Nae Caranfil and The “Maximalist” Aesthetics

     Cu ocazia evenimentelor recente organizate de UNATC, anume conferirea titlului de Doctor Honoris Causa cineastului Nae Caranfil, precum și seria de proiecții publice cu filmele cineastului, redacția AaRC publică, prin amabilitatea autoarei, eseul criticului și istoricului de film Dana Duma,  "Nae Caranfil and The « Maximalist » Aesthetics", scris în engleză și publicat în revista universitară Close Up. Film and Media Studies, vol 1, no 1, 2013, pp 20-32. 
 
by Dana Duma

Abstract

     The aim of this study is double: to identify in Nae Caranfil`s movies the first break with early post-communist Romanian cinema and the start of a renewal in filmmaking, to evaluate how his personal aesthetics is placed vis à vis the New Romanian cinema-creating methods. Relied on his movies' scrutiny through the grid of the auteur theory, the article refers to Caranfil`s aesthetic principles formulated in a surprising "statement of intentions" written when he was 23 years old and in recent interviews. The director`s „maximalist aesthetics”(as he defines it, 1) is finally confronted with the "minimalist” paradigm of the new realist Romanian movies.

Keywords: Nae Caranfil, auteur theory, film history, film aesthetics, Romanian comedy, self-reflexive cinema, post-communist cinema, New Romanian Cinema

     Inspired by Nae Caranfil`s own description of his cinema aesthetics, the title may suggest a radical opposition of this author`s style to the frequently evaluated „minimalist” style of the New Romanian Cinema. Of course, if we look closer both terms tend to reduce to a ridiculous extent the comparison between two important „breaking up” moments of our cinema, but the forced opposition offers a possible start to a broader discussion which may reveal that, in fact, they share not few common objectives and methods of working.

      Nae Caranfil epitomized, during the first decade after the Revolution, the idea of young Romanian cinema itself. He was the first who tried to shake „the aesthetic stillness” (2) of the 1990s moviemaking. He confirmed the expectations generated by his student films (especially Venice in September / Frumos e în septembrie la Veneţia, 1983) with his feature movie debut E pericoloso sporgersi / Don`t Lean Out the Window / Sundays on Leave (1993). Legitimized with his opera prima by an enthusiastic reception abroad (after being presented in the Quinzaine des realisateurs selection of  Cannes), Caranfil became, along with Lucian Pintilie, a Romanian film director`s name to remember. The film critics' favorable comments were accompanied by flattering statements of famous actors as Charlotte Rampling (distributed in his movie Asfalt tango, 1996), frequently quoted with her saying ”Caranfil is Woody Allen from the East”. Caranfil developed, with each new film, distinctive ways of structuring narratives and a recognizable style. His works confirm  the auteur film definition given by George Littera, as recognizable ”by the force of creating a distinctive poetic universe, based on the coherency of philosophical and  expressive substantiation, by his personal message and mythology, a crystalized style.” (3) 

      In the new millennium, Caranfil won a new status: the director who manages to reconciliate the auteur film with public expectations, especially after Filantropy / Filantropica (2002) topped the Romanian box office. His fans learn by heart lines from his movies, while the film critics appreciate the originality of his scripts. Each of them recognizes his signature. At first sight, his situation seems a paradox. Caranfil`s work asks to be examined through the auteur grid, in spite of his constant approach of a popular genre, the comedy. His particular profile includes the distance he takes from the Romanian auteurist cinema valued before and after the Revolution. Before 1990, the auteur status supposed (in Eastern European cinemas, included Romania) a modernist perception of the medium (as High Art) a metaphorical or allegorical expression, not missing a grain of subversivity. Caranfil `s different evolution is tied to the influences he assimilated during his studies years, a time when the ” Tarkovski model” was ideal for most of the students or recent graduates of the University of Cinema. He remembers:

