The Distance Between Me and Me is a documentary featuring a poet somewhat emblematic for the communist Romania. As a collection of scenes with communists and their own words the film is quite entertaining, but not if you look for historical objectivity.

Although Nina Cassian is a very well known name in Romania, one of the two women poets everyone knows about (the other one being Ana Blandiana), her name is mostly associated with children’s books, and very few actually remember a particular book or poem of hers. The one detail I knew was that she was the inventor of yet another new “language”: limba sparga. Nowadays she is considered a controversial character, either a dissident who managed to escape imminent arrest when she never returned from a trip to US in ‘85 or a communist activist faithfully serving the dictatorial regime for 40 years.

The movie combines an interview with the poet and her husband (filmed in New York), snapshots from Romanian State Security files about her activity and Romanian propaganda films and TV shows from the 50’s and 60’s. My impression was that the film weaves three shades of lies. The autobiographical discourse cannot be but subjective, one cannot trust surveillance notes by informers and security officers and no one expects the truth from propaganda pieces. I think we have here a fascinating snapshot of the way, in communist Romania, everyone was in the business of constantly deluding themselves and others.

One thing that bothered me was when, about 20 minutes in, Nina Cassian says that the big problem with communism is that the name has been taken in vain, because there has never been communism, only the pretext of communism. Deceived and deluded communist intellectuals in the west said this in the 1939 about Stalinism, and after the war, just before becoming Maoists. I’ve heard the same from young French socialists and (with the obvious exception) from Cuban high school students in the 90’s. This idea is particularly perverse, first because it invites new dangerous political experiments and second because it makes more difficult a reasonable progressivism.

A funny detail was a short extract from a 50’s propaganda film where the voice over says that USSR and Stalin are allied in a fight for peace with the metallurgist from Chicago, student from San Francisco or the professor from Sorbonne .