The Look of Delusion

We live in a world that has killed its gods. Killed them just in time and yet prematurely, abruptly, leaving the believers unprepared to face the massive changes they were made to go through. How can one fill up the void left behind by the death of a god?

This exact process lies at the core of “The Beast is Still Alive”, a documentary about a Bulgarian émigré’s attempt to understand the failures of a largely absent dissident grandfather, told through a mix of animation and imagined voice over dialogue with the deceased. Unafraid to dive into the depths of difficult questions of both personal and shared responsibility, the film clashes personal and collective memory to explore the (often absurd) vicious circles many ex-communist countries find themselves in.

At its core, a vicious circle is a failure of memory, focusing only on the immediate, on the short-term. Conversely, in “I am Hercules” long term memory in an altered state, glazed over with nostalgia, is the ruling principle. Dry-witted and with a fine eye for everyday absurdities, the film follows three self-made septuagenarian men who set up makeshift massage salons in the once luxurious Băile Herculane resort. If beauty is in the eye of the beholder, the protagonists show us sometimes to our own eyes we are demigods.

This holds true on a personal as well as collective level. The failures of memory take the flavour of mis-remembrance mixed with intentional forgetfulness in “Dead Nation”. A hybrid documentary mixing three different archival sources from the 1930s-1940s, it reveals the crafted absence of acknowledgement of Jewish persecution in Romanian history. In the end it is not horror made explicit that is chilling but the void in memory we jointly consent to, making history one of the biggest distortions we choose to conform to.

As such, the weight of history is not what brings about delusion as our main coping mechanism but weightlessness. It is not content but the madness of emptiness. For instance, the maddening empty space between us and God. “Tarzan’s Eggs” brings us face to face with our failed attempts to fill that void by trying to create, in this case, a crossover between monkey and man in an Abkhazian experimental medical institute. Observing this microcosm of paradoxes the documentary guides the viewer through an analytical and self-analytical process, only to have him understand that horror and pleasure come from the same place.

There is also a maddening void in the spaces we ourselves created. In an atmosphere of disenchanting surrealism, everything in “City of the Sun” is weighed down by the decrepit remnants of a by-gone era. In a small Georgian town, a miner/ actor, a music teacher living off of iron girdles dismantled from old buildings, and an emblematic pair of pre-teen runners inhabitants live like scavengers off of the corpse of its former communist glory. Together they become the collective portrait of a socially malnourished, yet enduring community.

Social and cultural malnourishment is what shifts endurance into agency in “Planet Petrila” where artist Ion Barbu and miner Cătălin Cenuşă engage the local community, determined to not become another “sacrificed generation” in history’s dice play. Their contrasting styles, flamboyant artistic activism and the subtler bureaucratic endurance, seamlessly merge in a joint effort of not only to preserve, but also to redefine personal and local identity.

And perhaps this could be the first step towards a collective reconciliation with trauma: the reconstruction of self, of a self that recognizes it has made delusion its one true deity. 

Curatorial text and films presentations by Diana Mereoiu