Imagine coperta I: Paul Klee, Dansul copilului îndoliat (detaliu), 1922

Colecția Oriens este coordonată de Virgil Ciomoș

Volum editat împreună cu Editura Eikon

Lucrarea Noeminei Câmpean ne oferă un demers exegetic de excepţie dezvoltând, pe parcurs, o triplă performanţă schiţată deja în titlu: un comparatism estetic în proximitatea unghiului psihanalitic atingându-se, adesea, pragul sinestezic între creaţia proteică a lui Strindberg şi polimorfismul artistic al lui Bergman (centrat pe memorialistică, teatrologie şi cinematografie). Apoi, vertebrarea acestei relaţii prin tema durerii inocentului amplificată ca o punte de legătură între tragedia greacă şi drama modernă. În al treilea rând, circumscrierea eşafodajului religios – în speţă luteranismul, dar şi cel propriu-zis artistic, legat de specificitatea avangardismului nordic – şi, prin extrapolare, a celui european, cu precădere din prima jumătate a veacului al XX-lea. Intricate până la osmoză, cele trei perspective conferă lucrării o structură rizomatică şi, mai ales, profunzime interpretativă, toate acestea fiind girate de o triadă metodologică corespunzătoare, respectiv: un comparatism multiplu etajat, analiza interdisciplinară şi examenul imagologic al integralei cinematografice şi teatrologice lăsate posterităţii de Bergman. Rezultanta acestui demers structurat în patru părţi defalcate în capitole şi subcapitole este o personală şi arborescentă meditaţie despre tragicul modern cu punctul de plecare în asumarea firească a concepţiei potrivit căreia destinul este imanent fiinţei umane. Or, tema „durerii inocentului”, obsesivă la „duplexul” Strindberg/ Bergman, nu doar acompaniază ori exemplifică, ci este parte integrantă din procesualitatea tragicului într-o analiză ce ajunge până la nivelul capilarelor. (Mircea Muthu)

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Jocul perspectivelor multiple, al reflectărilor poliedrice și al oglindirilor reciproce este ținut laolaltă de o structură subiacentă fermă, de un subiect cu un înalt grad de originalitate și de o construcție științifică serioasă. În ceea ce privește chestiunea influenței, e vorba, desigur, nu de una directă, mimetică, ci de o influență care conduce la o serie de anamorfoze, alambicări și transfigurări creatoare. Analiza de tip comparatist e structurată de o serie de cupluri dialectice uneori inversate, iar influența este abordată pe mai multe paliere. Din perspectiva teoriei artei, de exemplu, în care este urmărită metamorfoza conceptului teatral de „piesă de cameră” inventat de Strindberg în „cinematograful de cameră” bergmanian. Dar și din perspectiva psihanalitică, nu doar freudiană, ci și lacaniană, utilizând triada: tatăl real, tatăl simbolic şi tatăl imaginar. (Liviu Malița)

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Noemina Câmpean (născută Răduț, la 24.11.1987 în Târgu-Mureș). Studii: Facultatea de Litere, Univ. Babeș-Bolyai Cluj-Napoca, specializarea Limba și Literatura Română – Literatură Universală și Comparată (2009); Masterat în „Filosofie, cultură și comunicare” la Facultatea de Istorie și Filosofie, Dep. de Filosofie, Univ. Babeș-Bolyai (2011); Doctorat în Filologie cu calificativul Excelent (Summa cum laudae), 2015, tot la Literele clujene. Stagii de cercetare: Univ. Jean Moulin Lyon III, Facultatea de Filosofie, Franța (2010) și Univ. din Copenhaga, Facultatea de Științe Umaniste, Danemarca (2015). Bursieră a Academiei Române București în proiectul „Cultura română și modele culturale europene: cercetare, sincronizare, durabilitate” (2014-2015). Debut în poezie cu volumul Nudul lui Pilat (Ed. Pro Transilvania, București, 2005, pref. Tudor Opriș).

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Omul contemporan va trebui să găsească un alt Răsărit – cel „de sus”. E ceea ce Colecţia ORIENS vă propune: recuperarea unei anume verticalităţi. Ea promovează apropierea dintre două discipline ale Spiritului – filosofia şi psihanaliza –, mizând pe adagiul din Exod care ne avertizează că Fiinţa este Persoana. Şi invers.

Strindberg and Bergman. Comparative Perspectives on the Pain of the Innocent

Cover design: Paul Klee, Dance of the Mourning Child (detail), 1922
The Collection Oriens is coordinated by Virgil Ciomoș