     "Not to be bored while watching Stalker was proof you had been accepted into the elite and besides that you belonged to this kind of people who secretly opposed to the communist regime. The student films (and not only) were filled with skinny white horses carrying their sadness through crepuscular swamps,  everything was so bloody silent, they often shot images reflected into mirrors." (4) 
    This admiration for directors who ”had less prestige but more public” invites to compare Nae Caranfil to the young directors and film critics of the French journal Cahiers du cinema in the 1950s, the radical cinephiles turned into the directors of the ”New Wave”. They were nick-named by the father figure film critic André Bazin ”hitchko-hawksians”, due to their cult-admiration for Hollywoodian film directors such as Alfred Hitchcock or Howard Hawks. As they made firm statements before their debut films, any auteur figure is expected since to express his aesthetic ideas in an articulated form. Although he has not published any manifesto of a future aesthetic movement, Caranfil wrote, however, a text with a personal "credo" profile just when he was still a student, taking the opportunity of a symposium dedicated to the film director Jean Georgescu (that was later published in the Noul cinema magazine in 1996 - 6). The text entitled "Caragiale`s Tradition ("Tradiția Caragiale") is rather unknown, overlooked in the context of the radical (and often political ) statements of the Romanian film directors after the Revolution. But in the perspective of time, it seems to be a precious key to evaluate the author`s body of works. With no exaggeration, we may say that comedy`s ennobling belongs to an early aesthetic program formulated by Caranfil in Caragiale`s "Tradition". No doubt, his essay has a say in the director`s evolution and anticipates his aesthetic strategies.

 A kind of manifesto

     As Nae Caranfil`s filmography invites to be examined through the auteur grid, the discovering of a personal "plan B"  of evolution, grounded on polemical statements regarding most of  Romanian comedies( and Romanian cinema of any kind) is significant. The ideas and the tone reveal the author`s need to break with the „old” mainstream Romanian movie-making practice. Although it has no ambitions to be a manifesto, as Truffaut`s articles that attacked the academic French cinema of the 1950s  (as "A Certain Tendency of Frech Cinema" / "Une certaine tendence du cinema francais", published in Cahiers du cinema no 31, January 1954) the article "Caragiale`s Tradition" /("Tradiţia Caragiale") the text provides a critical evaluation of the  Romanian comedy from the beginings to the eighties. Sketching the particular profile of  Romanian comedy, Caranfil emphasizes ironically its inconsistency. He criticizes the screen adaptations of  Ion Luca Caragiale Caragiale`s theatrical work:

     "Part of them was merely a pretext to immortalize stage productions of Bucharest theatres. In other cases, we have conventional adaptations or, using a more appropriate term, cautious, with no other ambition than to crowd within the screen dimensions, the more number of actors.” (7)

     He comments more ironically the so-called contemporary comedies in which he sees only "sentimental troubles placed in fancy resorts”, ”feel-good movies” with merry rompings, girls and boys living shy and happy in the fairy tale world of Romanian cinema. The satire`s temptations, the tragi-comic vocation, the incisivity were the traits of other cinemas. We preferred the snowball fights”. (8)

     He signals two happy exceptions of prolonging Caragiale`s inheritance, the two adaptations signed by Jean Georgescu: A Stormy Night / O noapte furtunoasă / (1943) and a contemporary comedy whose polemic vigor and satirical character places it in Caragiale`s vein, Our Director / Directorul nostru (1955). According to Caranfil, he was the single director who really perceived the cinematic dimensions of the great dramatist`s oeuvre, recognizing his generosity in offering the model of a perfect structure and comic composition, a bright technique of developing situations and moreover a caustic spirit of profoundly national essence. 
 
     Mastering the basic notions of the comic genre nature, he notices:

      "in Caragiale`s work, the structure organizes a plot whose remarkably logical development gives birth to a satiric protest so pregnant, that the liberating laugh is directly determined. The sense is not added, it emerges naturally from the situations development itself. In the struggle between a villain and a dumb, the winner is a third one, a dumb villain ("The Lost Letter"/ "Scrisoarea pierdută"). The fable has, at the same time, comic substance and critical virulence(...) Look how, each time, the essential thing is the COMIC STRUCTURE saturated with life substance.” (9)

A popular version of the auteur 

     Dubbed by a committed cinephilia, Nae Caranfil`s profound knowledge of comedy brought remarkable results after he improved his writing techniques during the screenwriting courses he followed in 1988 in Belgium or in 1998 in France. The concern for solid screenwriting is going to become a key characteristic of the author. 

