In Search of the Unmeasurable: Conversation with Alexandra Gulea

Your films often seem less interested in what happens to people than in what remains of them after something has happened. When you pick up a camera, what are you looking for – a person, or the trace a life leaves behind?

I think that in the creation of my films, I am just as concerned with people’s fates, their stories, their concerns, and their struggles as I am with their daily lives. The documentary nature of my work means that I’m just as concerned with preserving a record and memory of the individuals I work with—whose stories I tell—and their “fates.” I generally gather a lot of material that doesn’t make it into the films, material that serves as a testimony to our time on this earth.

You came to cinema through painting. Do you still think with a painter’s eye – through faces, hands, objects, light, the distance between two bodies – rather than through explanation?

Yes, for a long time in my life I’ve looked at the world through the eyes of a painter. And I hate giving explanations, becoming explicit. I think you have to give the viewer the freedom to construct their own film, to find their own path among the trajectories I propose, the fragments of stories, the clues.

What has the camera taught you about people that life alone could not?

The camera allows me to observe in detail, to contemplate, and to set boundaries that I don’t set in real life. I also think the camera makes me more sensitive, more empathetic, and more precise. When we hear someone tell their story, we miss the nuances in their facial expressions and gestures. When you’re behind the camera, you think about what’s being said for others as well; you observe the language, the unspoken, the smiles. Then, it’s always interesting to know what people want to be captured on film—their truth, their testimonies. You become serious and, at times, final in the face of “eternity”…

Your films repeatedly turn towards people whom political and economic systems barely register: children, patients, migrants, the elderly, people left behind in mining towns. Can cinema restore visibility to someone whom society has decided not to see?

I’ve always been interested in the forgotten, the marginalized, the ordinary people no one cares about. In the margins. I want to give them a voice; sometimes I even feel compelled to erect a statue for them—one that I believe they deserve. If they are seen and heard, we should ask the audience of my films—which, it must be said, are niche films.

Are there lives that documentary can show but never quite understand – and lives that must be invented before we can understand them?

In the specific case of “Maia…”, the film about my grandmother, I did indeed have to proceed that way. Since she’s no longer with us, I had to feel my way through it, piecing together fragments and details that I discovered along the way, and reinvent her, understanding her through the sequences I was creating.

In a way, what you’re suggesting in your question is already part of the answer: sometimes, we simply can’t fully grasp all the nuances and truths about people.

In Matei Child Miner, Matei’s parents leave Romania to work in Italy, and the boy remains behind with his grandfather. You invented Matei. And yet can an invented child sometimes be more truthful than a real person placed before a documentary camera?

Matei… is a work of fiction inspired by real-life situations—by my experience with the children of the Jiu Valley and my own experiences with children, who often feature in my work. Even when writing fiction, I rely on extensive research, so I met with hundreds of children from the filming location and documented the places and situations. Most of these children wanted to become miners and not leave the valley. Furthermore, Matei (whose real name is Alexandru) is not an actor, so he brought with him the nuances of his own personality and his unique sensibility.

I had one major regret during the filming of this movie: not having worked exclusively with non-actors. Toward the end of the film, once we were more comfortable, I urged the actors to improvise. I also regretted showing the children the dialogue; I think that with plenty of rehearsals and improvising on my themes, they would have been more authentic. But the fact is that the shooting schedule for a fiction film, with a larger crew, is unfortunately much shorter than my way of working in experimental film.

Documentary cinema carries a dangerous word around with it: truth. Do you still believe in documentary truth, or only in different ways of looking?

I’m quite skeptical about the idea of a single truth, and I believe that even between what I consider to be my truth—which is by no means absolute—and the truth of the protagonists or the audience, there are layers of reasoning, understanding, and personal sensibility.

This is a question that cinéma vérité and direct cinema have grappled with in the wake of Dziga Vertov’s theories on the subjectivity of the human eye versus the “objective lens” of the camera. To what extent does a film that seeks psychological or emotional truth capture reality, rather than merely reflecting the “auteur’s” vision?

I have made only one observational documentary: “Today I Was Young and Pretty,” in which I believe the approach is more about the sincerity of my process as a filmmaker than about an objectivity that is impossible to capture in an emotional artistic endeavor.

