MATEI PREDA AND THE ROMANIAN NEW WAVE

by Pablo Jimeno

This work consists of two main differentiated sections: the first one is a contextualization of the main cinematographic movement of the central European country Romania, the Romanian New Wave; from a brief review of the history of the country's cinema and the background of the movement, to the explanation of the movement and its common and main characteristics.

Subsequently, it consists of an interview conducted by the author with one of the emerging promises of the national cinema, the student Matei Preda. The interview addresses the vision of the young filmmaker and analyzes his possible proposal as an alternative to the predominant movement in the country during the last three decades.

Matei Preda

BACKGROUND INTRODUCTION

If we look for antecedents to this movement known as "Romanian New Wave" at cinematographic level in the central European country, we will find an overwhelming scarcity of material and results.

This is due to the fact that, for the most part, audiovisual production prior to the mid-20th century in Romania has been sadly devastated by the consequences of the passing of the years. The ravages of time have ensured that, although there is evidence of an abundant production of national works at the height of the silent film boom, only a few scanty evidences remain of this footage in the form of stills published in the press of the time.

Regardless of the impossibility of accessing and viewing them nowadays, we can know the type of works they were mostly about: works in the genres of drama and fiction romance, mainly adaptations to the big screen format of previously existing theatrical works. On the other hand, it is also worth mentioning an abundant production of historical works with a markedly political and propagandistic character.

The latter will be the protagonists of the development of Romanian cinema from the first half of the 20th century, specifically with the arrival of the communist regime in 1948, a period in which the country would replicate the importance given to cinema by Russia as a focus and tool for the dissemination and reinforcement of communist and socialist values. This support from the state would bring as a consequence a vast improvement in the constant technical and budgetary problems that had tormented the professionals of the sector throughout the previous decades.

However, the strong influence of the state in deciding and filtering the works to which it would provide funding based on criteria that were far from objective judgment and were clearly influenced by interpersonal relationships and individual economic and political interests, inevitably distorted most of the production of the time. This made more and more obvious and imminent the need for a structural reformulation of the national cinema, which would come from the end of the 80's with the fall of the Ceausescu regime and would last for the next decades, even maintaining a strong influence today: the "Romanian new wave" or "NOUL VAL ROMÂNESC".

The Death of Mr. Lazarescu (2005) Cristi Puiu

NEW ROMANIAN WAVE

This brings us to the period known as the resurgence of Romanian national cinema. The main differentiating key that makes this movement the most important milestone in the history of Romanian cinema is its function as a representative at international level.

A cinema of creators, performers and filmmakers emerged, who became regular participants in international competitions and awards of the stature of the Cannes Film Festival. Followed and praised by the specialized press, this new way of making cinema became known, mainly as a result of the production of the following two short films: Cigarettes and Coffee (Un cartus de Kent și un pachet de cafea, Cristi Puiu, 2004) and Trafic (Cătălin Mitulescu, 2004); the latter being awarded the Palme d'Or for best short film.

At the aesthetic level, we find ourselves before films with a marked common style characterized by austerity, realism and minimalism; mostly directly conditioned by the technical and economic limitations of the productions. Abundant shades of black humor are also a trademark of this trend.

Trafic (2004) Cătălin Mitulescu

In terms of tone, subject matter and context, this movement can be divided into two blocks following a chronological criterion:

The first would be the works set in the final period of the 1980s, conditioned by the imminent fall of the totalitarian regime of dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu (1974-1989). In this first period the films address and explore themes related to freedom, the capacity of resistance that society opposed against the communist regime of the dictatorship, resilience and other attempts of progress on the part of the people in the face of the unfavorable imposed policy. They are works loaded with a critical tone that focus on the exposure and denunciation of themes, realities and problems that had remained taboo until then.

The second period dates from post-communist Romania and contextualizes a modern and contemporary country, analyzing with a critical eye the effects that the Romanian Revolution that took place in 1989 (and ended with the execution of the Ceauşescu) had on society and the country. He also pays attention to themes such as the transition to capitalism or the new paradigms that the introduction of the market economy and democracy entailed for the citizens of this "new Romania".

THE NEW GENERATION’S ALTERNATIVE

Hereafter I will transcribe the conclusions of the interview I arranged with the young Romanian director Matei Preda, in which we discussed his vision of the NOUL VAL ROMÂNESC and his alternative proposal to the current that made his country's cinema known internationally and that remains in force as its main and almost only representative to this day.

