Beyond the Black

„Infra-noir”, un et multiple. Un groupe surréaliste entre Bucarest et Paris, 1945-1947. Dir. Monique Yaari. Peter Lang, Bern, 2014. 

A new series of books (Art and Thought: Histories of the Avant-Garde, edited by Dawn Ades and Timothy Matthews) was initiated at Peter Lang with the collective volume on the activity of the Bucharest surrealist group. It is a brave and interesting choice to begin this new series with an internationally lesser known avant-garde group, but in fact more than one third of the volume consists of an effort to increase the visibility of this very group activity by including a facsimile edition of their collective texts

Interpretations and Self-interpretations of Brauner

(Mihaela Petrov, Victor Brauner pictopoet, Fundația Gellu Naum, București, 2013)

I concluded my review of Mihaela Petrov’s previous book on Victor Brauner with the phrase: “The interpretative effort seems to be still ahead of us.” Petrov’s essential contribution to the scolarship on Brauner was to insist and develop on the idea of the connection between Brauner’s self-interpretative texts and his painted work. The title of the new book (Victor Brauner pictopoet) suggests the same logic of interpretation (establishing links between text and image), and indeed, one will find in the volume several references to Brauner’s letters, notebooks and interviews that tried to explain to himself and to others how elements of his art were interconnected from his specific point of view.

The Network of Artists around Victor Brauner

(Emil Nicolae, Victor Brauner și însoțitorii [Victor Brauner and His Fellow-travelers], Ed. Hasefer, Bucharest, 2013.)

The volume consists of twenty shorter texts that explore Victor Brauner’s universe in terms of biography, spiritual kinship and artistic analogy. The author succeeds in retracing elements of biography that go beyond the simple factual level, and finding the instants where “facts” often result in works of art, anecdotes worth remembering, and germs of stories that have never been written. The strategy of the book is to present Brauner in his relation to others: how they saw him, how Brauner saw them, how they interacted, how they “met”, often in spiritual ways only, through their shared interests and aspirations.

Mal d’ombre

The “sinister name” Malombra has a long story in European culture. In 1881, Antonio Fogazzaro published the novel Malombra. As a recent article points out, the novel is “a perhaps unique example of an Italian novel of the period whose inspiration comes primarily from the English Victorian novel and the late gothic”.[1] References in other texts by Fogazzaro include authors like Horace Walpole, Ann Radcliffe, Wilkie Collins, Edgar Allan Poe and books like Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte. Malombra was a success and was soon translated into English and published also in the UK (1896) and the US (1907). In 1942, Mario Soldati’s movie Malombra was released (after a first adaptation in 1917, made by Carmine Gallone). In 1947, the Romanian Surrealist Group (Gherasim Luca, Gellu Naum, Paul Păun, Virgil Teodorescu, Trost) published the collective text written in French, Eloge de Malombra – Cerne de l’amour absolu (Malombra, aura of absolute love), inspired by the film – as they called it: “the involuntarily surrealist film Malombra”. The story could go on with two more Italian films called Malombra (1974, 1984), but let’s stop here and consider instead the reasons of the surrealists’ fascination with the movie.

Szürrealista karnevál

Ada Milea zenéi egyre inkább összekapcsolódnak Gellu Naum színpadra állított műveivel. Én magam először az Apolodor című (több, mint) gyereklemezt hallgattam meg (2003, A&A Records). Apolodor, a pingvin bejárja a világot, Ada Milea zenéi pedig végigkísérik az utazót: hol afrikai kongákat hallunk, hol bluest, amíg a Missisippin hajózunk, hol latin ritmusokat, hol vérbő countryt.

2011-ben a kolozsvári román színház két bemutatón is Ada Milea zenéjével közelítette a nézőkhöz Naum szürrealista karneválját.

Julien Gracq és a másik part

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Antoine Compagnon a nagy antimodernek egyikének nevezi Julien Gracqot Les Antimodernes című könyvében.
Gracq első értekező prózai művét 1948-ban André Bretonról írta, legismertebb regényét, A Szirtiszek partvidékét (Le Rivage des Syrtes) Gellu Naum fordította román nyelvre: ezek olyan jelek, amelyek mindenképp relevánssá teszik a Gracq-művek szürrealista kontextusban történő vizsgálatát.

Gellu Naum és az európai avantgárd

A Kolozsvári Román Nemzeti Színház nemzetközi fesztivált-találkozót kezdeményezett 2011 októberében, középpontban ezúttal a tíz éve elhunyt Gellu Naum életműve. A közönség sorain végignézve a választás egyértelműen sikerültnek mondható: igen sok bukaresti, párizsi arc bukkan fel a Gellu Naum személyes ismerősei közül: jó nevű szerkesztők, kritikusok, költők, művészek. És lehetőség van négy Naum-színmű megtekintésére is (Zenobia, Florența sunt eu / Firenze én vagyok, Insula / Sziget, óriáskivetítőn pedig az Exact în același timp / Pontosan abban a pillanatban).