And has the opposite ever happened while making fiction – has life suddenly broken into a carefully constructed scene and ruined it, only to make it more truthful?

I deeply believe in the power of the unexpected on set. Whether it’s a change in lighting, an unexpected event, or a reaction from the actors, any unexpected moment is welcome during the process. It brings with it this unexpected, the “reality” of the moment, and questions about ideas that hadn’t crossed our minds. I try to provoke happy coincidence in my work, and I draw inspiration from it. I value the “camera gaze,” which is sometimes frowned upon.

You are also an editor. Editing is perhaps cinema’s most discreet form of power: you discard ninety-nine per cent of reality and call what remains the film. Sometimes we even call it truth. How do you live with that power?

Not really. I shoot a lot and have a hard time parting with the footage. That’s why short films emerge from old, unused footage. “Valea Jiului - Notes” is a film made from leftovers. Among the shots in “Maia - Portrait with Hands,” there are five films that will never see the light of day… even though, as I said, I really enjoy recycling footage. In a way, the subject dictates the form, and the edited film is already present within the raw footage. I think it’s the footage and the sounds that dictate the form more than the editor’s desire.

Since I edit mostly with my father, Stere Gulea, on his films, I see a different relationship with the raw footage than I do with my own. He works like a sculptor who seeks form in clay, paying little attention to the material that’s removed. Then it becomes fluid.

My fascination with what we’ve filmed—what Nicu (Ilfoveanu), George (Chiper), Dragos (Hanciu), or Andrei (Oana) film based on what I imagine and their own gaze—comes from the images that draw me in, that guide me emotionally as I seek out the clash, the confrontation between cuts, a jerky edit that struggles to remain a unified whole. It’s not a power I exert over the shots, but rather they are the ones that compose within me what we call the form (final or not, but above all open-ended).

And then, last but not least, I have to mention Frédéric Fichefet, my go-to editor since “Flying Sheep”, “L’épopée Maia…”, and “Psychopomp”. He’s the one who saves me and my work, like those editor-psychologists who help create some distance between an exhausted, hysterical creator and their raw material. Although, to be clear, I’m still the one who spends a lot of time with the footage, editing away happily. But Frédéric brings his intellectual refinement and his magnificent sound editing, and asks me all the questions I’ve hardly ever asked myself.

And then there’s Vlaicu Golcea, my wonderful composer who has also been with me for a long time and who brings me joy during the editing process. It’s wonderful to work with such amazing artists over such a long period of time.

In God Plays Sax, the Devil Violin, you entered a Romanian psychiatric institution and filmed people in an extreme state of vulnerability. How do you look at vulnerability without appropriating it? And how do you make it visible without turning suffering into beauty?

It was a life-changing experience for me, one that remains etched in my memory. I learned a great deal about what it’s like to live with suffering, proportionately speaking. We had terrible problems with the hospice director. She hated me and used every measure within her authority—including psychological abuse—to prevent me from being there. We found common ground with the patients, who understood that we were on the same side. She ordered injections for anyone who wanted to film. I gave up on my story; I tried to protect my friends at the time and to bring them attention, tenderness, and cigarettes. There is a beauty locked within suffering—if one has the courage to see it—that I have carried within me ever since.

Is there a moment when an ethical filmmaker must turn off the camera, precisely when the filmmaker in them desperately wants to keep it running?

I have never wanted to continue filming when there was a risk of putting the person who wanted to be filmed by me in danger. I am very mindful of how people feel in front of my camera, and I tend to ask for less than they might be willing to give of themselves; I choose to step back for the sake of their well-being.

Absence is almost a character in your work: absent parents, abandoned homes, broken family histories, disappearing languages. Are we perhaps shaped more profoundly by what is missing from our lives than by what remains?

Absence calls to me and inspires me—the very nature of emptiness, of the in-between, of memory lapses, of traces… I don’t think it’s a matter of lack, but rather a state of being.

A world we reconstruct, that we try to fill with our imagination, that we reinvent precisely to perpetuate the absence—reinterpreted through our own vision of the void, once again, of remnants. It’s like “Tom Thumb,” who, lacking pebbles or stones, leaves traces that will be eaten. Ephemeral traces—the cannibalism of memory.

