Triton (Merman)

A female voice is haunting a male gaze. An archival documentary about three men making images of women, in Romania, from WW II until the Revolution: an engineer filming his daughter, a music professor documenting his family and an aristocrat capturing the summer spent with his wife during wartime. These stories are linked and told by a questioning female narrator whose obsession with the figure of Alexandru P. gets out of hand. Through an obsessive portrait of an obsessive person, the film paints a picture of a country in the era of totalitarianism and everyday gestures of escaping it.

«For the past seven years, I have been trying to make a film out of my uncle’s 8mm home movies shot during the Ceaușescu era (1965-1989). As most of the images I knew from that time were propaganda images, like in Andrei Ujica’s Autobiography of Nicolae Ceausescu, I was fascinated by this “uncensored, amateur gaze” and for some time I tried to make a film out of his archive. This work has led me to discover other, more singular and significant sources. Primarily, the vast image archive of music professor Alexandru P. The Nabokovian character of Alexandru P. was becoming more elusive the more time I spent with him, escaping my efforts to frame and describe him. The questionable nature of his photographs, which included private, at a time illegal, erotic images, both challenged me and intrigued me. This ambiguity led me to find a structure through which his life will be told via his relationships with women, creating a multi-perspective portrait of the man and the country. This endeavour made me realize that I, as a filmmaker, am no less innocent or complacent than those whose images I appropriated. In the words of Maria Stepanova: “I had internalized the logic of ownership. The subject(s) of my film had become my property, to treat as I wish.”»

– Ana Lungu

The archives used in the film are Romanian private archives shot between 1942 and 1989 discovered and collected by the director. Because 8 mm technology was widely available in the Western world during the 1960s and the 1970s, home movies in that part of the world were commonplace, and are associated with the ordinary. But behind the Iron Curtain, home movies were extraordinarily rare, accessible only to a few people. During that time in Romania, it was almost forbidden to have an 8 mm camera; those who had one understood the dangers associated with filming anything that would expose them to the wrath of the regime. The same rule applied to photographs — this is why there are so few photos taken in the streets during the dictatorship. A Romanian Jonas Mekas or a Romanian Vivian Maier could not exist. As a result of these limitations, home movies during the communist era work around history, denying their context while being fully inside it.