Rural Landscapes and Affective Encounters in Radu Muntean’s Film, Întregalde

Abstract

Abstract The paper discusses Radu Muntean 2021 film, Î ntregalde focusing on the representation of rural landscapes and the encounter between different social classes. The film marks multiple displacements within the director’s oeuvre, epitomized as “the chronicler” of the middle class in contemporary Romanian cinema. The spatial displacement from middle class urban spaces towards mountain and rural areas and the shift from the distant picturesqueness of landscape to the experience of landscape as dwelling, as inhabited and sensed environment mediated through textural images enables unsettling embodied, affective encounters both with the natural environment and between different social classes. In this way, the film addresses the question of class differences and lays bare the socio-economic inequalities between the urban middle class and the countryside without reducing rural characters to clichéd figurants in a picturesque or sombre countryside decorum. The film’s critical reflection on a form of occasional humanitarian aid and middle class philanthropy does not relativize the concept of charity, altruism and help but rather points to the growing gap of social inequalities (and the crisis of care) in the context of contemporary capitalism.1