The Notebook’s Silence, the Interview’s Voice: Archiving Intangible Directorial Heritage

Presentation abstract

Abstract

The director’s notebook occupies a paradoxical position in the heritage of Romanian theatre directing. A private manuscript recording staging decisions, textual analysis, and visual conception, it is often treated as a complete record of a production’s preparation. This paper proposes a different reading: the notebook is self-intelligible rather than complete, written for the director’s own use. It falls silent precisely where no explanation is needed.

The project Arhiva Regizorală (The Director’s Notebook Archive), funded by AFCN, brings together two bodies of source material generated fifty years apart: director’s notebooks from Romania’s socialist-era repertory theatre system (1947–1989) — including Lucian Giurchescu and Dinu Cernescu — and roughly twenty filmed interviews with directors currently active in Romania and the diaspora. Read against one another, these corpora reveal a productive tension between static document and live discourse.

Giurchescu and Cernescu were exact contemporaries, yet their notebooks differ entirely in kind: Giurchescu’s are dense with movement diagrams and staging instructions, almost silent on conceptual vision; Cernescu’s invert this, rich in essays on the production’s imaginative world but absent any staging notation. Read separately, the corpora suggest unequal preparation. Contemporary interviews suggest otherwise: Eva Patko describes clarifying a production’s world through reading, music, and visual art — research that never resolves into written notes but becomes knowledge carried into rehearsal. Cernescu’s silence, read this way, is a different working method, invisible on the page alone.

Archiving the notebook in isolation risks distorting the history of Romanian directing, mistaking documentary silence for absence of thought. The filmed interview, retrospective and justificatory, does not replace the notebook — it recovers what the notebook was never written to say. We propose a dual archival methodology treating notebook and interview as two halves of one act of directorial thinking, divided by a boundary of genre: what is written for oneself, and what is spoken for another.