The most ingenious filmmakers to launch their first works in the early 1970s were Dan Pita (b. 1938) and Mircea Veroiu (b. 1941), both around thirty at the time. Together, they made two remarkable films, The Stone Wedding (Nunta de piatra, 1972) and Lust for Gold (Duhul aurului, 1974), both inspired by the stories of Ion Agarbiceanu, a Romanian literary classic. The two films displayed emphatically the distinct narrative and stylistic preferences of their authors, and were balanced by a sense of the tragic, a ballad-like tone, and modernist expressionist imagery (bearing the trademark signature of their cinematographer, Iosif Demian).