More or less on Aurora and Bucharest, on factories and blocks and on art as a sophisticated riddle.
Interview: Constantin Goagea
Photo: Sorin Nainer
This article was published in zeppelin magazine number 97.
One room on Plantelor Street. After 20 minutes of talk with Cristi, am so absorbed that I almost forget we are recording it. We talk about film and architecture, what is beyond definitions. He speaks about the cinema beyond the clichés of a dictionary, while I talk about the unspoken side of architecture, the void.
….Cosmina comes in the room and sees us deep in the question of great criminals, those to commit murders through other, in wars, we are startled and say amused that yes, we talk as boys do. I get back to the transcript later on…
CG: I see, yet I wonder how Viorel does not disgust me, when I understand that he has a gun and means to do those terrible things. It’s from there, in his mind. Can you get into his mind?
CP: I really thought about myself, and the way I would do it, it is the only thing I thought about. How would a murderer do it? Have no idea! Even if I see it, perhaps I don’t get inside of it…
CG: I was fascinated by the city details you added up in the film. Not only about the city, how shall I say it, am fascinated by the city in your film and the unspoken stories, the cinema out of it. I keep wondering where this fascination for the suburbs comes from. Where from this obsession for periphery, for commonplace, for a non-spectacular reality of a Bucharest from neighbourhood… why not a noir fancy, an elaborated noir? Why from the whole Bucharest where you could say the same story, let’s say in Cotroceni or in Prim?verii, and where you could have product placement for Bentleys, and you actually went for this place? Your character could be anywhere, yet you went for an oppressing periphery. And this factory… a whole show in itself…
CP: This is not a factory you may see every day, it is the niche of a niche… They make those gigantic tanks you see in the fields and have no idea where they come from.
CG: Was this the former IMUAB, wasn’t it?
CP: No, no, Grivita Rosie. Yet this is completely outstanding, as Andre Rigaux said, the sound engineer I worked with, and who thought that these people are gnomes, they produce some pointless things there. They were truly incomprehensible, you know. You went in each unit, and there were some small pieces, and it was like that to the end… certain abstract items… and this excited me. I felt it answers my concept, that people make abstract things which, once assembled, lead to this reservoir which you call tank, cistern, because you can see it. You see that it is actually a container for something, meant to have water. Yet if you go from one unit to the other, you don’t get to this, because they make individual pieces. They finally fit each other and turn into the object making sense. I felt this is a kind of an answer: when you along this journey, you need certain signs to point you that you are not on the wrong way. When I wrote the script, I imagined some tings in spaces I am familiar with, in places I knew. When I was expelled from the 12th grade the second time, I had to work, could not go for full-time study again and had to go for evening classes.
CG: Have you repeated the grade?
CP: I was repeating the grade and then expelled; completed the high school in seven years. And had to work, I started working in my neighbourhood [we start laughing since we realized that we grew up/lived in the same area]. I worked in the glass factory, it was actually a company subordinated to the glass factory, something called IRDFCTB (Institute of Research and Design in Fine China Technology Bucharest). We used to cut glass blocks. There were blocks of raw glass, they were cut, polished and placed in front of a light fascicle, they coloured some bubbles, and you were supposed to cut on the coloured lines, and send them to the Romanian Optic Company to produce lens, it was a special glass. That was the factory I knew. I worked for three months and they fired me for insubordination. Yet in those three months there was something I was fascinated about: a belt on which Coca-cola glasses were produced for export.
CG: I remember the glass blocks you mention…
CP: From the field…
CG. …across the other side of the glass factory, they were cool. Like the rubbish in Tarkovsky’s the Stalker; a field full of pools, goats and sheep and in between some bits of melted glass…
CP: …yes, yes, bizarre shapes, many people used to take them and put on the TV set. The famous glass fish on the TV set… everyone speaks of this, but there in the neighbourhood…
CG: …people had those bits of melted glass.
CP: …indeed, we had those at home too. And one could find various colours, the green was rather common place, but sometimes there was a certain yellow…
CG: There were iridescent flashes too in some of those, contaminated with something coating a nacreous layer… I understand you were marked by that factory, an industrial and absurd place, and represented it in this film… I was made pioneer in that factory!
CP: Yes, this was the glass factory, but one needs to be as flexible as possible for a film… when you write the script, you imagine the characters and the locations. The actors then don’t look like the imagined characters, neither the locations. You don’t just get it. The glass factory was dead when I started the film. Locating other operational factories, I wanted to shoot in an archetypal space standing exactly for what we know, what comes up to our mind when we say “worker”. I thought it was the steel-maker.
CG: Did you see this in the film as recapturing in the present of a traumatic social moment, including the personal point of view?
CP: Not at all. It is connected with my thoughts about communism and that world. I was actually close to communism. As a child, I was an ultra-communist.
We then get to photos and speak of them, the places in the blocks, their numbers, the chemist’s with a photocopier and tailor’s mending stand, all details are real…
CG: Apparently this is a comic world, full of incredible details, absurdly and constantly cheerful: the neighbourhood at the edge of Bucharest, a typical block with air conditioned and all the cables and pipes out, the entrance door dusty, the stairs broken by concrete thrown by trowel, but we see a new intercom, internet and digital TV cables, a single insulated floor. A world in full swing, signs of cosiness, a dubious welfare on top of old deprivation. Those blocks look similarly inside, unsafe facilities, furniture from the Ceausescu era… among them, new icons and TV sets, or a corner for the computer, yet the remains of the old furniture industry are incredible identical. Is this world tangled in its own foolishness and humour oppressing the serious Viorel? Viorel has a sharp eye in observing the petty details of life and is obsessed by precision: he measures manually the manufactured firing pin…
CP: …indeed, and keeps an eye on the money, the change in the shop and the factory…
CG: …rebukes Pusa’s courtesan (acting like a step-mother) sharply and firmly, rejecting his jokes and attempts of mundane talk. The end when he says that he is terrified by the inability of the law to get in the complexity of his former marital relationships indicates his obsession for details and emotional precision, a truly clear construction. This is a city which turns one desperate, turns one mad. Viorel is a man irritated by grotesque details.
CP: yes, that was the hint I could make. This film is about a relative unfitness and about temporariness. And if you think like that, you don’t need to demonstrate it. I wanted him to have unfit clothes, but not ostentatiously. It’s all about tones… the sports trousers yet ordinary shoes… and how people go to take the rubbish out in their neighbourhoods…
We remember the area again and we laugh, taking the rubbish out was a major thing there, in Ozana…
CP: …I wanted the film to follow those three things: unfitness, relativity, and temporariness. If you look around, the world is like that. I am not a critic; I am truly touched and am very connected to those expressions of life. Viorel lives in a relative world, marked by temporariness, in a film entitled Aurora – which again is an intermediate moment. If we refer to the title, for all of us what counts is the day and the night, but less the intermediate moments. We expect the light and the start of a working day, and then the night for sleep. Life is split in precise slots. In a world in which Viorel is obsessed by precision, in a film entitled Aurora and which suggests that world where I think there is no night and day, but a rather continuum (I am an optimist and I think there will be light), in a world of relative things, such unfitness around us are the marks of life. Interventions in the natural flow of life. What happens to Viorel who sees the world differently? And brings it to the end?
