Bulgaria is once again before elections. The Parliament did not adopt the Law of Cinema. It’s a pity – with all its imperfections it would have untied the purses tightly sealed a la Grandpa Grande, both of the poor country and the rich film distributors. Because while liberation from censorship is still not celebrated, Bulgarian filmmaking has fallen into a tighter corset – the corset of the lack of funds and governmental irresponsibility. And thus constricted in its new corset, Bulgarian Cinema patiently rubs the carpets of power. For the time being though, we have nothing left to do, but to endure the Hollywood invasion (without knowing till when) and to malign the drama in our cinema situation, which can be defined as a simulation of the cinematographic progress.

The misery of the country tore to pieces not only our lives but filmmaking too. It was nailed to the pylon of governmental subsidy. The word “producer”, new in the beginning of the 90s, is still an enigma today. While the cinema of the late 80s itself gave rise to the democratic discontent in the country, it, by Murphy’s law, became a Guinea pig of the cultural reform in the transition to a market economy.

Today, the two motion pictures per year (plus one or two TV pictures) in Bulgaria is nothing more than a miracle. Now it’s not important whether they are good or not. When the number increases to three, we can start thinking of making comparisons, though each picture can be examined in two contexts – actual (world) and yesterday’s (Bulgarian). In the last six months we welcomed three debuts (Iglika Trifonova’s Letter to America, Stefan Komandarev’s Dogs’ Home and Alexandâr Morfov’s TV film Blueberry Hill). But of course, they did not create a wave. Nobody expected it. Just like before, when the pictures were 20 and more. But now it’s worse. It’s a paradox but also a pure fact – at the Bulgarian cinema shore, during all those 86 years, since the production of Bulgaran Is a Gallant until now, only one “licensed” wave has been crashing, though it’s a little bit theoratical – the so-called “migration cycle” in the beginning of the 70s. Those ten or so pictures about psychological quakes determined by the urbanization in our country, in the long run made the foreign critics pay attention to our small cinema for the first and last (for now) time, though Rangel Vâlchanov, Eduard Zahariev, Georgi Dyulgerov were names from the prestigious Eastern European filmmaking group.

Of course, we are not talking about aesthetic explosions like Italian Neorealism, the French New Wave, the Czech Miracle, nor about the German New Cinema or the Polish Cinema of the Moral Unrest, that were topical in that very same period, but about the sociological reflection on Bulgarian existence in the beginning of the 70s. The “migration” pictures are inhibited not only by old villagers ruined in the city (Hristo Hristov’s A Tree without Roots [Dârvo bez koren, 1974] and The Last Summer [Posledno lyato, 1973]), or semi-citizens whose rural weekend is an escape into real life (Lyudmil Kirkov’s The Peasant with the Bike [Selyaninât s koleloto, 1974]). The value in them is the concentration of the story around the problems and joys of the ordinary man, observed in his life’s orbit. I.e. these pictures are an everyday life cinematic alternative to the pompous governmental orders, connected with big and small leaders from the far and the more recent past. For the first time, in this massive way Bulgarian Cinema opens for normal, not disguised, modern experience, notwithstanding whether it’s an everyday life event or extreme situations, satire or drama. Characters are funny and pathetic, good and bad, ignorant and passionate, vulnerable and aggressive – but they are authentic, born bythe rural autoirony of writer Georgi Mishev. With his sense of humor, characteristic of the Fore-Balkan region, he mercilessly “ground” them, although they sometimes get free and take a chance to attempt to dream for a short time. Around Mishev’s feuilleton style, crucified between real life and grotesque, are gathered the classical “migration” pictures of such diverse directors as the sardonic nonconformist Eduard Zahariev (The Hare Census [Prebroyavane na divite zaitsi, 1973], Villa Zone [Vilna zona, 1975]), the humdrum poet Lyudmil Kirkov (The Boy Turns Man [Momcheto si otiva, 1971], Matriarchate, 1976), the kind-hearted Bohemian Lyubomir Sharlandzhiev (The Kindest Person I Know [Nai-dobriyat chovek, kogoto poznavam!, 1973])… The key to the charisma (even today) of the bigger part of those “quakes” is in the plebeian invasion into emotions and the aristocratic elimination of the “general line”.

