We return with the second part of our interview with Andrei Gorzo, film critic and theoretician, whom we spoke in the context of the premiere of his newest book: The life, death and again life of film criticism / Viața, moartea și iar viața criticii de film, published by Polirom. In this part, we discuss about the history of Romanian film criticism and cinephilia through the prism of the late Alex. Leo Șerban and then passing onto an international territory, speaking about Andre Bazin and his theory of cinematic realism, but also about Graham Greene, whose correspondence with the Romanian translator Petre Solomon is analyzed in-depth in one of the book’s chapters.

Let’s go back to Alex. Leo Serban – who is already a mythological figure, especially for those who didn’t have the chance to interact with him while he was alive. He’s also especially relevant for the Romanian cinephile culture because he introduced a very cosmopolitan approach – which you analyze and deconstruct in the book.

I do not deconstruct them – I just appreciate their limits, which are natural, after all. He had some blind spots, but I guess all critics have their own. The problem is not that Alex. Leo Serban did not notice the importance of Iranian or Taiwanese cinema – the problem is the discourse that was created about him post-mortem. The way you show your respect for a critic who has passed away, or your concern for perpetuating his or her intellectual inheritance means that you must always turn a critical eye towards it. And that didn’t happen to Alex. Leo Serban – he fell victim to this festive disease of our local discourse. His figure was embellished with all sorts of beautiful words that don’t say anything concrete. And, on top of this, neither his fans nor his detractors actually read his texts carefully after he died – maybe not his entire oeuvre, even just a couple of them – in order to treat them as an object of analysis.

Do you think a critic like him, or at least a figure like his, can be repeatable? And beyond this highly, as seen by Alex. Leo Serban today, what is his relevance now?

I don’t think that his work is being read anymore, and it seems to me that a lot of the blame for this situation lies squarely with his fans. All critics who are become classics owe this status to the fact that they’re being (re-)read critically. This critical approach may even be a devastating one, after all, because a work that resists over time is implicitly also a work that resists to successive waves of criticism, even flat-out dismissals. Mummifying a figure such as Alex. Leo Serban doesn’t help at all – because the virtues of his criticism are not transmissible in that sense. You can’t come and teach young people that they should “respect and admire this guy, cause he was great”. It is only through continuous engagement with what he has written that you may achieve something like this. Consequently, if he’s not being read, his figure will remain as a kind of sentimental fetish to an ever decreasing group of people, who will not be able to attract others into their group – again, to achieve this, some kind of contact with his texts is needed.  A contact that is respectful and intelligent, but certainly not pious and romantic. What he left behind – for good or for bad – that is it.

Of course, his importance was not just limited to the texts he wrote. And he may have been very important for his generation, for the cultural milieu of the time for things other than his texts. The fact that he was doing introductions to films, or the fact that he had large access to movies and magazines which couldn’t be found in Romania back then, since it was much more difficult to obtain them, before the advent of the internet. He and others introduce them in the country like a sort of smuggler: they brought video cassettes which they passed on between each other, which is something that played a very important role in the local cinephile culture. It’s the same notion that Serge Daney pushed – the passeur, a figure which is something between a guide and a smuggler.

Alex. Leo Serban was a passeur, and so his merits in this area are conjectural – they belong to that era, so it’s harder to explain to someone who is young nowadays, who grew up with the Internet, how important it was to have someone like him doing these things for the local cinephile circles.

Examples of auteurs that he popularized are directors such as Lars von Trier and Wong Kar-Wai, for whom he waged entire campaigns. He was one of the last people who had the power to introduce authors within these circuits. It wasn’t only him doing this, of course, but he did it zealously. Sure, he had a lot of energy, he was tireless – and he had many places that would publish his writings, ranging from super-popular platforms, such as the daily newspapers to cultural, intellectual magazines, with claims such as Dilema Veche.

And he was also highly theoretically informed.

