Seven Years of Books on TV

There were seven years on 8 March 2011 since I've been presenting books for television, on the TVR Cultural.

Three stages and three different formulas: first as daily tablet, Monday to Friday, for 3-4 broadcasts a day, under the generic title Cartea [The Book], for a little more than two years (530 episodes between 8 March 2004 and 17 March 2006); then, for nine months as weekly show, a mix between talks with guests (writers, editors...) and brief introduction of recently published titles (40 editions between 23 March and 21 December 2006); then as a feature called Carte.ro within the weekly magazine Art@.ro, still on (109 episodes as of 21 April 2007, with some weeks covered by recasts, especially during the summers after 2006; in 2004-2005 I had filmed incessantly, during all seasons). All together – 679 editions in which I presented thousands of books. I couldn't tell precisely how many, but I can give you an estimation: during the first stage, that of daily tablets, there must have been over 2.000 (I keep a record, only that... I never bothered with counting the titles!); during the “talk-show” version of the show, I would come in the end with a higher pile of new releases from the library, about ten of them, let's say (I haven't written them down on my computer...), therefore I must have done about 4-500; and with Carte.ro I go for an weekly average of minimum five titles, which means another about 500.

This was “seven years of home books” (!), selected – that is – from the piles suffocating our abode and taken back and forth to and fro the TV studios. I have written before on the project I have drawn up and carry on with. So I won't repeat here the content data: motivations, goals, strategies. I should only say again that this is not “book reviews on TV”, but an overlook of the book market as a system, as wide cultural field, of an extremely dynamic metabolism. Instead, on the TV show “celebrating” seven years, here's an anecdotal inventory of moments, people, places I filmed in. “Snap shots” from Cartea/Carte.ro:

■ The “credits” in the beginning – the list of names I keep repeating: Daniela Zeca (TVR Cultural manager, the one who proposed this show to me), Aurel Badea (the director who imagined the first two “mise-en-scene”/ “mise-en-TV”!), Ioana Mihai and Adriana Ene (the producers who assisted me for about five years, if my estimations are correct: a while together, then only Ioana, then only Adriana, when Ioana had a baby boy), Ileana Ploscaru-Panait (painter and producer I am working with – therefore- for about two years now; or more?!...), Ruxandra Ţuchel (general-producer of Arta.ro), Constantin Iane, Cristian Popescu, Viorel Sergovici & comp. (operators, along with many others), Dan Cira & comp. (sound designers, image assistants and light designers, etc.), Ela Ştefănescu (film editor) and many other colleagues whose names I cannot recall.

■ Other characters in the story: the good ladies from accounting and the two other cashiers, at the gate on Ermil Pangratti Street and the ground floor of the tower building of the TVR; then, the ladies in the library, where editors research for their shows, for which reason they asked me bring them some of my “very requested” books; and... the gate watchdogs, who are long used to me and just let me drive inside the yard, without looking for my registration number in the list admitted to the premises.

■ Special “characters, on which I dedicated separate “tablets”: the young Marin Creţu from the props workshops (from the “scenery”), who recognised me while I was going in for a filming, and thought I was I former teacher of his from a secondary school in Militari, which was clarified only on a second meeting, when we realized we know each other from the secondary school in Berceni commune, where I did my compulsory internship in education, after graduating university (in Bucharest I only taught at the University); or the art photographer Aurel Baboi, who made some very beautiful portraits of myself for the “promotion” of the Carte.ro show, adding with great modesty that he won't require mentioning if I use them for magazines...

■ And more characters from the small odyssey of my small show on new editor's releases come to my mind. For example, the employees at the Cărtureşti Bookshop, on Magheru Boulevard, where I filmed the episodes during the first two years, in some room or another, with always new arrangements of books on the background or foreground, therefore in an always changing colourful “scenery”. Not only did we get to know each other and exchange friendly smiles, but the boys and girls at the cashier-reception or assisting customers in the book shop halls or the tea house approached me now and then, between two filming sessions with questions about some writer or some book or the current intellectual debates. When they heard me coughing too much, the “tea-girls” would think of getting me a cup of hot liquor, so I may get better! Also with a “bad” cold I remember this sweet girl barely able to speak from her sore throat, wearing a wool pullover and a scarf rolled up around her neck. With two of the “watch” boys I would talk more often: the friend of about my age, whom I found again later in Cărtureşti ANADOR, in the commercial complex built on the premises of the former taxi garage, on Galati Street, now called Vasile Lascăr, at one end of Ştefan cel Mare road; and the younger Adrian Olaru, who later became the head of the Cărtureşti Depot on Radu de la Afumaţi, in the neighbourhood where I spent my childhood and youth, when I lived on a... promising street: Viitorului (of the Future)! Or the gentleman who still opens the book shop in the mornings and closes it in the evenings, takes things to and fro, cleans up when necessary, a very modest person, the “trustworthy” type, needful in any great enterprise. When I'd get a filming team earlier, I would sometimes get there before he did and wait, or find him inside already, in full homey fever, before customers walked in. We still meet, in the book shop or the neighbouring streets (as I live close by), and warmly greet each other, like old acquaintances.

■ One detail: at some point, after having finished presenting a pile of book, among which one by Ruxandra Cesereanu, and the filming was over, who's to walk in? Ruxandra herself, who is from Cluj but came to Bucharest with some business and walked into Cărtureşti to see the new releases and heard me tells her name from the next hall!