The volume was published in collaboration with Eikon Publishing House

The study Strindberg and Bergman. Comparative Perspectives on the Pain of the Innocent represents, prima facie, a research of comparative literature that aims to archive and analyse Strindberg’s influences on Bergman’s oeuvre with regard to the theme of the pain of the innocent. Lato sensu, this paper intends to approach the work of several Scandinavian creators (writers, philosophers) such as Em. Swedenborg, S. Lagerlöf, Tomas Tranströmer, H. Ibsen, P. Lagerkvist, K. Hamsun, S. Kierkegaard, Kaj Munk, by circumscribing their influence on Bergman, by tracing the development from the pain of the innocent Job to suffering, guilt, humiliation, solitude, faith and despair, against the Lutheran background and the subject of Deus Absconditus. With a Janus Bifrons face, the pain of the innocent appears in all these signs and it is described in its negativity – experienced in intimacy, it must always be shared with the others by the character that we could generically call the passionate Job. Another objective of this paper is to highlight the “contamination” between Bergman and his Swedish/ Danish or German expressionistic masters: Sjöström, Stiller, Sjöberg, Molander, Dreyer, Murnau, Lang. August Johan Strindberg (1849-1912), as the naturalistic playwright of the “clustered soul”, as a poet, as an author of confessions, journals and novels, of funeral and occult studies, of chemistry, genetics, botany and biology, as an alchemist, painter and photographer, is considered to play an important role not only in the process of rebirth of the dramatic movement of the late nineteenth and the early twentieth century (an expressionism or a surrealism avant la lettre), but also in the reconfiguration of the reminiscences of tragedy, both classical and ancient. Ingmar Ernst Bergman’s work (1918-2007) – his art films, journals, interviews, confessions of stage craft or dramatic compositions transformed first into juvenile plays, later into the Great Text of the film – represents an archeological assertion of Strindberg’s distorted vision of humanity – pessimistic, dysfunctional, even nostalgic and apocalyptical; moreover, we shall examine Bergman’s work in the context of Strindberg’s creative “demons”, but also in connection with the modern European cinematography.
The approach of such a serious, inexhaustible, extended and eccentric topic might be surprising, even in this academic and institutionalized space. This might be due to language obstacles, the cultural differences and the very opacity of the pain theme itself. However, having studied the most important directions (including the first film theorists from the late nineteenth century up to contemporary Lacanian and Freudian scholars who apply psychoanalysis in relationship with these arts), we can sincerely affirm that approaching the topic of the pain of innocent from a comparative and aesthetical perspective represents indeed a novelty and a necessity. This book does not aim at offering a synthesis of the history theater or of the Swedish film (or even of the Nordic film), nor does it constitute a cinematic primer or a book of aesthetics. Our method does not fall into a simplistic or simplified comparison and it will not bear an hermetic conclusion. Therefore, it is not a classical or proportionate interpretation of the pain of the innocent, it is not progressive or gradual, au fur et à mesure, but a demonstration “in branches”, divided and segmented, conducted with and through each chapter – speaking with Professor Muthu’s peculiar metaphor, the current interpretation is a multiple one, like the “eyes of the cockchafer”, having plenty of facets and thousands of compounded eyes. Correspondingly, the theories of film and theater are used here only for their relevance to the topic of pain. The symbiosis between a literary work and its cinematic accomplishment (and we don’t mean here one screening or the other, but an essential conveyance of themes) involves numerous specific aspects: the particularization of the artistic beliefs of both Strindberg and Bergman, but also the modern mutations of the tragedy. When analyzing a cinematic realization, we use a different kind of technical discourse and distinctive instruments; nevertheless, cinema is the art that always reverberates profoundly with the modifications in literature (let’s just think of the narrative technique of the stream of consciousness). In addition to this specialized language, there are in certain places also signs of a biblical language related to our subject. If we were to adopt Jacques Aumont’s appreciation, we could say that the film in its entirety is the place where cinema meets non-cinematic elements, but the personal contribution of the researcher would be inconclusive, even insignificant if he did not uncover all these layers. In fact, modern theories of film and theater – two areas that, undoubtedly, interfere – are separated by a boundary as thin as a pellicle. Thus, beyond the didactic objective of writing a PhD thesis that becomes a book, the mission of this project would remain in the shadows, marginal or unnoticed, without an inter, multi and transdisciplinary approach where various methods of research such as literary critique and literary theory, philosophy, psychoanalysis, criticism and theory of film and theater coalesce.
In the title of this study, Strindberg is read and revisited sorrowfully and painfully (i.e. in terms of his pain), simultaneously with Bergman; as a consequence, Strindberg unveils his numerous metamorphoses, the radiations of his ego. While Strindberg is indebted rather to a “real balzacianism” (a referential propensity for the significant detail) than to Zola’s naturalism – his writing reveals the reality, the imperfection and the incompleteness of his troubled psyche, touched by a fatal pain, always current and always brought up-to-date –, Bergman’s work reveals a Shakespearean vein (doubled by a Chekhovian and a Brechtian one): the director conceives the theatrical scene as a Shakespearean state of mind in which the Faustian artist is affected by the impossible pain of possessing his own art. Throughout his life, Bergman claimed that Strindberg was his “demonic” companion and he felt a great literary and spiritual affinity with him. As a matter of fact, the occurrences of Strindberg’s written work increase and reproduce themselves in the “body” of Bergman’s both written and cinematic work. In other words, our purpose is to find the traces of the influence – an influence that never articulates what was there before, an influence that does not reproduce the entire metamorphosis, but only the different forms of the transfiguration, the decisive process. Accordingly, the influence becomes reversal, reprise, repression, release, discovery, vitalization, an inter/ sub/ supra-textual presence. Reassembling retroactively the roots of the influence, but also dealing with the subsequent “cut wounds”, we could talk in this case about a future tense in the past of the innocent`s pain theme. So, what we are trying to prove in our interpretation “in branches” is that, by reading Strindberg through Bergman, the influence does not represent itself entirely restored, but always as a remnant or residue, under a changing form and essentially indebted to the three main names of the Bergmanian father – the real father (the Lutheran minister Erik Henrik Fredrik Bergman), the symbolical father (August Strindberg) and the imaginary father (this one being composed from distinctive images: firstly, the director Victor Sjöström, further by literary or cinematic paternal images, especially expressionistic). Even if a pure redrawing of the influence appears initially to be unfeasible and unbearable, the identity of Job’s pain is found in the difference that is never symbolically exhausted by a performative reader – he, who moves back and forth in the room of a future tense in the past, moreover, he, who disposes of the necessary resources to anticipate what was, paradoxically, never represented. (Noemina Câmpean)