As part of the Instituto Cultural Rumano’s annual programme of promoting Romanian writers through documentary films , tomorrow Friday at 7 p.m., the Romanian Cultural Institute will screen The Apocalypse according to Cioran: Part I (1995) in its auditorium (Plaza del Cordón, 1), in a session dedicated to the pessimistic writer and philosopher Emil Cioran (8-04-1911, Rășinari – 20-06-1995, Paris).
The documentary, directed by Sorin Ilieșiu, was filmed in June 1990 in Paris and Romania, with Gabriel Liiceanu‘s omnipresent narration, almost always as a voice-over. The actors are Cioran himself, his brother Aurel and Petre Țuțea, who barely appears, all of whom give testimonies and anecdotes about the author.
In 1937 Cioran went to Paris on a scholarship. “Would existence be for us an exile and nothingness a homeland?”, the philosopher asked himself rhetorically. In 1940 he began writing Breviary of the Vanquished, his last book in Romanian, which he finished in 1945, when he settled permanently in France, and remained unpublished until 1991. He lived in Paris, in the Latin Quarter, from which he never left. He kept to himself, avoided publicity, and cultivated a rich correspondence and conversation with his friends, Mircea Eliade, Eugen Ionescu, Paul Celan, Barbu Fundoianu, Samuel Beckett and Henri Michaux. Cioran lived bohemian life, something relatively easy in his attic: “I have led, more than anyone else, exactly the life I have wanted: free, without the restrictions of a profession, without painful humiliations or petty worries. A dream life, almost, a life of idleness, such as there are not many in this century”.
After Confessions and Anathemas (1987), Cioran decided not to write any more. He died on 20 June 1995, a few months after his old friend Eugen Ionescu. Both are buried in the Parisian cemetery of Montparnasse. Tickets can be purchased at this link.