     We don`t have to search elsewhere for the explanation for the international support received from  Western financing sources even from his beginnings. Caranfil became a dear of European producers because he proposed projects based on well-written scripts, promising personal movies with strong entertainment dimensions. We should not forget that his first two films, E pericoloso sporgersi (titled in France Dimanches de permission) and Asphalt Tango were financed by the ECO Found, implemented by the Culture Minister Jacques Lang in 1989, meant to support the development of film production in the countries from Central and East Europe, as Anne Jackel highlights in ”France and Romanian Cinema 1896-1999” (10). When the tasks of this found have been taken over by Eurimages, Nae Caranfil got financing from there as well. His success may be tied to his personal aesthetics which he defined in an interview. He describes it by analyzing the relationship between the scriptwriter and the film director wearing the same name, Nae Caranfil: 

     "I can`t say that I forced onto myself a sort of «maximalist agenda». But, on the other hand, when I`m writing a screenplay and I`m trying to create high-quality entertainment, austerity, and excision are not two of my favorite tools. «Kitchen sink drama is far from my specialty. Consequently, it may happen that I`m writing huge, cinematically spectacular crowd scenes, well aware that I`m opening the door to a huge pile of production problems and that one day Caranfil the director will silently curse Caranfil the writer for throwing at him that crazy, mind-bending scene" (11)

      After having identified the aesthetic program written by Nae Caranfil long time before his debut, we could conclude, by exploring his filmography, that it was an efficient  „self-development plan” that brought him not only box office success but also the quality of author, a status acquired mostly by American standards. 

     Although it was born in Europe, the idea of auteur cinema had influential supporters in „the new world”. It was the film critic Andrew Sarris who reshaped the auteur theory in American terms and defined it for the first time in close relation with the movie industry. According to him, a director could not obtain this qualification if he doesn`t confirm his "technical abilities”: 

      "Obviously, the auteur theory cannot possibly cover every vagrant charm of the cinema. Nevertheless, the first premise of the auteur theory is the technical competence of a director as a criterion of value". (12)

      Although he values the technique mastering, Sarris borrows from the French filmmakers and film critics from the Cahiers du cinema journal the important ‘personal criterion’ and highlights: 

     "The second premise of the auteur theory is the distinguishable personality of the director as a criterion of value. Over a group of films, a director must exhibit certain recurrent characteristics of style, which serve as his signature. The way a film looks and moves should have some relationship to the way the director thinks and feels. This is an area where American directors are generally superior to foreign directors. Because so much of the American Cinema is commissioned a director is forced to express his personality through the visual treatment of material rather than through the literary content of the material." (13)

     If we evaluate  Nae Caranfil`s movies using Sarris criteria, we might note they answer each demand: from the “technical competence”, to some “recurrent characteristics of style,” but we could have some problems with making an analogy with the status of the American film director, “forced to express his personality through the visual treatment of material rather than through the literary content of the material ”. Sarris needed to underline the efforts of the personal Hollywood directors to avoid the standardization supposed by the commissioned scripts of the big studios. In Caranfil`s case this effort is unnecessary because he is always the author of his films` scripts. The scriptwriter and the director are not in a position to dispute their superiority. Even when he accepted a commissioned project, as the French-Italian co-production Dolce far niente (1998) he did it only after being assured he would script it.

      Film critics and viewers generally agree that the strong part of Nae Caranfil`s movies is the script. Long before the scriptwriting manuals signed by Robert McKee or Sid Field went available to each young Romanian dreaming to become a filmmaker or film writer, Caranfil did everything to enhance his natural ability to write for cinema. But his highly crafted scripts manage to mark always his presence, an operation further accomplished by directing tools. Nae Caranfil is an auteur by European standards as well, mostly by Jean-Louis Comolli`s definition:

     "No matter the origin or the sources of inspiration, the film director always talks about himself. When he stages characters, we find out less about them than about him, even there are things stranger of his own experience’. (14)    

   We may say Nae Caranfil's films are autobiographical in a light way: he always tries to dissolve autobiographical details in agreeable stories. His auteur vocation was recognized thanks to the autobiographical touch, starting with his debut movie E pericoloso sporgersi, a nostalgic-ironical comedy that tales stories about the communist „golden age” avoiding the usual furious „denouncing” tone of Romanian films from the beginnings of the 1990s. Similar to Akira Kurosawa in Rashomon, Caranfil makes use of the embedded stories technique, a little bit before Quentin Tarantino also used it in his Pulp Fiction  (1994) and this narrative device turned into an epigonic phenomenon. The stories of the Student girl, the Actor and the Soldier bring on-screen characters whose destinies cross in a small suffocating town. In the juicy description of the milieu, full of details relevant to the era, we guess autobiographical suggestions in the high school`s atmosphere with the vaguely erotical teasing of the teenagers and silly farces or in the army episodes with bathroom jokes and vindicative superiors. Caranfil`s movies always provoke the viewer to discover the author`s avatar.

