Radio România Internațional

Tag: Scarred Hearts

  • Dana Păpăruz, a multi-award-winning artist

    Dana Păpăruz, a multi-award-winning artist

    Dana Păpăruz began her career as a costume designer in the early 2000s, immediately after graduating from the Faculty of Decorative Arts and Design of the National Arts University, and has collaborated on numerous films and hundreds of commercials. Some of the films are ‘Beyond The Hills’ directed by Cristian Mungiu, ‘La Gomera’ directed by Corneliu Porumboiu, RUXX directed by Iulia Rugină and Octav Gheorghe, ‘Boss’ directed by Bogdan Mirică, ‘Shadows’ directed by Igor Cobileanski and Bogdan Mirică, ‘Warboy’ by Marian Crișan and ‘Lemonade’ / ’Honeymoon’ by Ioana Uricaru.

     

    For her achievements, Dana Păpăruz was rewarded with three Gopo awards: in 2016 and 2017 for the films directed by Radu Jude, “Aferim!” and “Inimi Cicatrizate”(Scarred Hearts), and in 2019 for “Moromeții 2”, the second part of the Moromeții trilogy, directed by Stere Gulea. Radu Jude’s two films, “Aferim!” and ‘Scarred Hearts’ represented two great challenges for the artist. If the action in “Aferim!” (a film that received the Silver Bear for direction at the Berlin Film Festival) takes place in Wallachia at the beginning of the 19th century, ‘Scarred Hearts’ tells the story of a young man suffering from tuberculosis and is a free adaptation of the literary work of Max Blecher.

     

    Here is Dana Păpăruz with details: “’Aferim!’ was really hard, I think it was the project that somehow increased my value. In ‘ Scarred Hearts’ the budget was smaller than in “Aferim!” and it was a new challenge because the action takes place in a completely different period. A close collaboration was necessary between the makeup and sculpture departments that created the casts worn by the characters in the film, who suffered from bone tuberculosis and had to be laid on mobile beds. And their life was quite boring, spent mostly in sanatoriums and limited in movement. The biggest challenge was that I had to create the costumes based on these casts, so I took the measurements and most of the costumes in this project were created by my team, very few were borrowed. At least for the character played by Ivana Mladenovic, Solange, a lot was invested, about half of the budget we had, and some very special hats were created, including that hat with birds. The period in which the action of Scarred Hearts takes place is the interwar period, very attractive from a fashion point of view, when we also had a synchronization and a desire to adopt European fashion. All these aspects helped me to fully use my imagination. Moreover, Scarred Hearts is one of the projects that I was able to play with and I appreciated that Radu Jude wanted me to come up with bold ideas. And since I mentioned the hat with birds worn by Ivana Mladenovic, an example is that very hat. What inspired me to create this hat is a cover of the Vogue magazine from 1939, a cover that I showed to the director Radu Jude, who accepted my idea, so, we looked for variants to succeed in making it. I documented the costumes using everything I found from that period, fashion magazines, photographs taken by Romanian artists, and obviously books.”

     

    Another important project for Dana Păpăruz’s career was her work with the director Cristian Mungiu, who hired her as a costume designer for the film “După dealuri” (“Beyond the Hills”), released in 2012.

     

    Written, directed and produced by Cristian Mungiu, the film is inspired by the non-fiction novels of the writer Tatiana Niculescu, focusing on the exorcism of a nun at the Tanacu monastery in Vaslui County.

     

    Dana Păpăruz: “In principle, ‘După dealuri’ did not appear to be a very complicated film in terms of costumes. Moreover, Cristian Mungiu usually gives you all the freedom and waits for you to come up with suggestions. But the complicated part, which we did not expect, was the fact that the characters wore specific costumes and it is very difficult to document something like that on site, in a monastery, which is a very closed environment. We were lucky, however, that the leading actresses were able to spend some time in a monastery, and that helped us a lot to understand what monastery life means. So Dana Tapalaga, who played the abbess in the film, tried to find out details that were very useful to us, such as how to cover one’s head with that veil that nuns must wear permanently.”

     

    Dana Păpăruz’s most recent collaboration was with the director Stere Gulea, who at the end of last year released ‘Moromeții 3’, a film that concludes a unique trilogy in Romanian cinema, based on the novels and life of the writer Marin Preda.

     

    Dana Păpăruz: “It is a film that explains at a deep level the changes experienced by Romania in the 1950s. It is also a film made with a lot of love and a lot of hard work. It was a very demanding project for me, I didn’t have a single day off during the filming, I would also work at home or reread a new version of the script. At the same time, it is a fresh film in terms of costumes and I think that it can be a surprising story, especially for young viewers”.

