DOI 10.60531/INSIGHTOUT.2024.2.13| CORODAN: THE SELF SLIDES OVER THE SELF WITH FRICTION_ INSIGHTOUT 2(2024) 95 back, experimenting with their movement possibi­lities, and a hyper-sexualised feminine body before intercourse. Déjà vu. This very strange and unidenti­fiable status of the body – its status in the world – un­derlines the processes to which this corporeal entity is subjected: male behaviour inclining towards the feminine is corrected, so the text reads. Freed from the recording eye of the camera’s lens, Grigorescu’s hands move around in an almost symmetrical choreo­graphy along his face, tracing its contours. The mor­phology of his body becomes slowly visible, a little bit more comprehensible: a centre, for which the head, neck and torso are representative and almost static, annexed by the dualities of extremities that fail to move synchronically. Turbulences of language, turbu­lences of the lens, turbulences of the image, yet the pursuit of duality continues: tracing along his face, along his legs; nothing but disruptions of the body and the frame. Duality fails, as is to be expected. The second half of the film constitutes a refrain bet­ween the interiority of the private space – the artist’s studio – and the outside sphere. Five repetitions show urban architectural elements – windows, doors, pillars and a magnitude of hole-like objects – paired with scenes of Grigorescu sensually, sluggishly and awkwardly occupying his studio chair. Actual archi­tecture, as represented in these scenes, is not ratio­nalised. It does not serve the purpose of housing or protecting, it does not follow any function, it is not a documentation of the living conditions in Ceau ș escu’s Bucharest: it is mere metaphor. Is the door open or closed? What about the window? The holes: ent­rance? Escape route? Where to? The womb? Maybe a glitch. What kind of pillar supports the balcony? What is this infrastructure? Maybe phallic imperti­nence. How does one know? Grigorescu:“I was try­ing to discover, by moving the camera over the sur­face of the body, which are the fragments that give the viewer the certainty of being face to face with a man or a woman. I was trying to help the viewer by showing him various architectural forms with a pro­nounced masculine or feminine aspect. For example, a round open window, or a glass-roofed porch, the transparent form of a shell.” 11 Metaphors compare a first subject to a second subject, and even if con­troversial in the history of philosophy and rhetoric, this ambitious methodology sometimes exposes the intricacies of both discussed entities. Or perpetuates new constructions: a refrain of photographic proce­dures. And what a comparison, what a construction: a slapstick comedy of a man lethargically reclining on his studio chair, no Benny Hill or Buster Keaton, but Olympia and Venus facing a gendered outside sphere, carved in stone – perennial, though not ever­lasting – asking their viewer: how do you know? Ileana Pintilie describes Masculin-Feminin and its gender dimension as a work that pleads in favour of the defining traits of both sexes, the construction of which gives birth to the“full, balanced, comple­te man”. 12 While I do agree that Masculin-Feminin works with the signifying traits of both female and male sexuality, I oppose the view that Grigorescu’s unity, if we are to call a fragmented chimera unita­ry, is in any way balanced or complete. Similarly, in Our Home and Delivery/Birth, Grigorescu confronts viewers with a fractured subject, disrupted along the frame and in its psychology, disrupted in its actual infrastructure, organic and technical, yet very affir­ming of this disruption. Inconsistent in its presence, painted by the penis, consistently marked by it, but corrected by the feminine, Grigorescu’s chimera is both and none at the same time, a hermaphrodite in continuous exchange, shifting its identity after and before every frame, doubled by the mirror, once again fragmented by this medium par excellence of subject formation and self-reflection. The masculine 11 Șerban,"Chronology", 337(see n. 6), quoting Grigorescu. 12 I. Pintilie,“Between Modernism and Postmodernism: A Contextual Analysis of Ion Grigorescu’s Work”, in A. Ș erban(ed.), The Man with a Single Camera (Berlin/Bucharest, 2013), 10–86 at 35.