■ Another detail from the beginnings of the show: for some months, Ioana and Adriana always brought along for the filming sessions a box of... make-up! They couldn't bring along from the TVR to the book shop with a make-up lady just for me, so that I had to do it myself: I would take the small box, go in front of the mirror in the book shop restroom and, first completely awkward at it, I would nicely put on my pretty make-up... Until the team realized that in the given background composition, with many books and various cover inserts of the volumes I presented, I didn't necessarily had to wear make-up. I only wore it again during the half an hour show period which were filmed in a television studio, where the bright spotlight required it. (A new studio, built during these years, therefore in mid 2000s, called by the employees the...”Carrefour”, since it looks like a shopping centre on the outside!)

■  Special editions of Cartea or Carte.ro were often organised, on the occasion of the book fairs. The first two – right in 2004, a few months after beginning the show: on within the Bookarest, in the building of the National Theatre in Bucharest, where the Bucharest book fair used to be organised just before summer, where I invited owners or managers of small publishing houses which played and some continue to play a major cultural role (like Vinea or EST); the second – with Călin Vlasie (Paralela 45), Silviu Lupescu (Polirom) and Petru Romoşan (Compania), in the studio at the time of TVR Cultural, on Molière Street, with lives from the reporters at the book fair, as they do the television or radio “lives” to relate major events. I can't remember if it was then or later that we came up with the idea of having a larger show on books, a sort of Romanian Apostrophe, but obviously not a copy of the Bernard Pivot's famous formula, but a special format, designed depending on our editing market and cultural landscape. An idea left as project, at some point developed on paper, submitted for internal selection, but still not materialised...

■ Some other live shows from the Gaudeamus Book Fair, from the central pavilion of ROMEXPO, or shootings for future broadcasts. A set of “narrative” episodes, explorations of the book fair, with stops at the stands and “unexpected encounters” (prepared in advance!) with editors and authors; the team in movement, always gravitating around me, with two or three cameras, always spotting one another, “metadiscursively”; and insets of bird-eye-views, shot in a “strategic” eye by Aurel Badea, overall perspectives of the book fair or close ups of the team in action, with equipment, cables and “hooks” for the sound, swimming through the swarm of people, in the kingdom of books...

■ Many memories from the episodes shot in the “Carrefour”, longer and – therefore – with more time to spend with guests and team colleagues before, during and after the shooting. Spontaneous or shy writers and editors, in a good relation with the camera or – to the contrary – scared by them, some loquacious, others brief, braggarts, modest or differently. The most memorable apparition: Samuel Tastet, the French owner of the EST Publishing House (a name acronym: Éditions S.T.), an elegant man, experimental photographer, once married, in Paris in the '90s, to Mariana Marin, later arrived to Romania, where he remained even after their marriage was over, developing his publishing house in both countries, at a rather modest size, but with a good visibility for a while, and an excellent selection of titles; an extrovert, loquacious, he spoke fast in his acquired Romanian, with a delightful French accent or directly inserting words from his mother tongue, to the general amusement of those in the studio, who could hardly hide it during the shooting and burst out laughing in the end. I haven't seen him in a while and he doesn't seem to have published anything during the past few years. He might have moved farther East, in Ukraine, or as he told me at the end of the afternoon in the TVR “Carrefour”, sad with the lowering trend of book distribution in Romania with reduced sales; and that was before the crisis which began in 2008...

■ The fine composition of those episodes, also designed by Aurel Badea: layered architecture of the screen, with three filming angles, with vertical axes on close-ups and horizontal when changing to overall images, cut at editing like long and narrow strips, on a black, austere background...

■ The show for Art@.ro, Carte.ro, no longer has a special direction. We're migrating wherever Ileana Ploscaru may find expressive corners in the buildings of the Television. Can't think of a place where we didn't shoot: in studios, on hallways and corridors, on the staircase, in the library, in the prop workshops, in the inner yard, everywhere. Sometimes, in downrightly spectacular places: unusual basements or the “attic” of a large studio, very much at height, where the light handlers walk up on narrow metal stairs, walking up there on loose flooring, giving a perspective of the abyss bellow. Spectacular results on the screen, especially when operators manage interesting composition in their frame, exploiting the unexpected expressiveness of the “alternative” spaces we use; electronic editing always making miracles of the rhythm, constantly alternating planes, absorbing static shots in a “moving”, alert, script, make one feel like... taking a ride around the book shops!

■ And a dramatic moment, when I saw again Dan Cira, short after having worked together. Very weak, he tells me about the difficult surgery he underwent a few months back, now in slow recovery. He's back – nonetheless – working, like he's not going to stay in bed! Suddenly, while talking to me, I see him going white in the face, nearly fainting, “melting” in my arms. We're on the hallway in front of the dispatcher-office of the operators and sound designers. I support him, slowly lean down with him, calling for help, trying to call on the mobile the emergency 112. After some seconds – or tens of seconds – colleagues pour out of the office; the physician at the Television medical office is called, and the kind Mr. Chira is given “first aid”. He gets back to his senses, still dazed, confused – and so on. After a few days I ring him: he's doing well, it was only a low blood pressure problem. After a while I see him back to work, a little more recovered: like he's not going to stay in bed?!