Romanian Cinema: Thinking Outside the Screen by Doru Pop (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Romanian Cinema: Thinking Outside the Screen by Doru Pop Andrei Gorzo Pop, Doru. Romanian Cinema: Thinking Outside the Screen. Bloomsbury Academic, London, New York and Dublin, 2021. xii + 268 pp. Illustrations. Figures. Notes. Bibliography. Index. £90.00; £28.99; £26.09 (e-book). Doru Pop's Romanian Cinema: Thinking Outside the Screen has a somewhat misleading title. The author himself (a Romanian professor of film studies) acknowledges as much when he writes that his focus here is not on Romanian cinema: what he aspires to provide is a clarifying intervention in film-philosophy debates, proposing a new model of how films 'think'; and the reason he is using particular Romanian films to illustrate such larger conceptual issues is simply that he is more familiar with them — that aside, many non-Romanian productions could have served his purpose just as well (p. 21). The fact that, notwithstanding Pop's disclaimers, his decidedly odd book is haunted by unresolved issues of national specificity, often couched in alarmingly essentalist-sounding terminology — 'Romanian cinema-thinking' (p. 136), 'the Romanian cinematic mind' (p. 175) — counts among its lesser problems. The larger conceptual issues that the book sets out to clarify have to do with questions like: in what ways and to what extent can a film be said to be philosophical? Does the fact that films can contain ideas mean that they can actually contribute to philosophical knowledge? Can films (by films, Pop usually means fictional narrative features) generate philosophical concepts? Is the 'cinematic machine' philosophical by its very nature? Has cinema reinvented or rejuvenated philosophy? Should we talk about 'film and philosophy' or about 'film as philosophy'? To a reader primarily interested in criticism and scholarship of Romanian cinema, Pop's recapitulation of these debates can give off a whiff of patience-testing scholasticism. And, when Romanian cinema makes its late entrance, in the form of some contemporary films directed by [End Page 167] internationally prominent directors (Cristian Mungiu, Corneliu Porumboiu and Cristi Puiu), it is disappointing. In one of his many grand-sounding statements, Pop announces that he will use the last sequence of Mungiu's 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (2007) as 'material illustration for how film thoughts are created' (p. 83). The creation of those 'film thoughts' apparently has something to do with the directors' deployment of 'non-cinematic cinema' — a concept on which Pop relies heavily throughout the book without ever building a convincing case for its utility. What is it, exactly? It has to do with things happening offscreen, with decentred visual compositions (that remove 'the main character from the center of the visual field', p. 221), with temporal ellipsis (things happening in 'the intervals between the sequences', p. 85), with storytelling that leaves gaps in the viewer's knowledge. More obscurely, it has to do with the camera's refusal 'to act like a "proper" moving image apparatus' (p. 85), while negating 'all the conventions and practices of moviemaking as a form of entertainment' (p. 184). Most of this boils down to little more than a notion that meanings conveyed through allusiveness or indirection are superior to meanings made 'manifest in the explicit or the viewable' (p. 86). Leaving aside the somewhat hyperbolic praise lavished by Pop on Mungiu for his orchestration of ironies which are not really that subtle, this is very traditional hermeneutical criticism. What is being gained (except obfuscation) by dressing it up in talk of the 'non- cinematic'? The two protagonists' final agreement to 'never talk about this' in the future (this being the harrowing experience they have just been through) is an occasion for Pop to drag in Wittgenstein's concept of the 'unspeakable' (p. 85). Is that necessary or even apposite? Is it necessary — or even remotely precise — to describe the locations of Romanian films as 'non-places' in Marc Augé's sense (p. 196)? Pop only backs it up minimally before moving on to something else. His conceptual table-setting and heavy lifting are excessive in relation to the pedestrian interpretational work which he performs on his chosen films. And sometimes it is not even pedestrian. Here is his example of 'decinematization' through 'the use...