Ars: časopis Ústavu Dejín Umenia Slovenskej Akadémie Vied (45.2012)

7. The Communist elevator. Still from "C” Block Story, 2003, dir.
Cristian Nemescu. Photo: Archive of the author.

of serial buildings, assisted by a very active caméra
that provides close-ups and unexpected angles,
from above, from below, grazing the walls, clearly
counteracting the predictability of architecture. The
movie constantly juxtaposes the dull and the lively,
the forbidding concrète surfaces with smooth warm
skin, the inanimate architecture with the pulsating Life
it contains. Nemescu (who died just two years after
this film) actively seeks to disclose the surprising
currents of passion that traverse the dismal spaces
and to reverse the ordinariness of rôles. The mother,
for instance, whom the viewer sees initially as pre-
dictable and grey in her everyday rhythms of work
and household chores, and awkward in her efforts
to reach out to her moody teenage son, turns out to
hold not a banal secretarial job, as the viewer all too
easily présumés but instead, and unknowingly to her
family, that of a phone erotic performer.
“C” Block Story provides a direct counterpoint to
the sinister garbage chute in 4 Monlhs, 3 Weeks, and
2 Days by giving the elevator central role. In Nemes-
cu’s short film, surprising encounters happen, and
inhabitants connect on the vertical, mobile axis of
the apartment bloc, not only the stairs, but also, and
principally, in the elevator: cramped, overlaid with
graffiti, poorly lit, the ultimate device of entrapment,
it is presented here instead as an intimate, protected
space, a room of fantasies and embraces. It is not any
kind of elevator, but only the one of the communist
mass housing bloc — technologically primitive, small,
and chronically stuck between floors — that allows

couples to find each other, slowly weave secret dé-
sirés, and ultimately fulfill them [Fig. 7].
The Question of Realism
With Nemescu, we are clearly in the realm of the
phantasmatic, but the fictional register (things imag-
ined, things dreamed, things too intimate to put in
the open) is nonetheless firmly anchored in very real,
and very spécifie spatial conditions, which the cam-
éra documents attentively. In all the films discussed
here, the meaning of communist sites is re-written
through the inhabitants’ personal expériences, from
the traumatic to the amorous. However, it is less
this act of re-imagining spaces, and much more the
raw, unvarnished quality of both the scénarios and
the cinematography that has attracted most of the
viewers and critics’ attention and commentary.13
The hand-held caméras, the shabby clothes, the grey
tonalities, the Overall sobriety of production are re-
current features that amount almost to a genre.
One is bound, however, to reflect on the par-
ticular implications of a realist approach in a post-
communist context. In fact, I would like to suggest
that the meticulous truthfulness, the earnest and
un-staged quality of these films amounts to a critical
aesthetic position in a country where trust in images
has been compromised by their systematic ideo-
logical manipulation throughout communist history.
One of Mungiu’s Tales from the Golden Age takés up
precisely the kind of political control exerted over
images. The film retraces with mild irony the ways
in which photographs — in this case, a représentation
of Ceaucescu and Valéry Giscard d’Estaing side
by side — were subjected to numerous corrections
and layers of official approvals. The story concerns
a minor correction brought to Ceaujescu’s hat,
a “correction” that exposes the systematic falsifica-
tion of the visual under communism, when even
photographs — commonly held as the most objective
and realistic medium — were not to be trusted as true.
If the insidious hand of ideology had corrupted all
images in the past, then the insistence on a certain
kind of realism in these recent films functions,

13 “Gripping realism", one reads about 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2
Days on www.cineeuropa.org (May 17, 2007); “Raiv realism"
Treahsm crud’) writes Câlin Stänculescu about The Death of

Mr Lägärescu in the daily newspaper Bománia Tibera (June
2005) - to quote just a few examples of a recurring motif.

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