Cold war, hot stuff. The official critical discourse and the desirability of film stars in socialist Romania

Andrei Gadalean

doi:10.1080/2040350x.2021.1999619

Abstract

This article examines the ways in which Romanian socialist politics and state-sanctioned film journalism intersected around film sexuality and foreign film stardom, in order to reinforce the official discourse on sexual morality in the 1960s and 1970s. The ‘60s represented a decade of political and ideological semi-relaxation in socialist Romania. Film audiences retained some access to Western productions, and foreign film stars carried significant erotic appeal to viewers. The state-funded Cinema magazine aimed to disrupt these tendencies either by arguing that the objects of desire were representative of lower quality cinema, or, in full-on Cold War style, by building the case for the decline of Western capitalism through pinpointing all manifestations of sexuality as a symptom of it. This article looks at the ways in which ideological arguments to “redact” film sexuality, while failing to repurpose it, managed to redirect it and reposition it as alien to socialist culture. The article also explores the continuation of this trend during the 1970s, when film stardom and the seductive appeal of film stars were validated by their conformation to political and historical ideologies directly linked to the concerns of the Romanian Communist Party.

Highlights

In the opening paragraphs of his seminal study Stars, Richard Dyer contends that the reasons for studying stars academically stemmed from either a sociological concern, or a semiotic one
This article examines the ways in which Romanian socialist politics and state-sanctioned film journalism intersected around film sexuality and foreign film stardom, in order to reinforce the official discourse on sexual morality in the 1960s and 1970s
The article explores the continuation of this trend during the 1970s, when film stardom and the seductive appeal of film stars were validated by their conformation to political and historical ideologies directly linked to the concerns of the Romanian Communist Party

Summary

Introduction

In the opening paragraphs of his seminal study Stars, Richard Dyer contends that the reasons for studying stars academically stemmed from either a sociological concern, or a semiotic one. The former concern, Dyer argues, “centres on the stars as a remarkable, and probably influential or symptomatic, social phenomenon, as well as being an aspect of film’s ‘industrial’ nature”. In the latter, “stars are only of significance because they are in films and are part of the way films signify” (Dyer 1986, 1). This article proposes a methodological alternative: while film stars are central to this discussion, this is not necessarily a “star studies” article as such, or if it is, it is more in the lineage of Jackie Stacey’s

Objectives

Conclusion