And he was theoretically informed, yes, but he was also very excited and involved – when the blogs and forums appeared in the early 2000s, he was there arguing with various web surfers in the comments, defending his tastes. Back then, there was an interesting phenomenon going on, a cinema underground that thrived on the Cinemagia forum – on which all kinds of moviegoers, cinephiles and critics (some of them even active to this day) used to hang out, It was a group of several dozens, then hundreds, then thousands of members, who read the debates on the forums and were very passionate about them. Alex. Leo Serban used to frequent these circles – he had this thing, you know, he was absolutely everywhere.

He and Cristi Puiu seem to be the last cultural figures who had the power to introduce filmmakers and certain currents of cinema to the local circuits: Puiu did it with Frederick Wiseman, John Cassavetes, Raymond Depardon and the observational documentary, which was completely unknown to the local culture at the time. And Alex. Leo Serban did it with filmmakers like Lars von Trier and Wong Kar-Wai. This part of his achievements belongs to the respective epoch, and so, to the rest of the world, what remains behind is his texts – and it is important that they continue to be discussed and criticized. Because, otherwise, Alex. Leo Serban risks to remain a figure that had a clear mark on his contemporaries, but who didn’t manage to pass onto future generations.

As I say in the book – I’m on the side of a film culture that is a wider, common culture. I have not abandoned the idea of ​​a common culture. And I know that it’s delicate to say this at the present time – what is meant by common culture, who is qualified to talk about certain types of experiences, why would, say, a Roma, queer woman identify with a film such as The Death of Mr. Lăzărescu, that is made by a white, heterosexual man –

– about another …

… but my position firm: this idea shouldn’t be abandoned. If we don’t make an effort to get out of our own boxes, we shouldn’t be proud of it.

We must not give up this ideal that has recently been downplayed, even ridiculed by some critics: to also regard the transcendent dimension of cinema. Transcendent in the sense that art can tell us things that are not necessarily universal, but things that we have common. That we can achieve common humanity.

And of course, when I say this, I know this recommends me as this somewhat old-fashioned humanist, but I’m really clinging to this idea. Without it, what remains is a world of Marvel, Netflix, a world of gigantic advertising budgets and, circling around these suns, all kinds of small groups, niches and sectors. This is the reason why I agree with the idea of a canon of cinema – which, of course, does not have to be that of Andre Bazin or of Cahiers du Cinema. It needs to be constantly improved. And I agree with the criticisms that address various canons, especially those that identify them as eurocentric and patriarchal, of favoring certain genres to the detriment of others according to elitist criteria, to a hierarchy that closely resembles class structures. You have to bring about films of various kinds, like films from Africa, Asia, and Latin America, films made by women, queer films – of course. It must be a varied selection, but still, but we must not give up the idea of ​​a canon, the idea of ​​value, of a list of masterpieces that we can be proud to pass on to others, others that we can thusly initiate into cinema. I simply cannot give this idea up.

Returning to ALȘ. He was the first local intellectual to talk about about films from across the field and about camp, writing about certain cultural products – from movies with Betty Davis to series like Sex and the City – from a perspective that was recognizable for the LGBT community (or for those who know how messages related to non-normative sexuality are coded). I think that this is also an important part of his legacy that should be discussed. He was a very complex figure – he was gay, he was a dandy, he was also conservative in some ways. There was something about him (though, that something was not religious), this concern for spirituality, that a conservative intellectual such as Horia-Roman Patapievici can detect very well: in fact, he wrote one of the best texts about Alex. Leo Serban, which is preface to his posthumous novel, in which he talks about his spiritual project. He was also a late modernist in some respects, even though many associated with post-modernism. A very complex figure.

To what extent it is repeatable – no, a career like his is not repeatable, because it depends on how the Romanian press was at that time. Looking at it now, from 2019, the press of the 1990s and 2000s seems very rich and healthy. It was a milieu in which Alex. Leo Serban was literally everywhere, and he was also interested in everything, speaking of highbrow and lowbrow. His brow was adjustable – but in a very controlled way. He wrote for Dilema Veche, but also for Elle, or in dailies, using different kinds of discourses. His career cannot be repeated because of the absence of these conditions and, more so, the institution of the film critic has a different function now. Alex. Leo Serban was valuable because there were not many people like him, who could dabble in the foreign festival circuit – especially not in the nineties, where Romanians hardly traveled abroad, period. He took the pulse of the Cannes film culture and brought it back home, to the local audience.

