now, it’s impossible. Of course, the ideal situation – which is the one that I am in – is to enter a university and be a professor, and then you don’t have to make a living from writing. When you’re paid, it’s fine, when you’re not, it’s not fine, but at least you have a salary, you have something to buy your bread with from other sources. But if you live out of writing articles about cinema, then you inevitably have to work either for the Film Union and its publications, or for TIFF (which, fortunately, runs the AperiTIFF magazine during the festival and so it can pay you to write there) – but the disadvantage is that you are clearly supposed to write advertising texts in there. There is also Les Films de Cannes a Bucharest, which produces very interesting brochures and invites critics to present films – but here you also have to dance around delicate topics. Fundamentally, maybe it’s not a good idea to get in such close contact with the big players in the film industry like Cristian Mungiu or Tudor Giurgiu – specifically, in business relationships where they are the ones paying you.

This is also a problem: in order to live from making commentaries about cinema, Romanian critics are getting themselves into a situation where they’re getting money from the people that they also write about, and this is a difficult situation to avoid, but it must be avoided – if you don’t, it becomes very complicated. Okay, when you are young, you go to do it once or twice, but then you realize that you’ve become a headpiece, and so your critical voice is being increasingly silenced.

I wanted to write about all of this in the book (because I had wanted to write about this for a long time), so, to try to make an article about the state of affairs in thirty to forty pages. I wanted to address these issues because they are not being talked about, or at least, they’re not being talked about honestly. Sometimes a little fight pops up on Facebook, but that’s about it. For example, Cristi Mărculescu once wrote an article attacking a number of film festivals in Romania, but he was working for other festivals at that time! He was in a conflict of interest! The least he could do was to start his piece by saying this outright, so that the reader would know who is talking to him, and from what position he is doing it!

Speaking of positioning and also quarrels on Facebook … in recent years there are very intense disputes on Facebook between two informal factions of critics: one which prefers an approach that is more (say) impressionistic, that avoids discussing too much about the political or social implications of certain films, and the opposite camp which, conversely, concentrates quite strongly on these aspects. How do you regard these conflicts?

In principle, one can write criticism in myriad ways, and that includes impressionistic criticism. It is a term that is often used as an insult and has turned into a label that many critics try to avoid, but in the end, there are very important critics who are impressionists, some even programmatically, like Manny Farber. He died long ago and was recently canonized, and rightly so – he was a critic who refused to practice a speech that was based on a thesis that would be argued for step by step. He had a very disoriented strategy in which he changed his way of working from sentence to sentence, from paragraph to paragraph, with high speed and virtuosity, sometimes idiosyncratically, both in regards to the thematic and form of the film he would be discussing. Impressionism is legitimate – it should not become synonymous with a kind of superficial criticism.

On the other hand, some critics and readers still have a priori resistance to political readings. Obviously, this resistance will probably disappear, because from what I see it, political interpretations and critiques are proliferating, and so that means that resistances to such discourses will decrease. Recently, even some Romanian critics who previously didn’t pay much attention to these issues have become more sensitive, to issues such as gender representation, the representation of minorities and social classes, they’re gradually incorporating it in their discourse.

The problem with political, ideological criticism is that if it’s mechanical, it’s boring. And every critic should avoid being boring – no one wants to get in the situation where readers know from the beginning what to say about the movie. But the problem is not the political criticism per se, it is only with a certain overly mechanical way of doing hermeneutics. Of course, you can also be mechanical while practicing other types of criticism, such as formalism.

You also talk in the book and about people who, based on a very precarious cinephiliac knowledge which is very American-centric, defend Hollywood cinema to the detriment of art cinema – and they sometimes also apply these mechanical grids.

You also had such a debate recently – surely, this is one of the big problems of our moment. People who might have otherwise watched European or Asian arthouse cinema, or other various alternative kinds of filmmaking thirty years ago, seem to no longer have the availability to do so. They watch Netflix series, and some of them defend Marvel films – I don’t specifically refer to this in the book, because Martin Scorsese’s attack on this type of cinema hadn’t yet been published as I was working on it, but I recognized some of my issues in his arguments. In his New York Times article, he didn’t say anything that would sound even remotely controversial for people like me or you – one of his points being that Marvel movies are essentially corporate art, in which every decision in regards to the film’s contents is the result of meetings, focus groups, market studies over market studies, where each and every ingredient is tested and pre-tested, in combination but also separately, on all sorts of different groups and samples of spectators… and if they don’t like the final product and the producers get scared, they reshoot everything in accordance to of some directions suggested by the test screenings.

Obviously Scorsese is right in noticing this and there should be nothing controversial about saying that there simply isn’t much to hope for, coming from movies like this: it’s an art that is completely impersonal.

It is quite surprising to see radical anti-capitalists defending Marvel movies or new installments in the Star Wars franchise against Martin Scorsese. They use the argument of anti-elitism as if these films had something to do with popular art in any real sense of the term. One of the things that happened during the twentieth century is that these two terms – snob and elitist – have become insults, and no one wants to be associated with these terms, and for good reasons too. But somewhere along the way, there was confusion at play: now is a time when are people who are taxed as snobbish or elitist people are those who have no economic or social capital, it is one that is at most one cultural. When a starving teacher, filmmaker, or columnist is branded as elitist because they advocate for a more varied cultural consumption, or when they argue against the ghettoization that Marvel and Netflix produce … it’s especially annoying when it comes from radical critics of capitalism. They seem to sympathize more with these empires than some fragile niches that promote Taiwanese or Iranian films. Something is wrong with this. Especially with the instrumentalization of the word “snob”. Snobs are people who exclude, while someone who proposes to watch Iranian films, South American films” include. Okay, maybe because some of these movies are more rarefied, which require some sort of training to be enjoyed… that’s secondary. But some of these films are not like that, they are quite easy to follow.

