What's wrong with the Romanian New Wave? Auteur Cinema, the communist, and the production of the violent working class (original) (raw)

This article argues that the much celebrated Romanian films such as Reconstituirea /Reenactment (Lucian Pintilie, 1968) and New Wave productions such as Sieranevada (Cristi Puiu, 2016) are plagued by its classist descriptions of two figures: ‘the uneducated communist’ and ‘the violent working class’. By contesting a simple gap between socialist and post-socialist temporality, I argue that these figures were already deployed during socialism to produce the working class as uneducated, violent and irrational. In this article, my first goal is to trace the emergence of the auteur Romanian cinema, with a focus on Reenactment, in relationship to the loss of European trust in socialism in the mid-1960s. My second goal is to deploy Croaziera/The Cruise (Mircea Daneliuc, 1981) in contrast with auteur films such as Sieranevada to point to a different realism which takes seriously the experience and positionality of the working class.