Now, that is no longer such a big deal – you and other critics are far more connected to the international milieu than he was. You, for example, are connected to this world of festival-affiliated criticism. He went to festivals as a Romanian critic, in the end: he got there and he took his badge,  went to some projections and wrote correspondences for Romanian publications, while you and other contemporary critics are much more cosmopolitan than he was. Alex. Leo Serban was incredibly cosmopolitan in the context of the nineties, but now, he no longer would be considered cosmopolitan. Young critics nowadays write for all kinds of websites and publications in English, which have an international reach and are a part of this world that is neither localized or centralized – the international milieu that is somewhat dispersed, an informal network of international cinephiles. So, you’re doing something different, in comparison to him. When I write about him or George Littera, or about André Bazin and other figures in the book, I admire them, yet, I don’t state that any of these people can or should be imitated. These are people who set inspirational personal examples, but none of them can be emulated directly, because they were people who functioned in times (and worlds, even) which were highly different, and so, it is clear that the function of the critic must be reconsidered nowadays.

Of course, certain responsibilities are likely to remain even so – such as the notion that a critic should enrich the local cultural landscape, as well as enriching the discourse around a particular film.

And a person which, by default, has the role of an educator, of an opinion leader.

And a person who is tasked with making the discussion about these films more interesting, to contribute by proposing certain analytical tools and concepts. To put the film that is being discussed in contexts that the viewers did not initially think about, which stimulates their own reflection about the film. This seems to me as a perennial and long-lasting function of film criticism. But, of course, in 2019, you must find certain solutions to these tasks that are different from Alex. Leo Serban’s solutions, who was active in the immediate aftermath of the Romanian Revolution, whose own solutions were also very different from the solutions of Andre Bazin, who started working right after (even, during) the Second World War.

Bazin was also engaged in a form of political resistance too, after all. Related to this – do you think it is still possible for someone to formulate a unifying theory as powerful as the theory of cinematic realism, like the one in Qu’ est que c’est le cinema?

No. That being said, it is still a very influential theory.

But certain technological developments that have been around since the end of the twentieth century have led to very interesting expansions of the theory.

Sure, but it is still a good starting point in discussions about film theory – encapsulating what the era of photographic cinema was and what happened to it: now, we are in the era of post-photographic, post-filmic, digital cinema. Still, Bazin remains a good starting point for discussions based on notions such as real-time, „dead” time, one-single-shot versus shot-countershot. It’s not to say that other, more precise and easily applicable theories about cinema haven’t appeared in the meantime, but the theory of cinematic realism is still relevant. One of the amazing things about Bazin’s theories is the fact that they practically drew the margins of the discoursive map, at the time – which have of course been much improved since then – but, this is still the territory. It is absolutely remarkable that this is the territory which we are sailing on, so many decades later.

Besides all of this, Bazin was a model of energy, of equanimity, of amenity – this legendary generosity of his, his complete lack of negativity… it’s quite something that after his death, everyone described him as a saint, and they were not just empty words. He seems to have been a good man. It’s a touching part of his personality to me, all the more so because of these virtues that I do not, and never will have. I am closer to the aggressiveness of one Pauline Kael … In my book, in addition to the fact that I want to make a kind of map (a very schematic one) of the history of film criticism and the point at which it is right now, I added some chapters that are quite personal, about things which are personally important to me. And, of all my books, this is the most personal one.

That’s true! You also have here a very interesting chapter on the correspondence between Graham Greene and Petre Solomon, the Romanian translated. You made yourself known as a Greene fan.

