Embodied memories of geographical and social mobility: White-collar women in post-communist films about Romania

Abstract

This article focuses on the ambivalent features of intellectual white-collar female characters in post-1989 films fully or partly produced in Romania ( The Oak, Fox-Hunter, The District, Sieranevada, Graduation and Toni Erdmann). Their ambivalence is examined in the framework of Pierre Bourdieu’s class habitus theory as interpreted by Tony Bennett and his colleagues, suggesting that the simultaneous presence of working-class, petit bourgeois and bourgeois/middle-class cultural capital types contributes to this effect. The performance of iconic actresses (from Maia Morgenstern to Sandra Hüller) is also situated within melodrama genre theory, a filmic template representing social mobility, often accompanied by travel. Finally, within the framework of mediated cultural remembrances the argument is made that these white-collar women may be incorporated into the category of ‘banal commemoration’ as developed by Vered Vinitzky-Seroussi, making it possible for Romanians to process traumatic memories of mobility engineered by the communist and post-communist states.