Preda is a film student living in Bucharest who has so far made a series of independent short films framed mainly in a comic and humorous style and tone that inevitably contrasts with the sense of brutal and somber criticism that characterizes the Romanian new wave.

MATEI PREDA’S INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPTION

My thing with the Rumanian new wave is that I respect it, it put us on the map. Basically, the directors of the Rumanian new wave came in and shaped the Rumanian cinema in a way that it has never been done before. Everything was so exaggerated and over romanced, Rumanian new wave came in and grounded down to the realities that we faced. It talked a lot about the communist period and you really can feel its presence in many of the greatest examples from the movement. They really talked a lot about what kind of oppression our country went through, about how society is, about the flaws in our system, it basically constates, addresses and criticizes a lot of problems about Romanian society as it is.

And, in my opinion, it’s kind of stuck like that nowadays. It takes a lot of inspiration from direct cinema and cinema verité. It’s a radical change regarding stylistic choices. In the era before the 2000 you had variant degrees of cadences in the montages, you had a lot of sound problems etc., but mostly because of the technical limitations that these directors had. A lot of things come down to budget and what it manages to do and everything about the earliest stages of the Rumanian new wave are there because of budget cuts and extremely low budgets. These filmmakers came in and managed somehow to turn them into stories: everything happens mostly in an apartment, they use natural lighting, everything is raw and visceral. It’s easier, it’s cheaper to hold the camera in your hand than to invest on a dolly.

But what these filmmakers managed to do is turning this budget limitations into ways of storytelling. When you hold the camera in your hand its way more personal, it’s more of a subjective view, you basically engross the viewers and place them there somehow. The really long takes are meant to induce you in a state of melancholy or some kind of hypnosis and lets everything to play out in a sort of theatrical way; even though the acting is not theatrical, its grounded, realistic and just credible.

Another poetic license that they took with them after the fall of the communist regime and the period of rehabilitation was swearing. There is a lot of swearing in these films, sometimes a bit too much to the point where it’s absolutely hilarious how much swearing you can find in one dialogue.

But the thing about Rumanian new wave is that it’s to be looked at through the prism of history. You need to understand what came before in order to understand the relevance for it now. And that’s what I didn’t quite get when I started watching this cinema. When you are a teenager you just see a boring gag long take, people dragging on about how shitty is society and you just feel really miserable and depressed after you watched a movie. And I thought, why should I put myself through that? I already have enough problems myself. I want to watch a movie in order to scape my reality, not see my reality on screen. But that’s the importance of it, I guess. It’s the way you look at going to the movies or making a film.

That’s up to the philosophy of each director, do you want to show reality as it is and expose its uglier truths or would you rather doing a film more escapist which takes people’s minds of and let them out of this context for a while?

But it’s important to make clear that both options could serve the director to get a message, a critic about society across to the audience. It’s the manner in which you do approach this message which makes the difference.

With all that being said and having clear how many benefits this movement brought to our country’s cinema, I thing that this kind of films have become the standard that other parts from the world have come to expect from our country. This is what we are doing now and it’s the same that we have being doing for the last two decades.

I have seen some attempts but I really haven’t seen that much of filmmakers who have succeeded to join both and tell really good histories in a really fun and interesting way; apart from Nae Caranfil with his films such as Philanthropy (Filantropica, Nae Caranfil, 2002).

Filantropica (2002) Nae Caranfil

I really consider him to be the most balanced and well rounded out director in Rumania because he has both: the message and the entertainment value.

We really don’t have anything in between rather than him. I’d really like to see a local production which has got both, the critics about society and this intellectual aspect, but I still want to be entertained because that is why I went to the movies for the first time, that is why I still want to see movies every day. I went to the cinema and saw greatness, I saw wealth, I saw situations, I saw stories that kept me entertained, kept me there by the edge of my seat. They didn’t meander for like 3 hours just spitting criticism in my face.

I get it, Rumanian directors from the new wave are really smart, well read and well educated. But most times they make a movie they need to spit in your face and show you how dumb you are, how dumb society is, they laugh in a very high broad way. I am kind of done with that condescending tone.

