Andrei Gorzo | UNATC - Academia.edu (original) (raw)
Papers by Andrei Gorzo
Transilvania, 2023
The subtitle of Radu Jude's new feature, Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World, 1 is "... more The subtitle of Radu Jude's new feature, Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World, 1 is "A dialogue with a film from 1981." This means that, like Jude's 2018 short The Marshal's Two Executions or his 2020 feature Uppercase Print, it is an exercise in montage. 2 It is a fiction incorporating fragments from an older fiction-a 1981 Romanian film called Angela Goes On (directed by Lucian Bratu); it presents itself as a sequel to that Ceaușescu-era picture, while also treating it as a documentary time capsule of 1980s Bucharest and using it for a series of evocative the-city-then-and-now juxtapositions. A scabrously witty anti-capitalist broadside (with claims to being the most relentless cinematic attack on capitalism in the history of Romanian cinema-not excluding its state socialist era), Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World is also (more or less explicitly) in dialogue with two other films: German director Maren Ade's Bucharest-set satirical comedy Toni Erdmann (2016) and Jude's own first feature, The Happiest Girl in the World (2009), likewise a satirical comedy, built around the filming of a commercial. Jude's latest can also be seen as a sequel to his preceding film, Bad Luck Banging or
Transilvania
The paper parses the major existing literature, in English and Romanian, on the New Romanian Cine... more The paper parses the major existing literature, in English and Romanian, on the New Romanian Cinema (also called the Romanian New Wave) which became an international film-festival sensation in the mid-2000s. It maps the main lines of disagreement among the various scholars who have attempted to define this phenomenon. The paper argues that the Romanian cinema that had made its dazzling debut on the international scene some 15 years ago has gradually turned into something else – something harder to pin down to an aesthetic paradigm, to a core generational group of ten or so filmmakers, or to a limited set of ideological coordinates. Finally, the paper proposes that the evolving body of work of director Radu Jude (who has established himself in recent years as a major innovator) provides a good lens through which to take the measure of those aesthetic and political changes.
Transilvania, 2022
The article explores Radu Jude's 2021 film Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn, considering it as a su... more The article explores Radu Jude's 2021 film Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn, considering it as a summation of the aesthetic and thematic concerns pursued by the Romanian director in his earlier films. The article also includes a discussion of Jude's short film Semiotic Plastic, which was shot at the same time as Bad Luck Banging.
Transilvania, 2022
The article discusses critically the following films—short and feature-length—by Radu Jude: The D... more The article discusses critically the following films—short and feature-length—by Radu Jude: The Dead Nation (2017), The Marshal’s Two Executions (2018), Punish and Discipline (2019), Uppercase Print (2020), The Exit of the Trains (2020), Caricaturana (2021), Memories from the Eastern Front (2021), and The Potemkinists (2022). In four of them—The Dead Nation, The Marshal’s Two Executions, The Exit of the Trains and Memories from the Eastern Front (the last two co-directed with historian Adrian Cioflâncă)—Jude cinematically curates Holocaustrelated archives, exposing Romanian antisemitic atrocities. Uppercase Print and Punish and Discipline explore state apparatuses of repression from other periods in Romanian history, while The Marshal’s Two Executions and The Potemkinists interrogate the relation between art and historical memory. A number of these films work by juxaposing two different sets of documents, using one set to tease out a narrative that the other set represses. Jude himself has described these works “as timid explorations” into the possibilities of montage (possibilities that the New Romanian Cinema of the 2000s had largely neglected), presided over by the spirit of Sergei Eisenstein. That spirit is explicitly (and playfully) conjured in Caricaturana and The Potemkinists.
Transilvania, 2022
The article offers an in-depth discussion of Radu Jude’s 2016 film Scarred Hearts, adapted from M... more The article offers an in-depth discussion of Radu Jude’s 2016 film Scarred Hearts, adapted from Max Blecher’s autobiographical novel with the same title (1937), as well as other of his writings. The article is structured in four parts. The first references André Bazin’s celebrated essay on Robert Bresson’s Diary of a Country Priest, bringing it to bear on a discussion of the unorthodox relation between Jude’s film and its literary sources. The second section ofthearticlediscussesJude’sdecisiontoforegroundtheprotagonist’s—andthe novelist’s—Jewishidentity.Setfar from home, in France, in an isolated sanatorium for tuberculosis, Blecher’s novel was unconcerned with public events such as the rise of the anti-Semitic far right all over Europe; they didn’t intrude—not even as background noise. Transposing the story to a Romanian sanatorium, Jude decided to have the young Jewish protagonist go through his experiences with terminal sickness and literature, with love and friendship, against an implied background of rising anti-Semitism, of increasingly widespread support for the local Iron Guard, as well as for Hitler. In its third section, the article discusses Radu Jude’s approach to period drama, analyzing his mix of period detail and anachronism. The fourth section discusses Jude’s intermedial game-playing and general artistic playfulness.