But the history of Bulgarian filmmaking does not end in the middle 70s and with the fatigue of the “migration cycle”. At certain moments there is a concentration of authors’ inventions, styles, characters and situations, united both thematically or individually. Of course, we are talking about small waves, internal tides that are not so strongly communicative as the “migration cycle”, though they are indicative of the ethical and aesthetic quests of our cinema. If we take a closer look at the slightly pale, and as a whole, lacking personality of a Bulgarian motion picture, we are bound to find a wave from the beginning of the 80s, connected with the name of the screenwriter Alexandâr Tomov. He was so active that the Film Center in his time was called “Sasho Tomov’s Cabin”: Edi Zahariev’s Elegy (Elegiya, 1982); Plamen Maslarov’s Green Fields (Zelenite polya, 1984), Milen Nikolov’s Romantic Story (Romantichna istoriya, 1984); Evgeni Mihailov’s Death Can Wait (Smârtta mozhe da pochaka, 1985), Hristo Hristov’s Reference (Harakteristika, 1986); Stefan Dimitrov’s Ballad (Poema, 1985), Ivan Andonov’s Dreamers (Mechtateli, 1986). Although we meet Dimitâr Blagoev (Dreamers) or a police detective from the 30s (Death Can Wait), the greater part of the characters are contemporary inhabitants of the suburbs of Sofia - primitive passions, plights and vile acts take place in brothels or panel buildings. They question not only the necessity of conscience but the meaning of human life itself. But on the other hand, they present an idyllic living incompatible with the concepts of the life in the capital, such as in Green Fields for example. Plamen Maslarov’s film is warmly ironic and lyrically monotonous – the story is about the misfortunes of Mitri (Stefan Mavrodiev) and his horse. Though it seems that nothing special happens, that moments just go by, the soul tightens, strains and hisses. The impulse and the primitive in Green Fields tear each other’s hair. The struggle is fatal. And doomed, of course. The emotion in this picture is so thick that you can caress its mane. Green Fields is the most “mould” film of Plamen Maslarov. Strangely, but again written by Alexandâr Tomov, is my favorite film – Edi Zahariev’s Elegy. The retired railroad worker Ivan Shiyakov (Itsko Fintsi) is a powerful patron of his family, a man respected in the pub. Being a silent eccentric, he lives in his own harmony. He believes that his moral code is a law not only for him, but for his relatives, too. He has a cabin for reflection down by the swamp. And he has plenty of time. Everything falls apart when Shiyakov learns about the vileness of his son. The idyllic picture is swept away. Life has passed in vain. It’s over – the boat in the swamp waits with tragic persistence. The suggestion of death tears the asceticism of the swampy Bulgarian existence. It draws Elegy in a dialogue with other points of view about art and other cultures. At the same time, things in our country were clear – censors did not like this pessimism. There was no straw in it. Eleven years later, when Edi Zahariev re-edited the film to show it abroad for the first time, he did it with such tenderness that it became clear (for us, the younger and ignorant people) what the cost of the prohibition was.

In spite of the fact that in the motion pictures by Alexandâr Tomov’s screenplays the characters are close to the miserable people during the “migration cycle” (it’s no wonder if they become such if examined in another time and place), they are more aggressive, more brutal, fiercer as a life concept. At a certain moment the audience just feels smeared with so much sperm and blood. And the bigger part of the films are the same - fierce, snapping, but somewhat schematically, deprived of the organic grounds in Green Fields and Elegy.

I restlessly claim that the most important thing that happened in our Bulgarian filmmaking in the last 10 years was the removal of the trifling plot and the comfort from the delusions of the debuts at the end of the 80s: Lyudmil Todorov’s Running Dogs (Byagashti kucheta, 1988), followed by The Love Summer of a Schlep (Lyubovnoto lyato na edin lyohman, 1990), Krassimir Krumov’s Exitus (1988), Petâr Popzlatev’s I, the Countess (Az, grafinyata, 1989), Ivan Cherkelov’s Pieces of Love (Parcheta lyubov, 1988), Dimitâr Petkov’s Silence (Tishina, 1990). A few young men, angry at the queue for debuts, rushed through themain gate of the Film Center and straightened the face of Bulgarian cinema. The air was pregnant with buzzing that later became a thunder of prejudices – from acclaimed response to overburdening the screens around the country.

