Below, we publish a few questions addressed to director Ana Lungu about her competition film Triton (Merman).
Archivio Aperto explores the theme of memory and archives. How does your film intercept this theme? What elements of the film highlight this exploration of memory?
Merman is based on Romanian 8mm home movies shot between World War II and the Revolution, mostly during Nicolae Ceausescu’s dictatorship (1965-1989). Because 8mm technology was widely available in the Western world during the 1960s and the 1970s, home movies were commonplace and are now associated with the ordinary. But behind the Iron Curtain, amateur films were rare. During that time in Romania, it was almost forbidden to have an 8mm camera; those who had one understood the dangers associated with filming anything that would expose them to the regime’s wrath. The same rule applies to photographs — this is why so few photos were taken in the streets during the dictatorship. A Romanian Jonas Mekas or a Romanian Vivian Maier could not exist.
I was born in 1978, so I grew up in the worst years of the Ceausescu era. Gradually, the dictator’s control over the population increased and dissimulation became a necessary survival skill as citizens remained acutely conscious of the difference between their private realities and their public personas. This split between private and public is a characteristic of life under totalitarianism and I think that images that emerge from such regimes are valuable, as they show as much as they conceal, and preserve as much as they erase.
How do archive images influence the construction of the narrative? Can you tell us about a sequence in your film where archive images transformed or enriched the message you intended to communicate?
Our film is based on three private archives, each one treated distinctly. The first part is a film within a film. My uncle, an engineer, shot videos throughout his daughter’s childhood. When she got married and left the country, he made a film for her, a wedding present he called Once Upon a Time.
While working on Merman, I was reading Uncreative Writing by Kenneth Goldsmith and it helped me come up with the concept of remaking my uncle’s film. Goldsmith believes that because of changes brought by technology and the internet, we are faced with an unprecedented amount of available text and the problem is not needing to write more; instead, we must learn to negotiate the vast quantity that exists. He praises the “unoriginal” and believes no matter what we do it is impossible, to work with language not to express oneself. And I extended this to images.
What found footage or experimental films have played an important role in your education?
I am a huge admirer of the work of Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci-Lucchi, but I am not sure if there is a direct influence here. I learned how to look at images differently by watching their films.
In the case of Merman (the first time I worked with archives) the references for me and Dane Komljen, co-writer and editor, were mostly literary. We started with Speak, Memory by Vladimir Nabokov and his unquestioning belief in the value of everything lost and the necessity of resurrecting it simply because it isn’t there any longer; we continued with W.G. Sebald’s prose and let ourselves be inspired by the way he is combining the real and the imaginary past, the documentary and the fictitious; and we ended with Maria Stepanova’s In Memory of Memory.