DOI 10.60531/INSIGHTOUT.2024.2.13| CORODAN: THE SELF SLIDES OVER THE SELF WITH FRICTION_ INSIGHTOUT 2(2024) 91 This re-codification did not aim for the construction of new masculine values or plead for a feminist breakthrough, but rather was concerned with a very peculiar deconstructive and destabilising hybri­disation between the two canonically recognised genders. tus, you have an almost feminine sensibility: hysterical, sick and feverish. True turbulences of language.” 2 Occupying the frame for nearly three minutes, this passage provides more than an opening to Ion Grigorescu’s experimental film Mascu­lin-Feminin (1976). Composed of letters that differ in form – similar to a ransom note – the text is initially and only briefly introduced as a stand-alone paragraph, denying the viewers a comprehensive reading unless actively inter­vening in the playback of the film. After this fleeting encounter, the camera starts perfor­ming a radiography of the fragmenting sen­tences, visually quoting a reading-like motion. Phrases become incomplete as they slip away; letters and syntax interfere, escape, dissolve, not even words are recognisable any more. Deprived of its original logic, this textually dominated image is characterised by breaks in coherence and an arrhythmic, at times sha­ky movement of the camera recording it(or rather failing to do so). A subtle reference to the nature of film emerges. Turbulences of lan­guage become an imperative. Not only becau­se it is poetically declared, but because it de­fines Ion Grigorescu’s aesthetic methodology, this language comes as no surprise. Marked by fragmentation, narrative incoherence and frenetic camera choreography, a peculiar al­“The penis as a brush and the masculine as a mask. phabet(de)coding reality along its artefacts unfurls On the one hand, it occupies too much of my person. itself to the viewer. It is my masculine interlocutor, even though it dreams of a feminine name(penis). It gives me a conception In Romania’s national communist regime of the of myself and of my status in the world. It corrects my 1970s, describing yourself as a realist artist, as Ion behaviour inclining towards the feminine. Our dialo- Grigorescu often and emphatically did, not only gue is not reduced to the organic(things we almost came across as anachronistic, but almost as reac­neglect); I must recognise its intelligence, its capacity tionary. In a historical context where Realism conno­to create, compose and imagine. Regarding the sta- ted traces of the Socialist Realist genre that domi­2 Text translated by the author; original Romanian version shown in the opening sequence of Masculin-Feminin (1976).