Why did you call the portrait of your grandmother Portrait with Hands? What can hands reveal about a life that a face cannot?

To give a direct answer: I titled the film “Maia—Portrait with Hands” because in painting, we frame the subject in a portrait with their hands. It’s a sort of American shot that, among other things, requires the artist to draw the hands—which, along with the feet, are the most difficult parts of a human or animal to draw. It may be a trauma in my life as a painter. 

Irony aside, the photograph by Marina Obradović around which the film is built depicts both of us with our hands on our laps. This allows me to observe my own hands, which have changed significantly through the gestures that reveal so much about us and what we do.

I have an image of my grandmother’s hands washing cotton in a basin set on frozen ground, using cold water. Cotton was hard to come by, and her hands—with their powerful bones, veins, and almost purple skin—where sculpting it. These are all physical realities that remain etched in my memory with their raw truth.

Your grandmother lived a life that history nearly erased. When did you realise that what you had inherited as a family story was also a political history of the Balkans?

In the conversations between my Aromanian grandparents, the names of villages and towns in what are now Greece, Albania, and Bulgaria—places with which they had a connection, often came up. My grandfather spoke a little Turkish, Bulgarian, Greek, and French. So I sensed that they had always been on the move, driven by hardship and their nomadic past. As for my great-grandfather, who was killed in the civil turmoil in the Balkans, I had heard about him when I was little. The fact that Maia had been an orphan was a defining factor in her life. Also, the Aromanian community of my childhood showed great solidarity in the face of the uncertainties of their nomadic existence.

You and your grandmother share the name Alexandra. Can you make a film about your grandmother without, at some point, discovering that you have been making a film about yourself?

By putting myself on stage (even if in disguise) and by posing the question of “my mira,” the legacy I carry, at the beginning of the essay, I was acknowledging, on the one hand, that I was haunted by it, and on the other, that I had no choice but to embody it. What emerged next was this mirror portrait—this discovery of myself searching for her, confronting her views on life.

Maia moves between archives, objects, reconstruction and imagination. But what happens when the archive falls silent? Does imagination have the right to enter the empty space left by history?

As many people as there are, so many versions of h(H)istory. While doing my research, I was quite surprised to find that historians had different interpretations of the history and origins of the Aromanians, not to mention the various versions I heard about Maia’s life story. It’s like a personal montage—a connection to those who exist only in memory. As for subjectivity, I embraced it, along with the creation of a character who lived within me. Not to say haunted me.

Perhaps this is one of the most beautiful questions Maia asks: is home the place we come from, or the place we spend our lives inventing because the first one has been lost?

As the tale goes, the treasure lies within us. We either have it and carry it with us, or we search for it. I asked myself where my grandparents wanted to be buried. They didn’t care; the question simply didn’t come up. While clothes, handkerchiefs, candles, and money were all prepared, the place was uncertain.

Aromanian survives as the language of a dispersed community. What disappears from a person when the language in which their mother once spoke their name disappears?

Language is the only thing that defines the Aromanians; that is undoubtedly why Maia has never spoken another language but the language for which her father died. With the last man who will be the sole speaker of this dialect, an entire community is disappearing.

Official history likes states, borders, wars, dates and treaties. Maia gives us hands, clothes, voices, animals, family photographs. Do objects sometimes remember more truthfully than history books?

The few objects they carried with them—by donkey, train, boat, or cart—tell the story of their lives, their occupations, and their wanderings. They are a small people without a written language, so these objects—which pass from hand to hand without anyone knowing who will inherit them, and which sometimes change form—serve as witnesses to our passage through time.

Did making Maia reveal anything about your own family that, afterwards, you wished you had never discovered?

No.

Romania keeps returning in your films after one historical rupture or another: abandoned mining towns, migration, institutions, families broken apart by economics. What did communism leave inside people – and what did capitalism take away from them?

Romanians heat their homes like saunas. It’s the cold they endured that they’ve passed on to their children and grandchildren. 

And then there are all those abandoned children that this people carries within them, in my opinion. It’s their children and the generations that follow who haunt us.

As for what’s been lost, I think a certain sense of solidarity and a great deal of humor have disappeared. (Among miners, solidarity has been preserved). Owning material possessions, especially cars, also seems to fill a void. And they don’t go to the movies anymore.

