Pioneers of Auteur Cinema: Iulian Mihu and Manole Marcus
Life Does Not Forgive! (1957) marks the feature film debut of the directorial duo Iulian Mihu and Manole Marcus, two of the first graduates from the newly established Film Institute in Bucharest.
Life Does Not Forgive! (1957) marks the feature film debut of the directorial duo Iulian Mihu and Manole Marcus, two of the first graduates from the (then) newly established Film Institute in Bucharest. Their graduation short film, La mere (1955), was an overtly sadistic adaptation of a Chekhov novella in which a young couple is tormented by a nobleman for stealing apples from his estate.
In the ensuing decades, both Mihu and Marcus were recognized as important directors, with filmographies that were politically aligned with the party's directives as well as catering to a broader audience. This makes the status of Life Does Not Forgive!, considered a pioneering example of local auteur film direction, particularly unique.
Life Does Not Forgive! is a powerful anti-war film that weaves several of Alexandru Sahia's novellas into a psychological drama centered around remembrance. Ștefan (Nicolae Praida), a lanky figure resembling an Eastern European David Bowie, is searching for information about his father, who returned home mentally disturbed after serving in World War I.
Years later, his son wanders through a meandering mausoleum seeking a former military priest who had served with his father, hoping to uncover the truth. The soldier, now crippled, crawls through the dirt and among the crosses, pushing his body forward and evoking the past in successive chunks. The film interrogates existential questions about the reasons for war, and is set against palpable tensions like communist subversiveness within the context of imperialist war tendencies.
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Life Does Not Forgive! paves the way, at least formally, for auteurs like Mircea Săucan and Lucian Pintilie to explore the potential of molding a screenplay into a multifaceted filmic material. Their play, which should not be seen as amateurish but as a deliberate search, has multiple causes. Among them is the power struggle within the production hierarchy, initially favoring writers in the early phase of the socialist regime, and the fight against the often thin, politicized themes of the scripts, leading to a flight towards the abstraction of the image.
Both Marcus and Mihu quickly abandoned the formalism of Life Does Not Forgive! and dedicated themselves to more popular formulas. Manole Marcus is known for popular successes like The Actor and the Savages (1975) and Operation Monster (1976). On Cinepub, you can also watch I Don't Want to Get Married (1961), which, despite its slightly negative title, is a playful comedy about love, enterprises, and art in a seemingly pristine, ever-sparkling society.
Meanwhile, Iulian Mihu directed films like A Sentimental Story (1962), the first romance film in Romanian cinema, and Felix and Otilia (1972), an adaptation of George Călinescu's novel Otilia’s Riddle, which delicately constructs the spaces and atmosphere of a dusty, decrepit bourgeois universe. Marcus is visibly more raw and Stalinist, while Mihu is aesthetic and sentimental. This combination of tendencies in Life Does Not Forgive! results in an example of early formal, modernist exploration in local cinema that feels both "iron-clad" and open.
The systemic failure at the level of policies and best practices in the arts, affecting filmmakers like Lucian Pintilie, Mircea Săucan, Liviu Ciulei, or Radu Gabrea (with his fabulous anti-war film Too Little for Such a Big War [1970]), was that instead of allowing contradictions (formal, ideological, thematic, etc.), the state hastened to close them off, thus stifling the possibility of real diversity in film art.
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This week's premiere: Life Does Not Forgive! by Iulian Mihu and Manole Marcus, Thursday, June 20, at 21:00 EEST, on CINEPUB.RO
This premiere is part of a national archive project supported by the Romanian National Film Centre. Special thanks goes to the Romanian Filmmakers Union and to the Romanian Film Archive.
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