Exploring the portrayal of women in Romanian films during Ceaușescu's regime: A feminist analysis of Cine mă strigă? (Who is calling me?) and Angela merge mai departe (Angela moves on (original) (raw)

Remembering the past: Representations of women’s trauma in post-1989 Romanian cinema

The paper focuses on the long-term effects of Romanian communist natality politics and the way in which cinema was used to re-appropriate the past after the shift in political climate in 1989. Romania’s process of coming to terms with the past was characterized by political reluctance to explore the communist legacy. However, personal attempts of recollecting the past have a unique ability to bridge the intergenerational gap and facilitate the transmission of knowledge and memories. This paper therefore presents two examples of Romanian cinema focused on the experiences of those directly affected by the family planning politics of the communist regime. Das Experiment 770 - Gebären auf Behelf (2005), directed by Razvan Georgescu and Florin Iepan, is a documentary based on oral testimonies and documents that sketch the history of Romanian communism and the involvement of various individuals. The second source used—4 Months, 3 Weekes and 2 Days (2007) directed by Cristian Mungiu—is a film that uses a different language and technics in order to re-appropriate the past, not through direct testimony of those involved, but creating fictional characters. The target audience of these movies—as is often the case with historical cinema—is the second or third generation. Cinematography provides a simple and popular way of connecting these generations with the experiences of their predecessors.

Gender representation across political regimes: a comparative analysis of Romanian films

This paper examines how gender roles, power relations, and the relationship between the state and individual are illustrated in two Romanian films. Both "4 months, 3 weeks and 2 days" and "Child's Pose" manage to recreate the historical context of the periods under discussion, communism and post-communism in Romania, while also highlighting the realities of oppressiveness and endemic corruption specific to each regime. This comparative study was conducted by using relevant theories, which were necessary in order to build the theoretical framework, and by coding the actions and dialogue extracted from the films under existing concepts from gender studies. Afterwards, a Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis approach was helpful in revealing the complexity of current and previous unequal social arrangements, as portrayed in contemporary Romanian films. The main contribution of this research is that it sheds light on the evolution of gender roles, power relations,...

Sites of Undoing Gender Hierarchies: Woman and/in Hungarian Cinema (Industry)

Media Research: Croatian Journal for Journalism and Media, 2010

The article engages Hungarian film production between 1945 and 2005 from a twofold perspective. It surveys women’s inclusion in the film-making profession and assesses the representation of women in Hungarian cinema. The study seeks answers to the questions whether state-socialist emancipation rhetoric and policies targeting women’s employment and social inclusion have also affected 1) the domain of creative work; and 2) the kinds of representations of women circulating in visual culture? The author argues that both women’s representation and women’s participation in cinema production have presented an overall more favourable picture in the decades of state-socialism than during the period following the system change. To indentify assessment criteria for „a favourable picture”, the insights of feminist film studies are consulted. The survey concludes that beside some pieces by engaged women filmmakers, a good proportion of complex portrayals of women came from male directors. At the same time, the author interrogates to what extent, and with what sort of qualifications, (Western) feminist film criticism may prove to be a viable tool of analysis to account for developments within an arguably different historical/social context and production environment. The starkly different production environments of mainstream Hollywood cinema (the foundational „research animal” of British-American feminist theory), its state-funded equivalent in socialist Hungary and the subsequent re-arrangement of the industry in the new market economy entail both material kind and film text-related consequences. The article proposes that the political economy of cultural production in state-socialist Hungary allowed for a kind of transformation of signifying practices that is appreciable from a feminist perspective.

The Representation of the Socialist Abortion Ban as Women’s Reproductive Burden in Postsocialist Romanian Cinema

2022

This paper examines the representation of back-alley abortions in postsocialist Romanian cinema as reproductive burden and the abortion ban during the socialist period 1966-1989, when Decree 770 was in effect. 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (Cristian Mungiu, 2007), tells the story of a university student, who resorts to an illegal abortion. The female characters in Mungiu's art film show reproductive agency. Backalley abortions became a way of reclaiming women's bodies. In the documentary Children of the Decree, director Florin Iepan explores Ceaușescu's pronatalist policies by subversively juxtaposing official propaganda images with a series of interviews with medical professionals, abortionists, and women. Iepan's contribution is to show the eugenic dimensions of Ceaușescu's population policy that preferred healthy children to the detriment of disabled children. In another serialized documentary Truths about the Past female director Raluca Rogojină explores the impact of communist patriotic pronatalist policies on women and children. This article investigates the representation of back-alley abortions as women's reproductive burden in postsocialist Romanian fiction film and documentary. Ceaușescu's pronatalist policies rendered women susceptible to an abortion black market and unsafe abortion procedures. The representation of women's reproductive experiences in 4 luni, 3 săptămâni, și 2 zile/4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (Cristian Mungiu 2007) discloses women's agency and grit, female solidarity, but also women's vulnerability in seeking illegal abortions. This article examines different narratives about Ceaușescu's policies of fertility control in two postsocialist documentaries Născuți la comandă, Decrețeii/Children of the Decree (Iepan 2004) and Adevăruri despre trecut/Truths About the Past (Raluca Rogojină, 2015). These documentaries have shaped public perception in postsocialist Romania about the reproductive burden placed on women in socialist Romania by Ceaușescu's strict pronatalist policies and have captured the negative implications for disabled institutionalized children of eugenic conceptions of childhood that shaped Ceaușescu's population policies. This article centres on mapping out postsocialist Romanian fiction film and documentary discourses on the communist abortion ban from 1966 to 1989 and Ceaușescu's pronatalist policies, as a type of memorial discourse.

