Documentary Film Award, Romanian Filmmakers' Union, 1993
Best Video Award, Costinesti National Festival, Romania, 1993
Experimentarl Film Award, Mediaware International Film Festival, Győr, Hungary, 1994
Third Prize, International Anthropological Film Festival, Romania, Sibiu, 1994
First Prize, Documentary Film Festival, Cotroceni National Museum, Romania, 1995
SHRIEK INTO THE EAR-DRUM
The romanian avantgarde 1916-1947
The history of the romanian artistic avantgarde movement
begins at the same time with the europan one, in the winter of 1916.
Young artists, german and romanian refugees,
gather around the Cabaret Voltaire in Zürich.
The DADA movement is born.
Among its promoters, Tristan Tzara and Marcel Iancu.
Here is a hesitating world on the run.
And there are on the other side the tough new men
jogging on the backs of sighs.
Here is a mutilated world, and there are the literary healers,
busy at enriching it.
I warn you, there is no beginning and we are not trembling,
we are not being sentimental.
We tear up like a wild wind the clothes of the clouds
and of the prayers, and we prepare the great show of disaster.
The great fire.
The decomposition.
We prepare the suppression of pain and we replace tears with sirens,
stretching from one continent to another.
Pavilions of joy, bereft of the sadness of poison.
DADA is the method to learn abstraction,
even advertising and business are poetical elements.
The violent protest of the entire being directed
towards demolishing action is DADA.
The abolition of memory - DADA.
The abolition of archeology - DADA.
The abolition of prophets - DADA.
The abolition of the future - DADA.
The unchallenged faith in any God readily produced
by spontaneity - DADA.
Freedom - DADA.
DADA.
Roar of crammed paint.
Meeting point of all contraries, of all contradictions,
of every grotesque motif, of any incoherence, life.
I can imagine Urmuz in his lifetime,
especially in his social life of miserable conventions
as a child - locked up by his parents in a room.
There, his only corespondent action would be to overthrow
the oppressive order, to torture and alter
the utilitarian meaning of every object he'd been locked up with.
Thus, the box of the piano is filled up with odds
and ends on the shelves.
And Napoleon looks better with a mustache. and ends on the shelves.
And Napoleon looks better with a mustache.
And the objects on the table look better under the bed,
and those under the bed - in the fireplace.
These mere-pranks, these childish gests that will never be given
the attention they actually deserve,
nevertheless keep locked inside them a core of genuine
and perfect tragedy.
Urmuz, a prisoner of his lamentable life, did the same in his writing.
Down with art, for she has made herself a prostitute!
Poetry is nothing but a press to squeeze a tear gland
of girls at any age.
The theater - a prescription for the can food marchend's melancholy.
Literature- a flat clistor.
Drama - a jar of painted fetus.
Painting - the rag of nature laid in brothel saloons.
Music - a means of locomotion in the sky.
Sculpture - the science of dorsal fondling.
Architecture - an enterprise for pompous tune.
Politics - a job for sextons and brokers.
The moon - a brothel window on which the kept man of the banal knock
and starving men from arts wagons rest.
We want the wonder of the new and self-contained world.
The plastic, rapid and strict expression of the Morse operator.
Abstractism, also called cubism by those in the wrong, means,
first of all, the liberation of painting from the aspects of life
and from outer science.
Ultimately, abstractism neglects the model, the aspects of nature,
the old pretext for painting.
It is no longer the interpretation of the outer world,
nor does it look for support inside that world.
It is inner, it is personal.
The contemporary soul demands its city build anew.
The modern art had found its definitive seal by this city roads overflow.
Constructivist architecture through its abstract harmony,
through its balance of essential forms sets itself as a firm, unremovable necessity.
Houses must no longer be thrown at random along streets full of holes.
They must be built massively in a constructivist way,
bearing the entire hard and sensibility of this age.
Cinema is the drama of motion.
In a photogenic picture, the actors, the background,
the Lilliputians scenes, the coincidence of different moments,
are all nothing but tools, for filmmaking is the first art
which through its very nature leaves imitation behind
and creates the fantastic.
From the concert of machines, free of the idiocy of principles,
the 75 horse power has started its way towards tough achievements.
Above, the flashing, incorrigible, non formula personality
of the painter Victor Brauner.
By his side, the daring Ilarie Voronca,
Stephan Roll, Miguel Donville.
With such elements, art will remain forever new.
It is hard to over estimate the contribution of the modernist
experience to literature and to the visual arts.
In the last 5 years, the whole load of melancholy,
school girls, romanticism was lost.
Forgotten in suburban railway stations,
in the old sacramental sound of the street organ.
Now, fresh with new virginities, painted or written thought,
cleaves open sonorously unfolded steps.
Inside airplanes, passengers with tough sensibilities
play poker or tap dance on their hands
and a sharp edge of sensation no longer stops sterile
on the retina and fruitfully breaks doom-dum its way onto the meninx.
Ethic transformations have always run parallel to the social ones,
and especially to the scientific and technical changes.
The links between these distinct aspects are so tight
that we can easily imagine a scholar of the future guessing
the entire sensitivity and the culture of an epoch from a car screw
found in an excavation, just like contemporary researchers have
recomposed anti- antediluvian animals from a single bone.
No doubt, our allegation will make many people smile.
And still, this connection is unbreakable.