What do you think is the source of this equation between snobbery and certain forms of cinema, forms which are more austere, more formalistic, which evade traditional narrative policies?

These alternative forms of cinema are rejected simply because they are different to the ones the larger audience is generally used to. And the one that they’re accustomed to is the type of cinema which operates within the paradigm of classical narrative cinema, which is largely the same nowadays, even though it was developed and perfected by Hollywood in the first decade of sound film, in the 1930s – fundamentally, there is no difference between the films of the 1930s and most new Netflix series, at least on a narrative level, that is, how a story is told through images and sounds. It is a way of cinematographic narration that people are familiar with and so they can easily follow it, it’s a cinema which is very entertaining, and I would like to add that I do not think that it is a type of filmmaking that is revolting or passe: you can still make very good and interesting films using these parameters, and I don’t think there’s anything fundamentally wrong with the classic narrative cinema paradigm, it’s really healthy, alive and kicking.

Of course, at a first meeting with, these shapes of cinema which are more or less alternative to this paradigm may cause perplexity, fatigue, irritation and so on. Which can easily turn into a kind of hostility towards these films and their fans. There is also the thought that critics and moviegoers are suspected of defending their own territory and advocating pro dome, because, obviously, to get caught up in what is going on with these forms of cinema and to end up liking probably not a little. of training coming from some critics. This hostility probably comes from in part. It is true that these elite, refined, quality sectors of cinema – I mean here the art cinema, the festival cinema that is not mainstream, that is, not the ones in the main competition in Cannes, Berlin, Venice, but in films from Locarno, from Viennale, from Rotterdam – and a sect of very passionate people is created around them who may seem unfriendly and precious from the outside (and there are elements of prejudice in this culture). But this degree of hostility towards them, combined with ignorance, is profoundly wrong – it clearly wasn’t like this in the past.

The old kings of international art cinema – who were largely European, so Bergman, Antionioni, Fellini, plus Satyajit Ray and a few Japanese directors – were known to a wide audience and even had international commercial successes, such as La dolce vita and Blow-Up. While their contemporary counterparts, the cinema film stars – people like Pedro Costa and Lav Diaz – are completely, completely unknown outside the cinephiliac ghetto.

Outside of professionals, critics, curators and a group of dedicated filmmakers, there is an audience that goes to the cinema and is (in principle) willing to see a smart, art cinema – but probably not willing to see something that requires them beyond a certain threshold. Because they are professionals who do hard work, lawyers or doctors – and if at the end of the day, if they go to the movie, they don’t want to feel like they are being fooled, they don’t want to see a movie that offends their intelligence, but they probably don’t want to. they see something they have to work on, like films by Lav Diaz, which last between four and six hours. First of all because they are tired and this puts them to sleep, secondly because they have to work, give from them to make it interesting. Then it is normal that they will prefer an Almodovar, or a Haneke – a more accessible, more friendly area of ​​art cinema. There is nothing condemnable in this, but this hostility, austerity, this lack of curiosity is condemnable. Which goes as far as the idea of ​​retiring to the fact that Marvel is killing them. It’s a lobotomized perversity. It’s silly. It is definitely the job of critics to defend these films as well. You are a snob if you just fall into such a culture, if you refuse to come up with things of value from Hollywood – Scorseze gives all kinds of mainstrem examples, popular movies.

And not just films of his own generation, of the New Hollywood Cinema.

Yes! He makes an effort to find newer films and give examples of popular filmmakers who operate within popular genres, such as Ari Aster’s horror films, Sean Baker’s The Florida Project, Paul Thomas Anderson … extraordinary films can be made in Hollywood, but the diversity of cinematographic culture must be defended at all costs, because it is under assault. Those who attack it seem to only watch Hollywood movies, Netflix movies, while pretending to be ironic. So, they’re claiming not to look at Pedro Costa’s films because they’re part of a niche that is destined for a snobbish sect, so instead they watch Netflix, not because they’re “wasting time”, but because they’re operating so-called “symptomatic readings”, “getting themselves acquainted with the evils, with the diseases of late capitalism.”

The responsibility of critics right now is not to be intimidated by all of this and to continue to expand cinephiliac territories, to really fight for the de-ghettoization (if possible) of non-Hollywood cinema, of films which are spoken in languages other than English.

In two weeks, we will resume our discussion with Andrei Gorzo and discuss about the legacy of Alex. Leo Serban in the milieu of Romanian film criticism, about Andre Bazin but also about Gorzo’s favorite author, Graham Greene.

Flavia Dima

Film critic & journalist. Collaborates with local and international outlets, programs a short film festival - BIEFF, does occasional moderating gigs and is working on a PhD thesis about home movies. At Films in Frame, she writes the monthly editorial - The State of Cinema and is the magazine's main festival reporter.