Sites of Undoing Gender Hierarchies: Women and/in Hungarian Cinema (Industry)

The author argues that both women's representation and women's participation in cinema production have presented an overall more favourable picture in the decades of state-socialism than during the period following the system change. To indentify assessment criteria for "a favourable picture", the insights of feminist film studies are consulted. The survey concludes that beside some pieces by engaged women filmmakers, a good proportion of complex portrayals of women came from male directors. At the same time, the author interrogates to what extent, and with what sort of qualifications, (Western) feminist film criticism may prove to be a viable tool of analysis to account for developments within an arguably different historical/social context and production environment. The starkly different production environments of mainstream Hollywood cinema (the foundational "research animal" of British-American feminist theory), its state-funded equivalent in socialist Hungary and the subsequent re-arrangement of the industry in the new market economy entail both material kind and film text-related consequences.

Alternative Histories of Communist Past. Typologies of Representation in Romanian Film and Novel after 1989

Ekphrasis. Images, Cinema, Theory, Media, 2015

The article analyzes the extent to which the Romanian film and novel after 1989 propose a contrasting vision on the recent past as compared to the official, hegemonic discourse of the political realm. One important event was the official condemnation of the communist regime in 2006. Another objective of the paper is to analyze the artistic response of films to media and political events. The questions asked are: do the films from this period challenge the hegemonic anti-communist discourse? What are the strategies employed? How has the film or the novel influenced other discourses as well? Three typologies of representing communism are proposed and discussed.

SOCIAL REINTEGRATION IN THE ROMANIAN FILMS OF THE 1970S AND 1980S

BRVKENTHAL. ACTA MVSEI XVII. 5, 2022

Starting with the official ideas expressed by Nicolae Ceauşescu, this paper explores the way in which Romanian cinema relates in the '70s and especially in the '80s to the subject of the socio-ideological recovery of the state's enemies. We are generally talking about young people in delicate moments of their existence, attracted to outrageous behaviour by bad entourage. To follow the way this attitude changes in just a few years, I first refer to how films in the '70s try to punish their anti-heroes, and then I swing to the next decade, when not sanction, but recovery of enemies becomes the main subject of this type of narrative. The article tries to understand why this mutation occurs and how it is actually applied.

Reluctant Feminists, Powerless Patriarchs, and Estranged Spectators: Gender in Post-1989 Eastern European Cinema

Feminist Encounters: A Journal of Critical Studies in Culture and Politics

The article analyses several films made within Eastern Europe during the first decade of the postcommunist period that represent the crisis of traditional gender models which permeated popular cinema. As the author argues the films represent 'transition cultures' in regard to gender discourse. The film Ildikó Enyedi's My Twentieth Century (Az én XX. századom, Hungary/GDR/ Cuba, 1989) destabilises normative models of femininity by means of both the narrative content and formal strategies. Dorota Kędzierzawska's Nothing (Nic, Poland, 1998) and Ildikó Szabó's, Child Murders (Gyerekgyilkosságok, Hungary, 1993) denounce its discriminatory politics, especially effective on women that represent marginalised sectors of society. Finally, The Garden (Záhrada, Slovakia, France, 1995) directed by Martin Šulík, demonstrates how breaking with the code of realism facilitates the process of 'correction of patriarchy'. The article will establish that these films significantly disrupt the national and thus patriarchal mode of address. This shift from the national to the gendered mode of identification also marks a new point of encounter between Eastern European and Western feminism. Due to represented gender uncertainty and aesthetic modes of spectatorial distanciation, the analysed works indicate this resistance and scepticism towards any singular mode of identification.

Communist Authoritarian Discourses and Practices in Romanian New Wave Cinema

Cristian Mungiu's film "4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days" reveals how the rhetoric of power in Communist Romania rendered absent the voice of young women, especially in their reproductive capacity. Women's survivance tactics in asserting a presence constitute a rhetorical act in a public space controlled by the official discourse where any dialog has otherwise disintegrated. This essay was published as a chapter in the book "Commanding Words: Essays on the Discursive Constructions, Manifestations, and Subversions of Authority" edited by Lynda Chouiten (May 2016, Cambridge Scholars Publishing).