Like Bazin, he is a very important figure for me, and he and Bazin have a number of things in common. I am attracted to these Western Catholic intellectuals, associated with a literary-philosophical current that enjoyed intellectual popularity immediately after the Second World War and in the 1950s: Catholic existentialism. Both – Bazin and Greene – can certainly be placed in this current. I am not a Catholic – I am Orthodox by baptism and I identify as an atheist, but it is a sensitivity that speaks to me. Or, at least, it did so in my late teens – when I read the entire oeuvre of Greene, but also of François Mauriac and others – and it still moves me now. It is a kind of literature in which religious faith does not make life more comforting, or easier to endure – in any case, not immediately – but on the contrary … I am interested in one more thing in Greene and in Bazin, which I think that has they also had in common: certain forms of intellectual independence in matters concerning their political positions in the Cold War, against the two great ideological blocs and powers – the United States and the Soviet Union. Without being neutral, they were aligned in ways that interest me and which, on a personal level, continue to inspire me in this moment of intense political polarization, of very angry propaganda blocks – although today’s world is very different, with only one great pole of power which, as a consequence, should be viewed as critically as possible. For me, Bazin and Greene, although they worked in completely different worlds, are inspirational. They had a kind of being that very reflective and dialectical, one that “did not go with the flock”. The fact that they took risks, reserving their right not to be loyal to any camps, or to be considered traitors … I really like it. From Greene’s literature, I learned to reject Manicheism, I learned how to think in phrases starting with “on the other hand”, I learned that none of us have any reason to be extremely proud – there is always another angle to look at our moment of glory, one that makes it seem pitiful. Sure, I could have learned these things just as well from other good writers, but it happened to be him.

I understand that you received access to the respective archive of letters from Alexandru Solomon, the documentarian. How did you work on structuring the information from these letters, how did you reconstruct the course of action?

Alexandru and Ada Solomon let me read them. I read (and re-read) them in chronological order and took time to think about them for a long while before I started writing, because it seemed like there was a narrative there, although I still had some doubts – I thought it might have been just my own interest in the case as a fan, and that nobody else would be interested in these things, these small, mostly professional discussions between a British writer and his Romanian translator. On the other hand, there, in the letters, was also a story with two characters in which larger things happen – time goes by during these correspondences and political and historical changes take place. There was also a contrast between the worlds of the two, so I saw a narrative there, which I tried to bring to the surface: two characters that, through themselves, bring these complex things to the surface. I felt that it had a place in this book, although it is not a text about film criticism – because it fits in with certain recurrent topics in the book, such as the Cold War.

In the third part of the book, where you have a series of applied studies on a couple of films, you also analyze Toni Erdmann (r. Maren Ade, 2016), which (at least to me) seemed to have been insufficiently discussed film in Romania, which paradoxical, given it takes place here. I thought it was important that you re-evaluated it here.

Yes, it is a text that is co-written with Veronica Lazar, my partner. It is an important film, which many international critics recognized as such at the time. They considered it to be even better than the film that won Palme d’Or that year: I, Daniel Blake by Ken Loach. It’s a very interesting film in many ways. First of all, because it is a film that casts a bridge of friendship between arthouse cinema and popular films. It’s a festival-fare kind of cinema, but at the same time, it is very accessible, although the humor is idiosyncratic, even though people sometimes don’t get it. Also, it’s interesting if you regard it as a film about Romania. It shows a different Romania than the one shown by  Romanian filmmakers, who were not interested in this universe of multinational companies.

Yes, it is a complementary vision. The New Romanian Cinema points to the dysfunction of the state – and Maren Ade was interested in a central character that is engaged in a form of savage rapacious capitalism, who hides under the guise of a comfy technocratic job and in nightclubs like Bamboo, who takes measures that negatively affect countless lives.

And their very colonial attitude is a strong point in the film, which is full of small sharp observations. Romanian filmmakers have not yet approached these things from critical positions, and my theory regarding this fact is that, in the eyes of the generation that created the New Romanian Cinema, this foreign capital is still part of a kind of aspirational horizon, it is associated with the positive idea of ​​westernization, of integration in Europe. Still not criticizable. It’s a taboo here. Who knows, maybe some authors associated with the New Romanian Cinema still think that the haunting austerity that was enforced between 2010 and 2012 was a good measure, while in Toni Erdmann, it is clearly looked at in a  critical way: one of those CEOs in the film says this thing about Romania at one point, in a very patronizing way: that, unlike Greece, we had done the right thing during the crisis. And he says it like a sort of colonial administrator, proud of his subjects, caressing their heads.