I consider that a really good movie is the one that has both of these components: It is a movie that can teach you something, you can go deeper on it and it can very well be analyzed. But, at the same time it is a movie that can still entertain the average public without the necessity of being analyzed further if they don’t feel like doing it.

Gatekeeping is the word I would use. New Romanian wave’s cinema is kind of gatekeeping. It’s a difficult cinema to consume for the average society and that is basically putting a gate on who wants to watch it, on who has heard about it.

That’s why I think there should be more people filling in this gap, in either part of the spectrum. It’s okay to make a really daring criticism of Romanian society, but make it a bit fun, a bit more watchable. Or either make a really dumb comedy that maybe has one single thought behind that makes people think that it’s an interesting approach to something. Something that is dumb but it still has a clear intent.

I would like to see that but, obviously, I would also love to be the one who makes it that’s why I kind of aim to this. I know that till the moment I’ve mostly aimed more towards comedy, I think I am kind of a moderately funny guy, I like to be entertained and I love to laugh and to make the ones that surround me laugh.

From what I have gathered, Romanian films are not quite appreciated by the masses in Romania.

I want to tell stories and whoever wants to listen will, I don’t have a specific target in mind, to be honest. I don’t want just to aim for the festivals circle and the critics recognition. I actually want my films to be in the cinema, I want people who actually go to the cinema once in a while to want to go to the cinema and watch my films.

When I think about target, I do not really think about types of people but about type of cinemas; here in Rumania I would say that we can easily differentiate between two kinds of cinemas: the first type is the small ones which actually put on Romanian films and higher broad or authors productions. They are mostly empty and when you go there, they’re mainly people from the specific cinephile circle which you already know if you usually like going to watch this kind of movies. In the other hand, the other kind of cinemas are those huge cinemas placed in huge shopping malls that have the newest blockbusters etc. there is really few Rumanian directors who reach to have their films projected in both type of cinemas.

If I had to choose one of the short films that I have done till now I would probably pick “Câh”. It’s about quantifying the traumas, these certain negatives experiences that happen to you throughout your life and about what you are supposed to do with them. It’s not as humoristic as many of my other films, I guess it is a sarcastic way of portraying the subject of trauma. It is basically a film about me and about how I perceive the world, in the most obvious way. That is the film that I would consider most representative of the style I want to do in cinema.

Obviously, if I went back to it nowadays, I would probably modify some things but I still like the way the voice over helps the narrative structure without joining it. That’s the movie I would consider showing as “hey, this is my vibe! This is what I want to do”. Before I was mainly focused on being funny, on making gags and jokes that make people laugh; now I am putting more emphasis on what I want to say with each project, even if I still want to keep this humoristic tone in order to make it more watchable.

You have to be really delusional to think that you are the only one who does something or sees something in a specific way, but I guess it has been noticed that my team’s way of working and approaching cinema is innovative and not that common in between our country’s filmmakers.

Comedy is a really hard thing to nail down and I am still trying to be on point, you really need to be perceptive on how you are dealing with it.

One of my colleagues says he sees comedy as a way to deliver even more drama. I agree with him to a certain extent because comedy cand really get a lot of hard truths across, it really has been used to criticize or expose things that portrayed in another tone could be too hard to digest. Comedy can make a lot of wonders; it can make the difference between a person wanting to hear what you have to say about a certain topic or just not giving a shit about it. At least make them laugh. As Jimmy Carr says in his Netflix special “His Dark Material” joking about a thing is not actually doing the thing, you can joke about anything as long as it is a joke and it is constructive; that is the wonder of comedy and that is at the same time what makes it so hard to do it properly.

I certainly do hope and I would definitely try to make a cinema that can fill this gap and take Rumanian cinema to the next step.

We are still just kids with dreams and aims of making shit happen, I think that we should not take ourself that seriously. Fuck it, just make movies, tell stories. Find your own thing and just do your own thing while you still can. "

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Harrison, A. (29 de September de 2016). The Calvert Journal. Obtenido de Sigue rodando: por qué la nueva ola rumana del cine no muestra signos de romperse: https://www.flavor77.com/articles/show/6830/romanian-new-wave-cinema-puiu-mungiu-porumboiu

Klein, B. (Dirección). (2021). Jimmy Carr: His Dark Material [Película].

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Preda, M., & Hurduc, T. (Dirección). (2019). Western cu toaster [Película].

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