Transilvania, 2022
The article offers an in-depth analysis of Radu Jude's 2015 film Aferim!. It considers the film a... more The article offers an in-depth analysis of Radu Jude's 2015 film Aferim!. It considers the film as a revisionist take on the Romanian tradition of historical cinema. It discusses Aferim!'s originality as a depiction of the origins of contemporary Romanian anti-Roma racism. It analyzes Jude's artistic strategies-for instance, his lavish and playful deployment of literary and cinematic quotation. The paper also addresses the film's reception in Romania. It goes on to discuss two stage productions in which Jude has further explored issues of racism.
Bright Lights Film Journal, 2022
This essay puts side by side two attempts to portray a modern saint in fiction: Graham Greene's n... more This essay puts side by side two attempts to portray a modern saint in fiction: Graham Greene's novel The End of the Affair and Roberto Rossellini's film Europe '51.
Revista Transilvania, 2022
The article discusses four Radu Jude films – the shorts Alexandra (2008) and It Can Pass Through ... more The article discusses four Radu Jude films – the shorts Alexandra (2008) and It Can Pass Through the Wall (2014), the never released, 60-minute long A Film for Friends (2011), and Jude’s official second feature, Everybody in Our Family (2012) – grouping them together as satirical studies of male rage and self-pity.
Transilvania, 2022
The article discusses the aesthetics and the politics of the so-called New Romanian Cinema (a maj... more The article discusses the aesthetics and the politics of the so-called New Romanian Cinema (a major post-2005 sensation on the international art-cinema circuit), succintly assessing its novelty in both a national and an international cinematic context. It then proceeds to discuss Radu Jude’s debut feature, The Happiest Girl in the World (2009), as a NRC film, typical in some ways, atypical in others. The paper highlights the film’s critique of advertising and the nuclear family.
Transilvania, 2022
The paper parses the major existing literature, in English and Romanian, on the New Romanian Cine... more The paper parses the major existing literature, in English and Romanian, on the New Romanian Cinema (also called the Romanian New Wave) which became an international film-festival sensation in the mid-2000s. It maps the main lines of disagreement among the various scholars who have attempted to define this phenomenon. The paper argues that the Romanian cinema that had made its dazzling debut on the international scene some 15 years ago has gradually turned into something else – something harder to pin down to an aesthetic paradigm, to a core generational group of ten or so filmmakers, or to a limited set of ideological coordinates. Finally, the paper proposes that the evolving body of work of director Radu Jude (who has established himself in recent years as a major innovator) provides a good lens through which to take the measure of those aesthetic and political changes.
Bright Lights Film Journal, 2021
Bright Lights Film Journal, 2021
Bright Lights Film Journal, 2021
Studies in Eastern European Cinema
Studies in Eastern European Cinema
Transilvania, 2023
The subtitle of Radu Jude's new feature, Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World, 1 is "... more The subtitle of Radu Jude's new feature, Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World, 1 is "A dialogue with a film from 1981." This means that, like Jude's 2018 short The Marshal's Two Executions or his 2020 feature Uppercase Print, it is an exercise in montage. 2 It is a fiction incorporating fragments from an older fiction-a 1981 Romanian film called Angela Goes On (directed by Lucian Bratu); it presents itself as a sequel to that Ceaușescu-era picture, while also treating it as a documentary time capsule of 1980s Bucharest and using it for a series of evocative the-city-then-and-now juxtapositions. A scabrously witty anti-capitalist broadside (with claims to being the most relentless cinematic attack on capitalism in the history of Romanian cinema-not excluding its state socialist era), Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World is also (more or less explicitly) in dialogue with two other films: German director Maren Ade's Bucharest-set satirical comedy Toni Erdmann (2016) and Jude's own first feature, The Happiest Girl in the World (2009), likewise a satirical comedy, built around the filming of a commercial. Jude's latest can also be seen as a sequel to his preceding film, Bad Luck Banging or
Transilvania
The paper parses the major existing literature, in English and Romanian, on the New Romanian Cine... more The paper parses the major existing literature, in English and Romanian, on the New Romanian Cinema (also called the Romanian New Wave) which became an international film-festival sensation in the mid-2000s. It maps the main lines of disagreement among the various scholars who have attempted to define this phenomenon. The paper argues that the Romanian cinema that had made its dazzling debut on the international scene some 15 years ago has gradually turned into something else – something harder to pin down to an aesthetic paradigm, to a core generational group of ten or so filmmakers, or to a limited set of ideological coordinates. Finally, the paper proposes that the evolving body of work of director Radu Jude (who has established himself in recent years as a major innovator) provides a good lens through which to take the measure of those aesthetic and political changes.
Transilvania, 2022
The article explores Radu Jude's 2021 film Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn, considering it as a su... more The article explores Radu Jude's 2021 film Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn, considering it as a summation of the aesthetic and thematic concerns pursued by the Romanian director in his earlier films. The article also includes a discussion of Jude's short film Semiotic Plastic, which was shot at the same time as Bad Luck Banging.
