Lucian Pintilie by Viorica Bucur
»I’m like an old madman who wants to retrieve the lost years of his youth, when he had so many things to say.« In Lucian Pintilie’s view, making films means a duty, a moral obligation towards himself and his fellowmen, but also a great pleasure and joy: the pleasure to communicate, the joy to live. However, to say about Pintilie that he is a filmmaker even if we add immediately: a great filmmaker is restraining and inaccurate, as he descends from a rare noble family that of the great showmen in the company of Visconti, Bergman, Kazan, Zeffirelli, Losey, and Fassbinder. Save for Duminica la ora 6 (Sunday at Six O’Clock) a film the director is not too fond of, for he thinks it is a simple and often a splendid exercise of »cinema language« (for, he says, »I believe that cinema begins where language ends«) the titles of Pintilie’s filmography represent a real meditation on the »spectacle« theme. What else is Reconstituirea (Reconstruction) if not an essay referring to productive machinery?! Other »faces of spectacle« are in Salonul nr. 6 (Ward Six), a spectacle of an inert, amorphous, miserable and brutal world in which wielding power is made by physical, mental and moral force; then in De ce bat clopotele, Mitica? (Carnival Scenes), a spectacle of the passional, political wildness and mockery in Romania; in Balanta (The Oak), a grotesque spectacle of »paraplegic communism«; in O vara de neuitat (An Unforgettable Summer), the spectacle of inventing the challenge of editing therefore of ethnic wildness; in Prea tirziu (Too Late), the somber spectacle of »transforming« communism; and in Terminus paradis (Last Stop Paradise), the tragic-grotesque spectacle of everyday living next to the revelation.
The most important and precious thing stemming from Pintilie’s theatrical experience is the work with the actor: »The common denominator of all my works on stage or on screen is a very complex and multiple work with the actors. I have never given psychological or esthetical advice for the stage or the screen.« His rehearsals have become famous as well as the numerous retakes shot in order to catch the most precise nuance of gesture, mimicry, voice, etc. From one film to another, Pintilie puts under continuous shooting our everyday habits, cowardliness, compromises a vital and regenerating shock for some people, but also a destructive and lethal one for others. Asking »Could somebody talk to Evil without altering his moral side?« he is not waiting for an answer, because he already knows it. However, the challenge must be faced, because in a creative process »the esthetic consequences could escape of artist’s control, but the moral ones never.«
Born on the 9th of November 1933 at Tarutino, he graduated from the Bucharest Drama and Cinema Art Institute in 1965 by staging Plautus’ Amphitryon. In the same year he began working in Romanian Television, directing telefeatures, but was released because of »lack of talent.« In 1958 he staged at different Bucharest theaters (mostly at Lucia Sturza Bulandra) Max Frisch’s The Firebugs, Gorky’s Children of the Sun, Bernard Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra, Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard, and Caragiale’s Carnival Scenes. With this last one, staged in 1969 in Paris at the National Theater, he became internationally known. In 1965 he directed his first film: Sunday at Six O’Clock, awarded at Mamaia, Mar del Plata, and Acapulco. »A film influenced by cinema study, it was also a beginning of my personal thinking. I wasn’t interested in its formal attributes, nor in the awards.’ In the spring of 1969 he finished Reconstruction. Dedicated to Victor Iliu’s memory, the film was an incision, very painful, however absolutely necessary, into the Romanian reality of the 1960s and, at the same time, a metaphor of what Romania of Ceaucescu’s times was and was about to become. The film was withdrawn from the cinemas after only a few weeks. »I do not accuse, I only describe things. And this is obvious in the film. In fact, the blames put on me and I’m deeply honored thanks to them are the very same ones, word by word, put on Gogol or on Caragiale.«
In 1973 he made for Yugoslav Television Ward Six, awarded at Cannes the OCIC (International Catholic Jury) Prize. It is a moving work about a locked-up world, closer to Solzhenitsyn’s universe than to Chekhov’s. »It’s a film for TV, made in two weeks and a half. It was a kind of intellectual fraternity: the Serbs welcomed me in a most affectionate way and not with too much money, as they felt amoral obligation to help an artist threatened in his own country.« Between 1974 and 1990 Pintilie settled in Paris, staging a series of plays hailed by audience and press as events of contemporary theater and opera: Carlo Gozzi’s Turandot, Chekhov’s The Seagull, Three Sisters, The Cherry Orchard, Molière’s Tartuffe, Ionesco’s Jacques or Obedience, Mozart’s The Magic Flute. Early in 1980 he came back to Romania to stage Carnival Scenes, later to become a film with the same title. Inspired by Caragiale’s work and planned as a synthesis of three wildnesses one passional, one political, and the one of an irresponsible kind of living: of mockery its making was sabotaged. Finally, in 1990, after ten years on the shelf, it was released. »In 1970, after Reconstruction’s premiere, I decided to dedicate the rest of my life to Romanian literature. Looking back after 20 years, those scripts ended in smoke. Each one a bomb, a torch, a candle, a buried film.«
Back in Romania in 1990, he became director of the Cinema Studio of the Culture Ministry, a studio which together with MK2 Productions (Paris, France) and Filmex Romania coproduced some of the most important films of these last ten years: Stere Gulea’s documentary Piata Universitatii (University Square) (1991) and feature Vulpe vinator (Fox-Hunter) (1992), Nae Caranfil’s E pericoloso sporgersi (1992), Mircea Daneliuc’s Senatorul Melcilor (The Snail’s Senator) (1994). In 1992 he adapted for the screen Ion Baiesu’s The Oak. An ironic incursion into the emotional, social and political chaos of Romania of the 1980s, it was programmed hors concours at Cannes under its French title Le chêne and was one of this festival’s events. In 1994 the short story Green Salad a chapter of Petru Dumitriu’s epic Family Chronicle became An Unforgettable Summer and competed at Cannes.
In the summer of 1995 the French Culture Ministry awarded him the title »Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters« and, only a short time after, he began shooting Too Late, screened in 1996 at Cannes in the competition. A film that prompted different reactions, it was considered by some critics »a settling of accounts with the Bucharest regime.« In September 1998 Last Stop Paradise was awarded the Special Jury Prize at Venice. The film presents an impossible love story that takes place in a world where the apocalypse became an everyday reality. »A lost hope is not a sin, sometimes it can also be a state of implicit despair and illumination. Last Stop Paradise might be a more precise and a more poetic title than one would think at first sight.« In 2000 Lucian Pintilie took the responsibility, as a director of Ministry of Culture Creation Studio, of finishing Cristi Puiu’s film Marfa si banii (Stuff and Dough), the financial expenses included. Screened at Cannes and awarded at Thessaloniki, it was voted by Romanian critics among the best films screened in Romania in 2001. Even more important, it introduced a fresh, new, modern, and up-to-date style of making films.
In September 2001 Dupa-amiaza unui tortionar (The Afternoon of a Torturer) competed at Venice. The script by Lucian Pintilie had as a starting point Doina Jelea’s book, The Road to Damascus, and chronicles »the history of a failed confession.« Frant Tandara, a former torturer in communist jails, is willing to confess his crimes to a journalist and former political prisoner. In the spring of 2002 Lucian Pintilie began shooting Cind din cap creierul iese afara (When Brains Get Off Your Head) (2003) from a script by Cristi Puiu and Razvan Radulescu and with a cast which brings together some of his favorite actors: Victor Rebengiuc, Razvan Vasilescu, Coca Bloos, Dorina Chiriac.
Translated by Stefania Ferchedau