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

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Gherasim Luca 100

   

Caietele Avangardei nr. 2/2013. Centenar Gherasim Luca;
Hyperion: On the Future of Aesthetics, Vol. VII, No. 3 (fall 2013) – Gherasim Luca centenary issue

The Romanian avant-garde has, beginning with 2013, a new scientific review: Caietele Avangardei, initiated by Ion Pop, the senior researcher of the avant-garde in Romania, assisted in this initiative by Lucian Chișu, director of the Romanian National Literary Museum as editor and Ioan Cristescu as manager editor. After a first issue containing articles about various aspects of the Romanian and international avant-garde (its reviews, its currents, its major authors like Geo Bogza, Gellu Naum, Jules Perahim or D. Trost) launched in May 2013, its second issue is dedicated in its totality to the works and biography of Gherasim Luca – a special issue celebrating 100 years from the birth of the author.

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.

A vámpírok passzivitásáról

A vámpír Gherasim Luca könyvében passzív és aktív egyszerre. A könyv fordítója, Krzysztof Fijalkowski szerint e könyv vámpírfigurája leginkább a Lautréamont-féle Maldoror gótikus képzetköreivel rokonítható, nem annyira a régió népi hagyományaiból lép elő. Lucánál tehát egy „kultúrvámpír” az, akit láthatunk, de a megjelenítés ezen belül igencsak radikális, a szerzőre egyébként is jellemző módon.

A vámpír világa az árnyékokéval, a szellemvilágéval érintkezik, így kerül bevezetésre a könyvben, szoros összefüggésben egyébként azzal az erősen sugallt tézissel, hogy maguknak a tárgyaknak is van egy olyan világa, amit nem lehet tőlük elválasztani, és amely főként vágyakból és egyéb irracionális erőkből szövődik köréjük.