     In this comedy which speaks with humor about the despair that pushed people to risk their lives by crossing the Danube swimming, hoping to continue their journey to the West, we identify themes and motives to be re-discovered in the director's next movies: the motif of escaping from a suffocating place, or the obsession of representing the show business world. 

      Some of the themes/motifs reappear in Asfalt tango (1996). Built on the road-movie canons, this comedy with extravagant situations and witty dialogues depicts the anarchical and full of contrasts landscape of the Romanian transition from  communism to capitalism. The movie tells the story of eleven young and beautiful women recruited by a cynical Frenchman (Charlotte Rampling) to perform in a sexy show. Embarked in a bus, they cross the country, followed by a desperate husband (Mircea Diaconu) who is trying to recuperate his wife. Asphalt tango develops a speedy chase, accumulating funny adventures that confront local and sexist mentalities to the Western ideas of women`s emancipation. Billy Wilder`s lesson seems very well learned by Caranfil in developing hilarious situations and funny dialogues. The naïve husband fails in his desperate attempt of making himself accepted by "European standards" (we can`t ignore the Western complex of the Romanian psyche) but this character definitely conquers the public's sympathy. Comparable to other comedies of transition coming from ex-communist countries (as the big international hits Kolya, directed by the Czech Jan Sverak in 1993 or the German Goodbye Lenin (2000, Wolfgang Beker), Asphalt tango grounds more his humor in the national obsession of migration, trying to avoid the Western stereotypes in the representation of "Romanian issues". 

     The ironic approach of topics like “communist nightmare” or “the dreadful transition” in Caranfil`s movies encouraged a new attitude of the film directors in representing the past, welcomed by the Romanian public. Because, as I wrote on another occasion, “in the early 90s the movies approaching these topics were generally avoided by the public because of their ethical didacticism and schematic plots. There are few exceptions, as Balanța by Lucian Pintilie or E pericoloso sporgersi by Nae Caranfil, the first internationally celebrated Romanian movies after the Revolution” (15). We have to notice that Caranfil`s attitude toward the past and the transition influenced the young directors belonging to New Romanian Cinema, from Cristian Mungiu`s Occident (2002), to Cătălin Mitulescu`s How I Spent the End of the World (Cum mi-am petrecut sfârşitul lumii, 2006), from Mungiu`s supervised omnibus-film Stories from the Golden Age (Amintiri din epoca de aur), to Adalbert`s Dream (Visul lui Adalbert, 2012) by Gabriel Achim.

     Caranfil continues to bring on screen the transition`s issues, even going more in-depth in Philantropy / Filantropica (2002), the bright comedy on top of the Romanian box office (with 113.000 entries) and turned Nae Caranfil into the beloved director of the young Romanian public. Mircea Diaconu, his habitual cinematic stand-in, gives life to Ovidiu, a high school professor who, humiliated by the student's indifference and his poor salary,  tries to recuperate dignity by writing novels in his spare time. After having sold only three copies of his first book, he faces a block writing trying to start the second one. Falling in love with a young model with luxury pretensions, he desperately tries to make easy money and offers his services to an exotic crook, Mr. Pepe, the head of Philantropy, a foundation whose aim is to transform poverty into a profitable business. Pepe`s major gift is to write texts for the beggars and to stage situations that activate people`s sense of pity. He creates for Ovidiu "a  brilliant script": the professor is assigned to impersonate, accompanied by the young woman, a husband who invites his wife to a restaurant to celebrate their anniversary, but discovers he does not have sufficient money to pay the bill. Their decent look and "sincere" embarrassment convince each time the customers to offer them the needed money. This sophisticated strategy proves Mr. Pepe's genius and confirms his theory: ”The bagging hand without a story does not get anything”.

     If Philantropy relies its vis comica on its solid narrative structure, powerful characters and speedy lines, the film directing strategy is equally efficient in providing intelligent humor. Staged in-depth, the beggar casting scene, where Mr Pepe improvises a different text for each case, is a subtle metacinematic moment that lets us follow the birth of a theatrical performance, within the frame of a cinematic one. In this occasion Caranfil brightly exercises his "maximalist" style, which does not avoid high angles and visual stunts brilliantly composed by the director of photography Vivi Drăgan Vasile.