To me, it is one of the important films of the decade. It should have been discussed much more in Romania because it brings a vision that is really complementary.

In closing, let’s go back to criticism. Earlier, you mentioned the ghettoization of art films, which takes place in both local and international film criticism. Referring to models of independent film criticism magazines which are fighting against this phenomenon – such as the Slow Film Project by Dana Linnsen, who was one of the inspirations of Irina Trocan and Andrei Petrescu when they founded Acoperisul de Sticla – which are the chances of this style of criticism to survive and what will happen to these fragile, informal institutions, but also to the people who compose them? There have been many cases in the past years of local critics who have given up.

I would not know how to prophesize who will remain or who will retire, in the long term, if we look at the critics which are active now. The point is, if you don’t have some sort of inheritance or if you’re not a landlord, you will have to find a job that you can live off, but which shouldn’t eat away all of your the time so that you can continue to write criticism. And you don’t have to stop, you have got to keep doing it. I don’t know what can keep you going, because the current situation is truly disheartening, especially when you start to wonder who is even reading our writings.

It is clear that we do not all have the same level of energy, the same level of motivation – there some people who get discouraged, and others who go ahead. Because maybe they feel that they have no choice, because this is what they want to do, they feel a compulsion to express themselves and to write. Whether they writing for one person or for hundreds of thousands of people. And this is the ideal situation – to feel just as motivated when writing for a few readers or for many. It is definitely an advantage if you can write not only in Romanian but also in English and if you have some connections with the international network, both peers and an international film audience. This is one of the big gains of the moment, the opportunity to work on two fronts. You have, on the one hand, a responsibility towards the Romanian cultural sphere, which I do perceive myself, even if it sounds somewhat pompous; on the other hand, it’s great if you can do that on an international level. The human quality of the young Romanian people who are now active in criticism, the level of professionalism they reach before they even turn 30, is incomparably better than they were in my generation.

This level of connection, of cosmopolitanism, is, if I try to look at it from the late ’90s, when I was starting to publish – not to mention the early ’90s, when Alex. Leo Serban started out – it’s unthinkable.

However, ours is a generation that has also benefited from other opportunities, especially from the circuit of international workshops for young critics. And you, yourself, were in the Berlinale Talents program in its first generation.

When I went to college in ’97, it was still so hard to get out of the country, as a Romanian: you needed visas, you had to show money on leaving the country and so on. When I was a student, I was in New York for a year with an Open Society Institute scholarship, and at that time it was a very very special opportunity. At least from that perspective, it’s better nowadays. The downside is the structures you can integrate into – because you obviously want to be paid for it what you write, to publish in more places than your own blog, like publications and various platforms. It’s also important for the public, the potential readers, for these institutions to exist so that they don’t forget that there is this thing called film criticism. However, I indeed find out many times that another colleague has left the field of criticism, and whenever it happens I must admit that it saddens me.

 It is a precarious lifestyle. If, perchance, a major event would occur in your personal life and you could practically fall completely through the social protection net.

Obviously, yes. The best thing that can happen to you is to enter a university, but of course, the jobs are very very few and it is a matter of luck – you have to be there at the right time.

Or in curatorship.

Yes, but that is a harder life – it depends on public financing, which is also exhausting. Look at how wonderful initiatives like the NexT Cultural Society – which also had an important festival in Bucharest, that also ran a cinematographic education program – simply disappeared. It’s a fight. Initially, I resisted the offer to become a professor at the university, because it seemed more interesting, for me, to be a part of the press, to write critique, or to curate. I didn’t anticipate the crisis that was just about to come and I thought that it’s a lifestyle that you could handle, that you became more and more familiar with work and survival becomes easier. But if had I stayed there, it would have been very bad.

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.