The movies of the young are different – both from the accomplishments of our filmmaking and among themselves – in terms of artistic quests and result. They are united by the Disagreement with long-atrophied models and canons. The Disagreement is with their lives. Turning their back to “global” issues, they explore scars from the devastation on the terrain of the existential. Professionally undefined, but socially known outsiders, the characters in these pictures, notwithstanding if they are artists or drug addicts, phlegmatic or angry persons, are a projection of the author’s anguish determined by the individual-environment conflict in the kingdom of non-freedom. More or less they eliminate parental prosperity. They desire to look at life (or death) directly, without intermediates. For them pain is both predicted and incidental; words are worn out in insincerety; gestures – phlegmatic because of lie; guilt – “dried out” of mimicry… Cigarettes – unsmoked and straight, the grape brandy – undrunk and crazy, the slang – group and wild – these are their tools against the triviality of the reinforced concrete – embrace drunkenness, orgy, forgetfulness. Love is a part of the group therapy of nothing. Socialism clattered with rusted clichés, but in the martyred giving-no-shit in Pieces of Love, Running Dogs and the others, we used to find adequate expression of motifs of our own frustration – in Bulgarian filmmaking no one before had afforded such suicidal nakedness, such apathetic honesty, such nihilistic profligacy. The young and some of our mature cinematographers uttered and wrote warm words about the debuts, they implied that there was something like a wave… Other (more in number) met them rigidly – this was secondary, enigmatic cinema, everything was deja vu, and the French New Wave was long gone. Along with the debuts new faces appeared on the screen: Petâr Popzlatev, Svetlana Yancheva, Ivailo Hristov, Zhoreta Nikolova, Alexandâr Morfov, Mariya Krumova… They were the people, together with the natural actors in Pieces of Love, who expressed on the screen the confusion of their own generation: “we are to be blamed for the ugliness of the panel houses, in which we suffocate; for the lonely grape brandy that seems to be the only thing that can create honesty; for the other people’s lies contain the silence huddled in the group”. And the cameramen-followers Stefan Ivanov, Rali Ralchev, Voitek Todorov, Hristo Bakalov introduced a plastic vision new to our cinema – troubling and exquisite, decadent and naive. And the monochrome ecstasies formed an atmosphere of disgusting grief. But no matter how dark the messages of the debuts at the end of the 80s were, a hope of survival somehow shyly sneaked by: the group poems and the final forgiveness in Pieces of Love, the yearning of the family in Running Dogs, and the trance-unification in The Love Summer…, the offered friendly hand in Exitus…

But in the time when “cinema was the most important art”, the real meeting with the audience was forbidden for these movies. They were the subject of critics, but not the audience’s interest. That’s why, in the 90s the young entered with one or two motion pictures in total freedom, and with absolute shock because of the things happening around. And they doomed themselves - due to subjective and objective reasons - to a much “crueler” lack of audience.

Ivan Cherkelov’s Rolling Stones (Târkalyashti se kamâni, 1995) and Glass Marbles (Stâkleni topcheta, 1999), Lyudmil Todorov’s Emilia’s Friends (Priyatelite na Emiliya, 1996), Marius Kurkinski’s The Diary of a Madman (Dnevnikât na edin lud, 1996), and Andrei Slabakov’s Wagner (1998) were rather different movies: in terms of the concepts of life of their authors, in terms of genres, language and color. According to me, they are united in their landmarks – they reflect not only the spiritual and social, but also the aesthetic vibrations of the frustration in the 90s. In these films, more realistically and more allegorically are exposed some of the most drastic issues of Bulgarian democratic living: moral crisis; disintegration of society; the everyday nightmare of survival; profanation of values, the sticky power of money… As much as they are traumatic as anamnesis of social convulsions, so too they are unfathomable in terms of expression of those social convulsions in dimensions bearable for humans. Fearing that they would look commercial and banal, their authors deprived them of emotional potency. They turned them into cinematographic theses. Thus, those five gloomy eccentrics could be described as the hermetic wave of the 90s. For many colleagues of mine those motion pictures look ridiculous, but for me they are dear with their dramaturgic imperfections characteristic of the Bulgarian cinema as a whole, and with their radicalism, even with their asceticism. They are an alternative to the vulgar restructuring of ideological signs, to the aiming at ethnic tolerance or the profane parties in our style that dominated the alleged commercial attempts in filmmaking during the 90s. Perhaps, the authors of the five titles would have felt much more uncomfortably on thebig screen, if the context had been richer. Notwithstanding their capsulated arrogance to commercial aspects or the lack of skills to narrate, in the long run these movies are landmarks of our national cinematographic quests. Moreover, they are far more attractive and authentic than the European running after/stumbling over the spells and vows in Dogma 95.

In the latest for the time being Bulgarian debut – the TV movie Blueberry Hill by Alexandâr Morfov – is an important episode: the party of the folk orchestra. This is a sentimental author’s revelation within the low quality music – it winks at the closing episode in Lyudmil Todorov’s The Love Summer of a Schlep (where Alexandâr Morfov was one of the group, and later in Emilia’s Friends, too), which, in its turn, is a nod to Ivan Cherkelov’s Pieces of Love. Of course, in Blueberry Hill everything is profaned, just like our life is – even the ecstasy from pain. But the narcissistic irony is a sketched succession – thin and indirectly expressed, but still there is an umbilical cord between Morfov’s carnival orgy and the spiritual parameters of Cherkelov’s and Todorov’s cataclysms. This is a reason to reflect on whether Bulgarian gloomy eccentrics are only regional insights, or universal messages for future successes in the field of filmmaking.

Since 1990 Genoveva Dimitrova has been cinema critic and cinema editor of Culture Newspaper. She is the author of the book Cinema in the End of the Century. Bulgarian Figures and Motion Pictures - Panorama of the 90s, EA Publishers, 1999. Lecturer in film analysis at the New Bulgarian University