     

    The winner of the Audience Award at the 2024 TIFF/ Transylvania International Film Festival, “Moromeții 3” has been screened at several national film festivals (TIFF, TIFF Chișinău, Serile Filmului Românesc – Iași, Film în Sat – Peștișani, TIFF Timișoara). (LS, AMP)

  • Writer Max Blecher

    Writer Max Blecher

    Rediscovered quite recently by literary critics and readers, writer
    Max Blecher holds pride of place thanks to the value of his work. Born in
    September 1909 in Roman (northeastern Romania), Blecher had a tragic destiny.
    At only 19 he was diagnosed with bone tuberculosis called Pott’s disease. As a
    consequence of this incurable disease, the writer was bedridden for the rest of
    his life, which ended in 1938 when he was only 29. The experience of his life,
    spent mostly in sanatoriums in the country and abroad appears in the novels
    published during his lifetime such as Adventures in Immediate Irreality translated into English by
    Michael Henry Heim in 2015 and Scarred Hearts as well as in posthumous works
    such as The Lit-Up Burrow: Sanatorium Journal.


    The name of Max Blecher was well known in the
    literary societies of the time. He made his debut in 1930 in the publication
    entitled Bilete de Papagal led by poet Tudor Arghezi. His writing was
    associated with the avant-garde movement. Although bedridden due to his
    disease, and sometimes at hundreds of kilometers away from Romania, Max Blecher published a lot of books, both poetry and prose, and was
    in touch with many Romanian and foreign cultural personalities such as Geo
    Bogza, Ilarie Voronca and Saşa Pană, and the French Andre Breton and Andre Gide.
    His suffering, which his readers were aware of, marked the way in which his
    books were perceived. Today many questions have arisen related to the extent to
    which Blecher’s tragic destiny influenced the perception of his works by
    critics and writers alike, the extent to which his writings are only
    autobiographical or are more than that. University lecturer Doris Mironescu is
    the author of the book The life of Max Blecher. Against Biography in which he
    tries to offer some answers.


    Doris Mironescu: Blecher’s books are partly autobiographical, they are
    journals he kept inside and outside sanatoriums. But this autobiographical side
    has been changed a lot and turned into something else. To a certain extent
    there is some emotional identification with the author, and this could somehow
    influence a reader’s choice. But that is not enough. Identification with an
    author cannot replace the value of a work. The biographical story could help an
    author, to a certain extent, in the sense that it could attract readers from
    all epochs on his or her side. This is what happened to Max Blecher. The
    critics in the inter-war period who wrote in favor of Blecher had the
    impression that they did an act of justice. The same happened in the 1970s,
    when Blecher’s works were re-published.
    Romanian critics are trying to recuperate Blecher. They are all trying
    to save Blecher from the aggression of oblivion in which his works had fallen
    for about 30 years and which had deprived the Romanian literature of a great
    writer.


    The main characters in Max Blecher’s books, which appear as alter
    egos of the author, seem to perceive reality from the perspective of illness,
    but that perception is not corrupted by pathology. On the contrary, it is
    extremely original and independent of the author’s disease. Blecher, like
    Emanuel, the character in his book Scarred
    Hearts loves life in spite of his illness, says Marieva Ionescu, one of the
    recent editors of Blecher’s work.


    Marieva Ionescu: The narrator’s perspective in
    Blecher’s novels is very minute. He sees everything through a poet’s eye. Emanuel, the character in the book ‘Scarred Hearts’ is very attentive to everything that happens
    around him: objects, people, his own body, his sensations, or nature. At first,
    he looks at the sanatorium world from the perspective of a stranger, then he
    slowly starts to identify himself with the other patients.


    Max Blecher also tried to get involved in the
    social and political issues of his time, to the extent his illness allowed it., as University lecturerDoris Mironescu told us:

    Blecher participated in the
    political life of his time. This aspect is present to a lesser extent in his
    books, but you can find it in his correspondence or the articles published in
    various magazines. The new information that appeared about Blecher is quite
    vast and it gives us a slightly corrected image of him, maybe less pure than we
    wanted to believe. Blecher was a man of his epoch.


    The involvement of Max Blecher in his epoch’s
    problems was dramatized into a film directed by Radu Jude in 2016, a film that
    was inspired by his book Scarred Hearts. Foreign readers can read Max
    Blecher’s books in their English, French, Italian and Polish translations.