Tactical Modernism: Romanian Cinema of the 1960s and the Disputed Modernist Aesthetics

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Throughout the 1950s, during the heyday of socialist realism, “modernism” as a concept is virtually nonexistent in Romanian literature and arts. Only in the late 1950s and in the early 1960s theories about a modernist style – in literature, but also in cinema – start to reemerge. The main issue with modernism during that era is that it is closely associated with the so-called decadent and bourgeois Western art. In order to be adapted to a Socialist framework, modernism has to be refashioned. As such, a hybrid, tactical modernism – political in content, open to experimentation in matters regarding form – slowly becomes, despite its fragile coherence, one of the dominant approaches of that era. By studying the debates about modernism in the main cultural journals of that era, such as Contemporanul or Cinema, this paper shows the manner in which modernist ideas about art are strategically integrated into the Romanian cultural discourse of the 1960s.