     Oana Chivoiu offers a good explanation, in her review from Film International,  of Filantropica`s critical success, by emphasizing the subtle scriptwriting and directing: 

     "Caranfil`s comedy flirts with drama, stays away from sentimentalism and loves the raw humour of farces. The commitment to excellent screenwriting seen in  Caranfil`s previous comedies Sunday on Leave (1993) and Asphalt Tango (1996) is taken to a higher level of narrative and psychological sophistication in Philantropy. The plot I seasoned with brilliant dialogues, quotable lines and numerous twists." (16) 

     The author is not only an entertainer, but also an observer of the Romanian reality of the transition to capitalism, with nouveaux riches, impostors, grotesque imitations of Western models and moral confusion depicted realistically, in a sarcastic Caragialesque tone. His ironic and sarcastic description never aims to reach metaphorical dimensions.

Self-reflexivity 

     Watching Filantropica, we are tempted to believe that, in a self-reflexive impulse, Caranfil includes a kind of statement referring to the scriptwriter's condition. The representation of the writing process (and the occasion to find other avatars of the author) may be also found in Dolce far niente , the international co-production (Italy- France), rooted in a best seller by Frederic Vitoux "9 Days at Terracina". The book imagines the presupposed meeting of 1816 between the French writer Stendhal and the Italian composer Giaccomo Rossini in an isolated inn, during the troubled days that followed the Napoleonian wars. They are involved in adventurous events, along with an exiled count and his wife, adventures that might have influenced their works. 

     Caranfil takes the novel narrative as a pretext to develop personal themes, such as the artist`s relationship with the idea of action. ” The character I created is Nae Caranfil” (17) confesses the director who ironically depicts Sthendal as an anti-hero. Awarded, for the subtlety of the script, at the Namur Film Festival,  the movie proposes an interesting narrative device: 

     ”a binom: the one who tells his experiences, Sthendal, and I, who tell the movie and am an omniscient narrator. I created a conflict between the one who apparently tells the events, but tells them badly because he cannot understand nothing and the events themselves, brought on screen by the film director: what you see denies what the storyteller understands.” (18) 

     This proves it`s impossible to avoid speaking of “self-reflexivity” in analyzing Nae Caranfil`s movies, whether he uses its techniques to refer to the writer`s condition or to interrogate the relationship between cinema and life. Like the American directors of the 70s he admires, Caranfil can be ranged in the category of auteurs whose “ expression of authenticity resides in an awareness of film, film references and the cultural detritus of so many scenes, set pieces and throwaway lines of dialogues”. (19) 

     This tendency of modern cinema of awareness is named by the French scholars Gilles Lipovesky and Jean Serroy “ the distance-image”. They claim it is a “form of cognitive distancing, (…) to provoke a reflection on cinema” (20). Although all the movies signed by Caranfil are full of allusions and references to recognizable authors and movies, some of them nurture their entire narrative substance from a particular case.

     The most relevant in this regard is The Rest is Silence (Restul e tăcere) which revolves around the making of  Romanian`s Independence (Independenţa României, 1912) the first Romanian feature film (signed by Grigore Brezeanu and Aristide Demetriad). Inspired by the book (21) his father (the well-known critic Tudor Caranfil) wrote on the making of this movie, Nae Caranfil is seduced by the myth of the young director, Grigore Brezeanu, who was only 19 years old when he started to fight for the project of bringing on screen the 1877 war against the Turks and the Romanian victory.

     Although Tudor Caranfil claims, in his book, that the true director would be in fact the mature actor Aristide Demetriad (co-scriptwriter and co-director), Nae Caranfil prefers to identify Grigore Brezeanu as author, seduced by the myth of the young author: "I didn`t like this events` interpretation because I wanted to explore this opposition artist-mogul and I needed a strong and contrasting binom: the artist had to be a kid and a dreamer, not a prestigious actor, in his mature age; Grig`s youth is a main element because it burns in its confrontation with the money, precisely Leon Popescu”. (22)

  The relationship between the artist and his Maecena, with its complicity, euphoric and conflictive moments includes a lot of details from the real facts, but follows the traditional love-hate relationship director-producer which inspired movies such as The Bad and the Beautiful (1952) by Vincente Minnelli, The Barefoot Contessa (1955) by Joseph Mankiewicz, The Last Tycoon (1976) by Elia Kazan, or Hollywood Ending (2002) by Woody Allen. 

