What's wrong with the Romanian New Wave? Auteur Cinema, the communist, and the production of the violent working class (original) (raw)
Related papers
Afterlives of Romanian socialist-era historical film: reruns, story universes, reception
Canadian Slavonic Papers, 2021
This article examines present-day reruns of Romanian socialist-era historical films, their programming, the publicity related to their programming, and their reception. It argues that, unintentionally, reruns act as an instrument of historical revisionism. It shows that the cinematic administration of the distant national past is still carried out by socialist-era films and explains the causes of this predicament and its cultural effects. It reflects on how the process of rerunning works to neutralize their labelling as Communist propaganda, a label that has been applied to these films by a large segment of Romania's postsocialist cultural elite. The article also briefly explores the marketing of two films, Dacii (The Dacians, 1966) and Mihai Viteazul (Michael the Brave, 1971), and highlights the commemorative practices brought into the present by these films. It uses contextual and genre arguments to explain why the commemorative practices proposed by socialist-era film appeal to present-day audiences and why their symbolism and ways of relating to the past are appropriated in contemporary Romanian popular culture. RÉSUMÉ L'article examine les rediffusions actuelles des films historiques roumains de l'ère socialiste, leur programmation, la publicité liée à leur programmation et leur réception. Il affirme que les rediffusions, sans le vouloir, jouent le rôle d'un instrument du révisionnisme historique. Il montre que la gestion filmique du passé national lointain est toujours effectuée par les films de l'ère socialiste, et explique les origines de cette situation et ses effets culturels. L'article réfléchit sur la façon dont le processus de rediffusion neutralise leur étiquette comme propagande communiste, étiquette qu'une grande partie de l'élite culturelle postsocialiste en Roumanie attribue à ces films. L'article examine brièvement la commercialisation de deux films, Dacii (Les Guerriers, 1966) et Mihai Viteazul (Michel le Brave, 1971), et souligne les pratiques commémoratives actualisées par ces films. Il utilise les arguments contextuels et de genre afin d'expliquer pourquoi les pratiques commémoratives proposées par les films de l'ère socialiste plaisent aux spectateurs actuels, et pourquoi leur symbolisme et leurs rapports avec le passé sont appropriés dans la culture populaire contemporaine en Roumanie.
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.
Socialist Sink: The Eastern Roots of the Romanian New Wave
Quarterly Review of Film and Video, 2022
Contemporary film theorists tend to link the character of New Romanian Cinema with Italian neorealism or the British “Kitchen Sink,” which uses a term borrowed from the theatre to describe the gritty look of films made in 1960s. If the Romanian New Wave may also have been influenced by local (that is, non-Western European) filmmaking, this is almost exclusively identified with the cinema of “dissident” directors like Lucian Pintilie, Dan Pița, and Mircea Daneliuc by virtue of the politically contestatory position of films like Reconstruction (Pintilie, 1969). In this article I argue that singling out dissident auteurs and the West as progenitors of New Romanian Cinema personifies a politicized view of the socialist past. This view subsumes the character of the movement to the neoliberal project of the European Union, seeking to enact a Manichean rupture between Romania’s socialist past and its capitalist present. In opposition to this view, I argue that the Romanian New Wave is influenced by the 1980s’ cinema of socialist realist origin, as well as by Soviet chernukha cinema and the Eastern European work of Micklos Jancso and Bela Tarr, which constituted an influence for the new generation of Romanian directors growing up in the late 1980s.
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.
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).
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.
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).