On Alexandru Solomon’s Arsenie: An Amazing Afterlife (2023)
Alexandru Solomon, Arsenie: An Amazing Afterlife, 2023.
If one looks up Father Arsenie Boca online, truly captivating stories pop up. A Romanian priest, eventually abbot, theologian, mystic and artist, Boca enjoys the status of one of the most important Orthodox Christian clerics of the 20th century. Today, his biography reads as something of a redemptive lesson of the Romanian totalitarian past. Born in 1910, Boca was a talented student and quickly advanced in religious circles. He was also an excellent painter and translator from Greek to Romanian. There are indications he was connected to the Legionary Movement from the late 1930s onward, a fascist, ultra-nationalist and anti-Semitic organization that took power in Romania in 1940, following the decree of King Michael I. The National Legionary State led by the Conducător (“leader”) Ion Antonescu fell apart in 1941, only five months after its establishment. Soon after having formed the new government, the communists arrested the priest for the first time.
The secret police kept tabs on Boca for the rest of his life. Still, he remained known for his reported miracles and prophecies. It is believed he personally foretold the future even to Nicolae Ceauçescu, warning him of danger. Boca himself didn’t live long enough to witness the unfolding of the events – he died three weeks before the violent revolution of 1989. These circumstances additionally fed into the myth surrounding the priest, culminating in the Holy Sinod’s agreement to canonize him in 2019. The Prislop Monastery where he was buried has since become one of the country’s most visited pilgrimage destinations. Boca’s face now appears on souvenirs and in tattoos, his legacy is studied in radio and television shows, and his quotes circulate on the Internet as spiritual guidance and a source of inspiration. He is present in the Romanian national consciousness as a martyr and genius. Consequently, Alexandru Solomon’s documentary film Arsenie: An Amazing Afterlife (Arsenie. Viața de apoi, Romania, Luxembourg, 2023) doesn’t simply center on Boca the person but sheds light to the entire complex phenomenon of his popularity.
How this approach works is made evident right at the start. The opening sequences show the recent social activity of the Romanian Orthodox Church. Resolute on how one ought to live and ostentatious in its public rituals, the Church seems to leave little room for contrasting views and critical reflection. Here Solomon breaks the observational character of his material, veering the film in a metacinematic direction, i.e. drawing attention to the inner workings of the film. The documentary footage just presented is suddenly merely a video playing on the tablet in a close-up of the director’s hands. Here is a rather Brechtian interception, an act of diversion that is to say, “look, this is reality, it is not a film!” (even though it is absolutely a part of Solomon’s film). The audience notices Father Arsenie is nothing but a metonym for things larger than himself, both in the film and reality – in a less benevolent reading, he is merely a mascot.
One may suggest Solomon deals here with what is known in literary theory as “aesthetics of reception,” i.e. the examination of reactions to the given phenomenon in specific historical and personal contexts, rather than the phenomenon itself in some idealistic, isolated way. The director has explored different facets of Eastern European present social reality in several of his earlier documentaries, primarily by examining the beliefs and promises of the previous regimes (Great Communist Bank Robbery, Cold Waves, Kapitalism: Our Improved Formula, Tarzan’s Testicles). In his latest work, he wants to know something about the very pilgrims, as if looking for the mechanism behind the “Father Arsenie Effect.” Yet by paying attention to some of the pilgrims’ most absurd attitudes, Solomon also provides his own commentary. To truly buy into the contemporary story of Boca, it is suggested, is to resort to some form of escapism at best. There is no condemnation or didacticism in the delivery of this thought but satire. As the audience joins the pilgrims on their journey, it also witnesses the making of a staged play about Boca’s life. Almost everything in the film happens against the backdrop of that amateur hagiographic drama, figuratively as well as literally – wonderfully split between the foreground, in which the director conducts short interviews with pilgrims, and the background, in which the rest of them perform, the film’s key scenes are incredibly dynamic, humorous, and transpose the problematics surrounding Boca to mere fiction in an overt way.
Solomon is aware that a conservative turn is an international phenomenon of recent times but that it comes in specific flavors in former socialist countries. There, it counterbalances decades of promotion of collectivism and materialist interpretations of the world. The popularity of Prislop resembles, for instance, that of Međugorje in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Ostrog in Montenegro, and other pilgrimage destinations in the ex-Yugoslav context. Much is absurd in the mass tourism such sights attract. Solomon accurately documents the discrepancy between the selflessly endorsed spiritual values and the profane ways to celebrate them. Once at their destination, pilgrims get to browse through thousands of different objects without a clear purpose but endowed with blessed imagery.
National heroes aren’t chosen just randomly – they are regularly controversial because they indebt the community in polarizing ways, responding to the aspirations and ideals on extreme ends of the spectrum. Again, Boca’s case resembles that of the Croatian archbishop, later also cardinal Aloysius Stepinac. Both clerics were convicted of supporting or advancing in fascist regimes, or in any case of not distancing themselves from them conclusively. In deeply divided societies, such figures are either fiercely supported or vehemently condemned, serving almost as orientation points in people’s identity formation.
Discussions about Boca provoke discussions about the post-socialist Romania on many fronts. What did privatization bring to the country? How was it carried through? “Ordinary” people preoccupied with their “ordinary” worries inevitably face gaps in their knowledge about the mechanisms that transcend them. How to fill them in? A pensioner who still worked as an accountant in the early years of democracy is telling the story of how deliberate misconduct at the time made entire companies worthless. The observation doesn’t sound like a conspiracy theory all that much, especially judging the experiences of other transitional economies of the period. Yet people easily draw irrational connections between the phenomena they cannot grasp in all of their totality, which is where figures like Father Arsenie step in.
Although Solomon examines a national phenomenon, his film easily resonates with an international audience. Much is universal in the symbolic processes that involve Boca’s character, not only because it mobilizes people emotionally but also because it follows patterns that go beyond Romanian society. Arsenie: An Amazing Afterlife is a work rich in cultural specifics as well as questions that loom over the liberal world of today in general – how to make sound decisions as a citizen, where to look for purpose, and where to identify one’s own responsibility.