We speak of 1989 as if history had changed overnight. But political systems do not disappear from human beings when regimes disappear from maps. How long does a political system continue to live inside the body?

At flea markets, you can buy Dracula mugs alongside Ceausescu and his wife coffee cups. For a glass of hot chocolate, they’ll make good company.

In Matei, the parents leave because they need work. Millions of Eastern European families know this story. Europe calls this freedom of movement. But what kind of freedom requires you to leave your child behind? Is “freedom” sometimes simply the polite vocabulary we use for economic necessity?

In one of my answers, I mentioned a painful history of child abandonment and a kind of “tradition” in Romania that has concerned me since the 1990s.

Your cinema moves between documentary, fiction, painting, photography, music, choreography, archives and performance. Does the distinction between documentary and fiction still mean anything to you? Or is it largely an institutional distinction – something festivals and funding bodies need more than artists do?

The documentary vs. fiction debate has annoyed me since I started out.

Because it’s tied to festivals and funding, this often poses a problem for me. As for the Romanian CNC, there’s no such thing as “experimental” or “hybrid” film. Documentaries are already considered a lower category. There are “films,” and there are “documentaries.” So I have to submit my work as a documentary, and the scripts are downgraded because the approach isn’t based purely on reality.

As for festivals, essays and hybrid forms are also generally difficult to categorize. And my films aren’t exactly in vogue to begin with…

What frightens you more: making a film that people fail to understand, or making one they understand immediately?

I also acknowledge that some of my work is cryptic and, at times, open to interpretation—even for me. I find it curious to read certain reviews that better capture the story being told than I could ever put into words.

We live in a culture increasingly impatient with ambiguity. Everything must explain itself: a film needs a message, a position, a subject, a reason for existing. What happened to mystery? Does art still have the right not to explain itself?

Yes, in my opinion…

What is a good image for you – one that reveals something, or one that knows what not to reveal?

I really love off-center framing, mystery, twilight, nighttime, and clashing transitions—images that echo one another and contradict each other.

After all these years of looking at people through a camera, has cinema made you understand human beings better – or trust them less?

I try with all my might to approach others with curiosity and trust.

I don’t move around much; instead, right now I observe animals. Most of the time, when I’m lucky, I watch the mystery of living beings—the way they position themselves in space, and the way their thoughts are expressed in words.

A filmmaker spends an extraordinary amount of time observing other people’s lives. Have you ever wondered whether looking so intensely at other people can become a way of avoiding your own life?

Yes, I work to take my mind off myself a little and, of course, to find myself again.

Is there someone you once filmed who never really left you after the film ended?

The vast majority of the protagonists and actors I’ve worked with have remained close to me. First and foremost, the children (Alex/Matei and Maria from Maia) and other children I’ve filmed with. I follow their journeys and cherish their friendship.

Miki (Dobrin) and Vava (Stefanescu)-both embodying Maia are also part of my life, and all those residents of the old, former institution in “God Plays Sax” have remained deeply etched in my memory, even though I can’t seem to find them in real life. The Roma musicians from Clejani in “Today I was young and pretty”… and many others.

What do you understand about life now that you could not have understood at thirty?

Hmm, I hope that, little by little, I’m learning to better tolerate myself. And also, to stop working in a state of constant suffering.

What did you inherit from your grandmother that no camera could ever photograph?

One regret… that I didn’t inherit her strength—the very strength that drove me to discover her and that I tried to understand during the nine years I spent with her while making the film.

What would you refuse to film, even if you knew it would make an extraordinary film?

I’m rambling, but the fact is, it’s getting harder and harder for me to fund my ideas, which is exhausting and frustrating. So the question is whether I’ll be able to keep going.

I’d refuse to film a well-written, well-paid commission :) (as few people understand that artists have to put a baguette on the table, too) if I don’t identify with it. Also, I wouldn’t film something just because successful at the moment.

And finally: cinema has always been obsessed with saving things from disappearance – faces, voices, gestures, places, the dead. But perhaps it saves nothing; perhaps it merely records disappearance. For you, is making a film an attempt to preserve something from oblivion, or a way of accepting that, eventually, everything disappears?

Everything will surely disappear... or maybe not?

 

Patricija Maličev