Transilvania, 2022
The article discusses critically the following films—short and feature-length—by Radu Jude: The D... more The article discusses critically the following films—short and feature-length—by Radu Jude: The Dead Nation (2017), The Marshal’s Two Executions (2018), Punish and Discipline (2019), Uppercase Print (2020), The Exit of the Trains (2020), Caricaturana (2021), Memories from the Eastern Front (2021), and The Potemkinists (2022). In four of them—The Dead Nation, The Marshal’s Two Executions, The Exit of the Trains and Memories from the Eastern Front (the last two co-directed with historian Adrian Cioflâncă)—Jude cinematically curates Holocaustrelated archives, exposing Romanian antisemitic atrocities. Uppercase Print and Punish and Discipline explore state apparatuses of repression from other periods in Romanian history, while The Marshal’s Two Executions and The Potemkinists interrogate the relation between art and historical memory. A number of these films work by juxaposing two different sets of documents, using one set to tease out a narrative that the other set represses. Jude himself has described these works “as timid explorations” into the possibilities of montage (possibilities that the New Romanian Cinema of the 2000s had largely neglected), presided over by the spirit of Sergei Eisenstein. That spirit is explicitly (and playfully) conjured in Caricaturana and The Potemkinists.
Transilvania, 2022
The article offers an in-depth discussion of Radu Jude’s 2016 film Scarred Hearts, adapted from M... more The article offers an in-depth discussion of Radu Jude’s 2016 film Scarred Hearts, adapted from Max Blecher’s autobiographical novel with the same title (1937), as well as other of his writings. The article is structured in four parts. The first references André Bazin’s celebrated essay on Robert Bresson’s Diary of a Country Priest, bringing it to bear on a discussion of the unorthodox relation between Jude’s film and its literary sources. The second section ofthearticlediscussesJude’sdecisiontoforegroundtheprotagonist’s—andthe novelist’s—Jewishidentity.Setfar from home, in France, in an isolated sanatorium for tuberculosis, Blecher’s novel was unconcerned with public events such as the rise of the anti-Semitic far right all over Europe; they didn’t intrude—not even as background noise. Transposing the story to a Romanian sanatorium, Jude decided to have the young Jewish protagonist go through his experiences with terminal sickness and literature, with love and friendship, against an implied background of rising anti-Semitism, of increasingly widespread support for the local Iron Guard, as well as for Hitler. In its third section, the article discusses Radu Jude’s approach to period drama, analyzing his mix of period detail and anachronism. The fourth section discusses Jude’s intermedial game-playing and general artistic playfulness.
Transilvania, 2022
The article offers an in-depth analysis of Radu Jude's 2015 film Aferim!. It considers the film a... more The article offers an in-depth analysis of Radu Jude's 2015 film Aferim!. It considers the film as a revisionist take on the Romanian tradition of historical cinema. It discusses Aferim!'s originality as a depiction of the origins of contemporary Romanian anti-Roma racism. It analyzes Jude's artistic strategies-for instance, his lavish and playful deployment of literary and cinematic quotation. The paper also addresses the film's reception in Romania. It goes on to discuss two stage productions in which Jude has further explored issues of racism.
Bright Lights Film Journal, 2022
This essay puts side by side two attempts to portray a modern saint in fiction: Graham Greene's n... more This essay puts side by side two attempts to portray a modern saint in fiction: Graham Greene's novel The End of the Affair and Roberto Rossellini's film Europe '51.
Revista Transilvania, 2022
The article discusses four Radu Jude films – the shorts Alexandra (2008) and It Can Pass Through ... more The article discusses four Radu Jude films – the shorts Alexandra (2008) and It Can Pass Through the Wall (2014), the never released, 60-minute long A Film for Friends (2011), and Jude’s official second feature, Everybody in Our Family (2012) – grouping them together as satirical studies of male rage and self-pity.
Transilvania, 2022
The article discusses the aesthetics and the politics of the so-called New Romanian Cinema (a maj... more The article discusses the aesthetics and the politics of the so-called New Romanian Cinema (a major post-2005 sensation on the international art-cinema circuit), succintly assessing its novelty in both a national and an international cinematic context. It then proceeds to discuss Radu Jude’s debut feature, The Happiest Girl in the World (2009), as a NRC film, typical in some ways, atypical in others. The paper highlights the film’s critique of advertising and the nuclear family.
Transilvania, 2022
The paper parses the major existing literature, in English and Romanian, on the New Romanian Cine... more The paper parses the major existing literature, in English and Romanian, on the New Romanian Cinema (also called the Romanian New Wave) which became an international film-festival sensation in the mid-2000s. It maps the main lines of disagreement among the various scholars who have attempted to define this phenomenon. The paper argues that the Romanian cinema that had made its dazzling debut on the international scene some 15 years ago has gradually turned into something else – something harder to pin down to an aesthetic paradigm, to a core generational group of ten or so filmmakers, or to a limited set of ideological coordinates. Finally, the paper proposes that the evolving body of work of director Radu Jude (who has established himself in recent years as a major innovator) provides a good lens through which to take the measure of those aesthetic and political changes.
Bright Lights Film Journal, 2021
Bright Lights Film Journal, 2021
Bright Lights Film Journal, 2021
Studies in Eastern European Cinema
Studies in Eastern European Cinema