Romanian and Hungarian film cultures at the Transilvania International Film Festival (original) (raw)

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).

Comparing Waves. Cultural and Aesthetic Similarities between Recent Romanian and Hungarian Cinemas

Ekphrasis. Images, Cinema, Theory, Media

This paper addresses the issues of cultural identity and aesthetic specificity, as manifested in cinemamaking practices of the Romanian and Hungarian recent films. The main questions are if the Romanian film makers tell different stories from their neighboring colleagues, or if the contemporary movies are showing similarities, which allows us to describe related tropes and even shared imaginaries. This paper is discussing those Romanian and Hungarian films and directors that had a major impact, using authors like like Cristi Puiu, Cristian Mungiu or Radu Jude and their counterparts in the region like Károly Ujj Mészáros, Kornel Mundruczo or Nemes László. The author raises the problem of a possible and impossible cinematic dialogue between these two cinema cultures by asking if we can talk about an East European cinema style, or can we identify a shared film tradition of regional cinemas (when it comes to Romania and Hungary) and if there is a larger trend that influences the cinematic expression. Another aspect would be the discussion of cultural strategies in the two countries, and how did these impact the development of their particular film industry, film consumption and film reception. In the same time, the EU integration of the two countries has created similar problems, with dissimilar solutions, as the cultural similarities and the transition from a homogenized cinema of the Socialist era lead to transformations that have influenced separately the two cultural environments. Finally the problem is if there can be a "Romanian style" of making movies opposed to a "Hungarian way" to film art, or if contemporary Hungarian and Romanian cinemas are part of a European mode of representation?

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.

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.

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.

Reframing Film Festivals. International Conference Full Programme. Venice, 11-12 February & Bari, 25-26 March 2020

Reframing Film Festivals: Histories, Economies and Cultures is an international film studies conference organised by the Ca’ Foscari University of Venice and the Aldo Moro University of Bari, in collaboration with the the Apulia Film Commission, the Consulta Universitaria Cinema and the Associazione Italiana per le Ricerche di Storia del Cinema and is supported by the Centro Studi Apulia Film Commission, Science Gallery Venice and Hostelsclub. This double-event conference seeks to contribute to the so-called film festival studies through a series of roundtables and debates involving film critics, practitioners and scholars. In this vein, Reframing Film Festivals seeks to foster an interdisciplinary and intersectional reading of film festivals, here conceived as a historiographic “dispositive”, as cultural formations and as financial institutions. Within a single and cohesive research framework, the Ca’ Foscari strand (11-12 February) will be devoted to the critical-historic and historiographic dimension of film festivals, while at the University of Bari (25-26 March) the focus will be placed on their cultural and economic dimension.

Restructuring a Cinema That Didn't Exist. The Romanian Film Industry of the 1990s

2017

In the 1990s, Romanian cinema was structurally, legislatively and fi nancially adrift : it was experiencing a sort of clinical death. To start with, there were no Romanian fi lm premieres in 1990 and 2000. Various social transformations, the lack of management expertise, as well as the political and legislative (dis)order aft er 1989 rapidly created a new and staggering context. Th e society was confused about power relations and access to resources, compared with the status quo of the socialist years (which applied at every stage of the dictatorship: from the Stalinism of the 1950s, to the liberalization of the 1960s, to the national-socialism of the 1970s and 1980s). While there have been no consistent research and documentation endeavours dedicated to explaining the state of aff airs from the fi rst decade aft er 1989, many debates were staged in the Romanian press at that time (for instance in Noul Cinema magazine), albeit to little avail. Signifi cantly, an article published in 1993 by Alex Leo Șerban, probably the most infl uential Romanian fi lm critic of the 1990s, was titled 'On a Cinema Th at Doesn't Exist'. 1) What Șerban drew attention to was the poor functioning of the fi lm industry, which had just abandoned the state-socialist mode of production. Most worrisome, however, was the questionable aesthetic quality of Romanian fi lms. Over the past twenty-fi ve years, the situation has changed from an 'inexistent' Romanian cinema to a new, intensively praised generation of fi lm directors (such as Cristi Puiu, Cristian Mungiu, Radu Muntean, Corneliu Porumboiu, or Radu Jude) who have reinvented the Neorealist 2) aesthetic style and rewritten the cinematic language. New Romanian Cinema has been described as 'an unexpected miracle' by Dominique Nasta 3) or as a late

INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVALS: FROM MODERNISM TO POST-POSTMODERN AGE

THE ART AND SCIENCE OF TELEVISION / НАУКА ТЕЛЕВИДЕНИЯ, 2020

This article uses the Russian film festival movement to analyze the evolution of film festivals from their beginnings to the internet age, focusing on how scientific and technological transformations in the audiovisual sphere influenced the social context of information circulation and cinematic creativity. The article first shows how film festivals came to depend on the internet and the use of digital gadgets in various cultural and demographic communities, including spontaneous teenage associations (so-called “youth cultures”), various professional groups, and the elderly. The article then considers the Soviet and postsoviet Russian film festival movement in the context of global shift from modernism through postmodernism to postpostmodernism. The Russian festival movement is flourishing: more and more festivals appear every day. Administrative difficulties predominate. Unofficial censorship inspires widespread fear and caution. The article proposes a parallel cine-club distribution system that would be exempt from the commercial and censorship restrictions currently applied to films in general distribution. It also considers why festivals spring up and why they disappear. Festivals are needed; otherwise citizens would not organize them. They may be organized for various reasons: to celebrate local functionaries; to celebrate art; or for other reasons. The article reveals the contradictions in the financing of particular festivals, and explains why some festivals receive government funding and others do not. Apart from federal funding, there are municipal funds, and informal relationships can bring private funding as well. The article then closely analyzes the Moscow International Film Festival, unique in that it combines two different “festivals”. From the one hand, it is a traditional showcase with three competitive programs (feature films, documentaries, and short films). On the other hand, it is an open “festival of festivals” that demonstrates films, shown and awarded at other festivals, hors concours. This section is particularly important because very few of these films can break into the general circulation in Russia.

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.