     By re-enacting scenes and sequences of the ancient movie, The Rest is Silence places itself into the "distance-image" of modern cinema of awareness. It also includes self-ironic allusions, such as the insolent line of the young director who, invited by King Carol l along with the crew of the movie, claims "he is the king on set”. 
      
     As the director of photography, Marius Panduru confesses, "Nae Caranfil aimed to use a classic American formula of the 60s-70s, with respect to the photography and the story (...) he proposed himself to bring various quotes, some of them taken from the years of the early production-the Hamlet excerpts, for instance, or the first movie screenings; he wanted to quote the whole history of cinema”. (23) 

     Caranfil approaches self-reflexivity in a different way in, Closer to the Moon (2013) an international production inspired by the so-called "great communist robbery” of 1959. The attack on a National Bank car when a sum equivalent of  250.000 dollars was stolen is investigated in the documentary The Great Communist Robbery (Marele jaf comunist, 2004) by Alexandru Solomon. It incorporates footage from Reconstruction (Reconstituirea) the educational film realised by the  Studiou Alexandru Sahia in 1960. Watching this documentary, Nae Caranfil was intrigued by the curious "good mood” of the heist authors, arrested and forced to re-enact the genesis and the unfolding of the heist.  It seems they accepted to perform beyond the investigators` false offer to reduce their sentence if they would co-operate. Caranfil decided to transfer into fiction the incredible event and, thanks to the quality of his script about the six Jewish intellectuals who organized the robbery, he won the national CNC projects contest and, afterward, the American producer Michael Fitzgerald`s support. Entirely shot in English, Closer to the Moon is tailored for the international audience, as the director confesses:

     ”I was still aware that it was a film for an international audience and, consequently, I had to work around the topic in a way that could offer more than one key of understanding the Romanian reality of the communist era-so that the uninformed viewer could enjoy the film without the film sounding too much as a history lesson.” (24) 

     Caranfil is aware that his approach “will raise all kinds of controversy, especially because of its topic but also because is treated with an unexpectedly «light tone», perhaps too light for its more tragic aspect”. The distancing attitude could however make the viewer accept the adventure movie conventions and involve him in the authors`s reflection on the manipulating powers of the cinema media. Counting on an international cast topped by Vera Farmiga (Up in the Air) and Mark Strong (Syriana, Zero Dark Thirty ), Closer to the Moon was not yet released (in March 2013). 

Nae Caranfil and New Romanian Cinema: A Mild Opposition

   Even when he comments the aesthetics of  New Romanian Cinema, legitimized by the constant international  recognition, Caranfil defines it by highlighting his own strategies and the differences which separe him from the new directors generation: 

     "The directors of the new wave are not claiming to derive from my work and I don t have the feeling I influenced them. Their aesthetic program is very different: they don`t pretend I was their model and I don`t have the feeling of having influenced them. The aesthetic program is different: I look for the structure, they linearize, I push the situations to their limits, they deliberately undramatize, I write styled dialogues, they look for naturalism, I use music, they don`t.  I`m trying to seduce, they to rape, but unlike the penal code, the artistic code can legitimate both of the approaches, one do not exclude the other one”. (25)

     The difference between the New Romanian Cinema style and Caranfil`s aesthetics is often underlined in foreign film critics comments as, for instance, in Derek Elly`s review of The Rest is Silence:
     
     ”The Rest is Silence comes like a breath of fresh air at a time when it`s easy to assume, from fest`s picks, that (currently hot) Romanian cinema is all grungy, DVD-S shot, miserabilist dramas.” (26)

     In spite of these claims, we cannot ignore the existing connections between Caranfil and the directors of the New Romanian Cinema: his work practically started the symbolic abandon of the Aesopian language preferred before 1990, initiated the first strong opposition against this metaphorical cinema. His efforts of depicting more realistically Romania and Romanians, or of making the dialogues to sound more naturally were extended by the directors who emerged after 2001 (the year of Cristi Puiu's debut, Staff and Dough/ Marfa si banii) and share some aesthetic principles. We can try to map what is similar and what is dissimilar in their agenda, by sketching a chart: