Rereading New Romanian Cinema: Minimalism, intermediality, and ethics (original) (raw)
Related papers
Modern Romanian Cinema or Modernity and Modernism Unfinished
Ekphrasis. Images, Cinema, Theory, Media
As this issue of Ekphrasis is dedicated to an in-depth discussion about contemporary Romanian cinema, from the perspective of contextualizing notions like modern, modernism, modernist, modernistic and even more broadly, modernity, the main hypothesis of this contribution is that modernism remains an unfinished project. Using Malmkrog (2019), the most recent production directed by Cristi Puiu, one of the most acclaimed Romanian cinema makers today, as a starting point, this paper questions the limits of Romanian modern cinema. Asking how modernity and modernization, which are ongoing social and political processes in Romanian society, have influenced recent films and, more importantly, what are the true modernist resources of this cinema, the author discusses the problematic relationships between modern culture, the principles of modernist art and modern cinema. With several modernistic storytelling practices and modernized worldviews integral to what constitutes today the essence of the Romanian filmmaking, a debate is directed towards the film theories considering that the films created by authors like Cristian Mungiu or Cristi Puiu and many of their fellow cinema makers have produced a "modernist turn" in the national cinema. This contribution questions the theoretical and practical dimensions of the modernism in Romanian films, and provides another explanation, suggesting that Romanian films are marked by a specific thinking, one dominated by what can only be described as a metaphysics of modernity. Ultimately the authors claims, following Bruno Latour, that we must take into consideration the fact the Romanian films have never been modern, since the never-ending search for the impulses of modernity makes them forever non-modern moderns. Also, paraphrasing Habermas, this paper understands modernity as an eternally unfinished project.
The New Romanian Cinema and Beyond: The Films of Radu Jude
Transilvania, 2022
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.
Making Sense of the New Romanian Cinema: Three Perspectives
The article provides a critical look at some of the recent academic literature (in English) on the New Romanian Cinema (NRC). It mainly engages with three texts: a book-length appreciative introduction (by Monica Filimon) to the work of writer-director Cristi Puiu: a highly ambitious attempt (by László Strausz) to trace, within Romanian culture, the tradition that the NRC could be said to belong to; and a harsh ideological critique of the NRC (by Bogdan Popa).
The Point of No Return: From Great Expectations to Great Desperation in New Romanian Cinema
East, West and Centre Reframing post-1989 European Cinema 2017-02 | Book chapter, 2017
The NCR (New Romanian Cinema) depicts many stories revealing some of the somber results of the exodus of a population coming from a ‘marginal space’ of Europe, a nation that woke up from the communist nightmare confused about its identity, living a permanent ‘frontier situation’ and ‘still in the search of the way ahead’ (Boia 2001: 12–13, 27). Twenty-five years after the fall of communism, Romanian villages are depopulated. The locals, once not even allowed to hold a passport, are now leaving the country at an alarming and increasing rate. The often tragic results of this exodus are nevertheless profound, with dramatic long-term consequences. Thousands of children are left without proper supervision or education. The family, once at the center of a patriarchal society, has been destroyed in the desperate rush of parents towards the West. A good number of their children will later become criminals, closing a vicious circle. This is the dramatic resort of NCR film productions such as Eu când vreau să fluier, fluier/When I want to whistle, I whistle (Florin Șerban, 2010, Romania/Sweden/Germany) and the philosophy behindPeriferic/Outbound (Bogdan George Apetri, 2011, Romania), the film that closes stylistically the first decade of New Romanian Cinema. This book chapter, authored by dr. Lucian Georgescu, is part of the East, West and Centre EUP volume - where the world’s leading scholars in the field assemble to consider the ways in which notions such as East and West, national and transnational, central and marginal are being rethought and reframed in contemporary European cinema. Assessing the state of post-1989 European cinema, from (co)production and reception trends to filmic depictions of migration patterns, economic transformations and socio-political debates over the past and the present, they address increasingly intertwined cinema industries that are both central (France, Germany) and marginal (Romania, Bulgaria, Lithuania) in Europe. This is a ground-breaking and essential read, not just for students and scholars in Film and Media Studies, but also for those interested in wider European Studies as well.
New and Old Realities in Romanian and Hungarian Cinema
Ekphrasis 19/1 2018, 2018
In her original attempt for comparative analysis of art cinema in two East European countries: Romania and Hungary, Anna Batori is using space motifs as ways of investigation and criteria of questioning both the aesthetics and the message of the selected films. The scenographic space with its vertical and horizontal axes becomes a visual vocabulary of analysis, decoding the social-political and cultural implications. The paradox of the gloomy atmosphere in the films of Eastern European corpus and the bright, communicative citizens of this area prompted the author to the logical conclusion that the films are influenced by the political, social and cultural traces of the socialist past as well as by the disappointments of the capitalist transformation. The research, mainly based on her PhD thesis, is also drawing from her first-hand experience of the capitalist transformation; the book has 11 chapters, 5 dedicated to the Romanian cinema and 3 to the Hungarian cinema.
Review about Romanian Cinema. A Miracle with a Tradition. Dominique Nasta
In 2013 the volume of Dominique Nasta, Professor at the Department of Arts, Faculty of Philosophy and Letters of Université Libre in Brussels, contributes to a new essentially improvement. Dominique Nasta’s Contemporary Romanian Cinema. The History of an Unexpected Miracle, was published at the end of 2013 at Wallflower in partnership with the prestigious American Publishing House at Columbia University. Firstly, the publication has the merit of illustrating and presenting valuable information about the history of the Romanian Film and Romanian highly ranked filmmakers to readers interested in film – students, journalists, and basically any spectator -, as well as to specialists: the ones that teach and study films in the American academic environment. Dominique Nastas’s volume addresses the Western audience of little information regarding the Romanian film. It also works on correcting a series of errors and biased interpretations that are present in dictionaries and studies on the Romanian film history.
The representation of other arts in cinema can be regarded as a different semiotic system revealing what is hidden in the narrative, as a site of cultural meanings inherent to the cinematic apparatus addressing a pensive spectator, or a discourse on cinema born in the space of intermediality. In the post-1989 films of Romanian director Lucian Pintilie, painterly and sculptural references, as well as miniatures become figurations of cultural identity inside allegories about a society torn between East and West. I argue that art references are liberating these films from provincialism by transforming them into a discourse lamenting over the loss of Western, Christian and local values, endangered or forgotten in the postcommunist era. In the the films under analysis ̶ An Unforgettable Summer (1994), Too Late (1996) and Tertium non datur (2006) ̶ images reminding of Byzantine iconography, together with direct references and remediations of sculptures by Romanian-born Constantin Brâncuși, participate in historico-political allegories as expressions of social crisis and the transient nature of values. They also reveal the tension between an external and internal image of Romania, the aspiration of the “other Europe” to connect with the European cultural tradition, in a complex demonstration of a “self othering” process. I will also argue that, contrary to the existing criticism, this generalizing, allegorical tendency can be also detected in some of the films of the generation of filmmakers representing the New Romanian Cinema, for example in Radu Jude's Aferim! (2014).
THE NEW ROMANIAN CINEMA (Romanian Cinema after 1990 and its New Wave)
ЗБОРНИК РАДОВА ФАКУЛТЕТА ДРАМСКИХ УМЕТНОСТИ, БЕОГРАД , 2007
The work briefly presents the history of Romanian cinema after 1990, pointing out the important political and social phenomena that had reflected in the film production. The new cinematic movements are presented and explained in their relationship with the past, that is with the last years of the socialist period and the so-called transition period (approximately the first decade after the December 1989 Revolution). A special attention is paid to the movement of the young filmmakers form the New Romanian Wave and to its most representative names, but without neglecting other young talented authors, that can't be subscribed to the enounced movement.