Every laboratory experience echoes in some work of art.
Art is a tinder box that sparkles only after an effort,
an opposition or a fight.
Always easy to understand are only restaurant menus or administrative orders.
A work of art that suddenly suits the public taste is in no way superior
to a salad, spontaneously arousing the consumer's enthusiasm.
In the field of visual arts, Romania is, with its few strong elements,
at a perfectly European level.
Man, an invention.
He invented himself.
Willingly, he populated the vacuum with sites, seasons, civilizations.
Will it forever, under the sign of the city, filter intelligence,
lucidity, surprise,
rhythm, speed.
Our poet creates with his typewriter.
Our painter builds with compasses and ideas.
Our artist is furnished with all modern comfort like an American skyscraper.
from up there all vision is intercontinental. Stop!
From the one side it narrows spirit of separate attempts.
From the patchwork exploitation of our sensibilities
we have passed on to the enormous synthesis of today integralism.
With firm, gigantic steps, we are heading towards a burning epoch of classicism.
We are not individual archangels flying over society.
Caught in the system, we live in it, through it, for it.
One represents, but we all represent mechanics
obsessed with their hobbies, nothing more.
Journalism has foreseen the essence of modern life
crudely exploiting a life that needs no interpreter.
Porter, tax collector,sentimental commentary.
Our experience has nevertheless provided a cool severity,free from sentimentalism.
We synthesize the will of life from old times and old places
and the efforts of all modern experiments.
Sunk into collectivity we created style according to its instincts,
which it is hardly aware of.
The deaf have still not heard, the daring have joined us.
Reader, this infests your brain.
Shriek into the ear drum.
Airplane, DFF, radio, television, 76 horse power.
Marinetti
Breton
Vinea
Tzara
Ribemont Dessaignes
Arghezi
Brancusi
Theo van Doesburg.
Hooray, hooray, hooraythe!
crap is burning in the libraries.
Let it be known, now and forever.
"Contimporanul" has nothing in common with our enthusiasm and our youth,
with the art and the spirit that we alone represent here this very hour.
And there is something else.
Even without the dubious, flagrant attitude of "Contimporanul".
The movement, it intended to promote and in which
it got involved in its very appearance.
The constructivism is totally alien from the present views of UNU
Which claims for itself a conduct entirely separate from reality,
entirely outside the utilitarian constructivism, as shown in architecture.
Our activity in ink is a tragedy, far from any playful wish to make literature.
For us, a career in writing is no ideal that we could praise in ecstasy, like an aura.
Our writing is not to search for a world longed for,
rather than maddening, implacable need to escape another world.
It is not an exasperation with the world, or a country, or a certain category.
It is the total organic exasperation, a cosmic exasperation.
Beauty in art is a prejudice.
Intelligence is a negative analytic factor.
Art is a positive, synthetic, constructive one.
Invention is an ability.
Imagination is creation.
The art of children, folk art, the psychopath's art,
the art of primitive peoples, are the most vivid,
the most expressive, because they come from deep down.
They are organic and have no culture of beauty.
Sensibility grows like finger nails from the flesh.
Folk arts - the most powerful examples of sensibility standards,
the ax always creates fresh things on a tabular rasa.
Our technical non traditional civilization is creating its own artistic form,
its new human type.
Each culture preserves its substance in a compact look,
which is being modeled and receives a form through art.
The technical spirit of the epoch.
Technique consumes and is being consumed.
Art is eternity.
The great parallel.
The subordination of natural forms through art.
The oppression of natural forces through technique.
The artistic form of our epoch presents itself in the nude,
without any solemn ornaments.
It is the bearer of truth and purity.
The future, the future, the future.
Don't ask Picasso.
Don't ask us.
Don't ask anybody.
Now and then Picasso plays tricks, sensual nervous relaxation.
Wait. Work. Wait.
The age is looking for a style in all fields.
We wait, we work, we transform.
I stand in my apparent disorder, observing the laws of imagination.
My forms melt together.
The mating of woman and bird.
I burst and I keep inside a mental space unknown, for it has been before me.
In my two dimensions, I can stretch myself to live beyond every dimension.
I would rather take death.
A thousand times death than the inexact pleasure caused by the light of day at the way out of the mine.
Then the crippled joy of moving outdoors after a long illness.
Then the first ball.
The first pair of long trousers.
The first cigarette.
The first journey.
Our first biographic romance.
All these apparent pleasures are caused by the historic accident of a frustration
and by the error of a temporar monotony.
All these delights of the tired lying on a bed, on any bed.
All these orgies of the miserable that is given food, any food.
All these unjustified these proportions in the effective economy
of the oppressed abstract the real manifestation of pleasure
and strangle inside a perpetual claim, the constant, surpassing of necessity.
The convolution of beauty, the fragility of memory, the color of regret,
the graciousness of life, the mediumnity of the gesture,
the rarity of love, the madness of the senses, the beauty of madness,
the sadness of the lakes, the moon's influence, life after death,
the nobility of orgies, the heat of a look, the memory of madness,
the future of the past, the somnambulism of reason, the death of landscape.
Action in the distance.
The sleepy sleep.
The lived dream.
The pride of sacrilege.
The orgy of hysteria.
The refusal to live.
The exhibition of being alive.
The beauty of hysteria.
The beauty of the beauty.
In Malombra!