"Marying into the European Family of Nations: National Disorder and Upset Gender Roles in Post-communist Romanian Film" (original) (raw)
Related papers
Journal of Women's History, 2011
Drawing on recent Romanian films, this article explores the distinctive post-communist concerns with national relocation in the symbolic geography of Europe. The focus on tragic comedies, an increasingly popular genre in Eastern European cinematography, foregrounds the critical usage of irony to express skepticism about the inclusive nature of geopolitical projects such as the European Union by national communities situated at its periphery. While the tragic comedies examined here are successful in challenging official narratives of European belonging, they rely on highly gendered scripts that prove more resilient to ironic reworkings. The movies resort to gendered plots and family tropes, representing Romania's efforts to receive European recognition as attempts to "marry into" the European Union. The larger thrust of this article is to open complex notions such as "Europe," "nation," and "gender," which are notoriously prone to essentialization, to a deconstructive analysis as systems of differentiation. S traddling the fine border between social reality and fictional representation, two recent Romanian films, Go West (2002) and Italian Girls (2004), turn a widespread social phenomenon-the desire of Romanian youth to leave the country for the West-into compelling film narratives. 1 Despite the references to western destinations in the titles, story lines never follow characters who leave Romania, focusing stubbornly on the alternatively rural or urban home front. Both movies "stay home," dwelling on a variety of social concerns that range from the emigrating urge of the young, to the propelling force of unemployment, poverty, and increasing dissatisfaction, coalescing into an overall picture of social instability and national disorder. In a sense, these films bring the West home, being less concerned with the West itself than with how pervasive conceptions of Europeanness and of the West become constitutive of the self-perception of Romanian society. Dramatized by the crisis of the family, upset gender roles, and failing state institutions and authorities, the general instability of post-1989 Romanian society captured by Go West and Italian Girls is indicative of wider attempts at national redefinition and relocation in the symbolic geography of Europe. Starting inquiry from two post-communist Romanian films that
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 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.
Fabricating Remembrance: Romanian Cinema and the Problem of National Identity
MA Thesis, University of Amsterdam, 2013
The scope of this thesis is to explore the role of the visual media, and cinema in particular, in the shaping of national identity in the multicultural, highly volatile area of Eastern Europe in the 20th century. Starting from Benedict Anderson’s theory that linguistic identity predates the development of the nation-state in ecclesiastic Latin-dominated Western Europe, I claim that cinema acted as a tool in demarcating the boundaries between the “national self” and the “Other” in what used to be a historically homogenous cultural space that came to a close with the collapse of the multinational empires that administered the region until WWI. Suggesting that its necessity to cope with instability helped it develop a protean identity, I use Romania for showcasing the area’s ability to face up to its not altogether acknowledged past.
Der Donauraum, 2012
Our study aims to investigate the Romanian post-communist cinema and how it mirrors the different phases in the process of EU-integration, opposing mainly the transitional period and its post-2007 counterpart through some key features of Romanian society depicted in the national cinema (especially the migration process and its effects on the rest of society). Before the EU integration Romania had a cultural Katharsis, short time after 2007 the Romanian society focuses its attention on what could be called Anagnorisis (the fascination with the non-mediated contact with the real).
Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism, 2012
This article analyses the way the concept of nation is reflected in film using the theory of cinematic nationhood and the method of relational constructivism. More specifically, it looks at how the nation can be legitimised when it occupies a strategic position within the national structure of fantasy and when it is closely associated with the most relevant commonplaces present within the social space. The article further investigates the situation in which the concept of nation loses legitimacy because of a change in the way it is imagined. The research addresses the case of Romania, choosing three films representing three distinct periods and characterised by different forms of political and economic organisation: communism, transition, and post-transition.
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.
The Oxford Handbook of Communist Visual Cultures, 2019
This chapter identifies visions of European identity articulated by the anticommunist propaganda broadcasts of Radio Free Europe Romania (RFER) in the 1980s and traces the way these visions influenced the audiovisual rhetoric of the Romanian cinema of the early 1990s. It examines how RFER listeners envisioned this identity in a context of inner exile and in opposition to the communist system and its legacy. The study presents the political profile of film directors of the 1990s who gave cinematic form to RFER anticommunism. Using the concept of “hauntology,” a psycho-ideological analysis of this cinematic output is provided, with a specific focus on one of the most appreciated films of the immediate post-1989 decade, the 1994 Pepe and Fifi (Dir. Dan Pița). Keywords: 1990s Romanian cinema, Radio Free Europe Romania, RFER, anticommunist propaganda, European identity, transition to capitalism, hauntology
Postsocialist Mobilities. Studies in Eastern European Cinema
Postsocialist Mobilities. Studies in Eastern European Cinema, 2021
This volume examines the various forms of mobility in the cinema of the Visegrad countries and Romania, bringing together the cross-disciplinary research of mostly native scholars. In four thematic sections, it expands our understanding of the political transition and the social changes it triggered, the transforming perceptions of gender roles and especially masculinity. The spaces of “in betweenness” and contact zones, be them geographical, interethnic or communicative, (im)mobility and transmedial encounters of Eastern European subjectivity are recurring figures of both cinematic representations and their theoretical analyses. In-depth and transcultural in their nature, the investigations of this volume are informed by political, social and cultural history, genre, gender and spatial theory, cultural studies, sociology and political science and, of equal importance, the rich personal experience of our authors who witnessed many of the discussed phenomena in “close-up “.