Romanian Cinema Research Articles

Challenging the Roma Structural Discrimination: Deterritorialization Practices in Romanian Cinema

This paper examines the cinematographic reworking of memory spaces associated with power relations and structural injustice. The way in which space is represented and used as a medium that reflects power relations allows to question the space itself in cultural productions from Central-Eastern Europe when associated with Romani people (space and power relations, memory of slavery and discrimination, space and freedom, territoriality, space and its inhabitants, non-belonging, segregation, etc.). The paper focuses on motion pictures produced in the last decade in Romania, a prolific period due to the increasing interest for memory activism and to the multiplication of the cultural exploration of challenging topics. It aims to identify narrative, visual, and aesthetic expressions used as deterritorialization practices to stimulate relational remembrance and engagement with ongoing social inequality and structural injustice. Two short films – Alina Șerban’ s Bilet de iertare (Letter of forgiveness) and Adrian Silișteanu’s Scris/Nescris (Written/Unwritten) – and a western type film – Radu Jude’s Aferim!, winner of the Silver Bear for Best director at Berlinale in 2015, are analysed here.

Between the scene and the silver screen: early Romanian cinema and the rediscovery of the ‘lost’ woman film pioneer Marioara Voiculescu

ABSTRACT Although some significant contributions to early filmmaking production and exhibition involve strong entrepreneurial female figures, very few women’s names appear in the histories of Balkan cinemas. Based on original archival research and press of the time, this article foregrounds the filmmaking activities of the Romanian theatre director and actress Marioara Voiculescu (1885–1976) and the role of her star persona and theatrical experience in the making of early fiction films produced by Leon M. Popescu’s Filmul de Artă company. Voiculescu achieved considerable success during her lifetime, a prolific stage career, founding her own theatre company in 1912, and playing a key role in the production of early films in 1913, yet she has received scant attention in film scholarship thus far. By shifting the focus to Voiculescu’s contribution to early cinema in Romania, I reflect more broadly on the spaces and roles that women occupied in popular culture within the ongoing process of modernisation of Romanian society.

“A Star Is Born”: Gender, Soft Power and Biopics in the Cold War Romanian Cinema Darclée (1961)

"“A Star Is Born”: Gender, Soft Power and Biopics in Cold-War Romanian Cinema (Darclée, 1961) Obsessively interested in life writing from the periods of 20th-century dictatorships, Romanian post-communist culture has been dominated, with very few exceptions, by male authors. However, shyly, yet steadily, in this large-scale attempt to retrace and understand the traumatic past, there has been an opening in recent years towards women authors. Although few by comparison, these personal narratives are memorable. In terms of biographical novels and biopics, the most striking feature is the absence of such female representations. Departing from this context of gender oblivion and inequality, and considering the specificities of the life writing genre and its filmic representations, the current paper focuses on Darclée (Mihai Iacob, 1961), one of the very few biopics in Romanian cinema that revolves around a famous woman. Aside from being a rare, female-centered exception among Romanian biopics, the film is also noteworthy for its politicized content and therefore interesting to discuss in relation to the political context, the totalitarian regime present at the time in Romania and its cultural discourse. Despite dealing with a-turn-of-the-century figure of aristocratic and bourgeois origins, the film (with the wife of a communist leader in the leading role) is politically appropriated by the communist regime and announces National Communism in Romanian culture. The analysis will thus consider the political discourse employed in Darclée, with its unexpected nationalist emphasis, as well as the film’s strategies of representation as it covers, in a rare occasion, a female figure. Keywords: life writing, gender, Romanian cinema, Cold War biopic, musical film "

The Romanian Cinema of Nationalism: Historical Films as Propaganda and Spectacle by Onoriu Colăcel

The Romanian Cinema of Nationalism: Historical Films as Propaganda and Spectacle by Onoriu Colăcel

Między minimalizmem a melodramatem. Przestrzeń filmowa w kinie rumuńskiej nowej fali

The starting point for considering the means of creating and designing a film space in Romanian New Wave cinema is the thesis that Romanian film art in the 21st century is an artistic response to the times of communism and that images of the post-socialist architectural space – their multi-faceted functionalization in film mise-en-scéne – are the key method of evoking memories of the past. The article discusses, via the example of movies by Crisitian Mungiu, Corneliu Porumboiu and Cristi Puiu, (1) ways of depicting the “closing” of film characters in the cramped interiors of their apartments and (2) film images of individuals’ alienation in public spaces, both of them allusively referring to the times of the oppressive Nicolae Ceaușescu regime. The most important cinematographic devices used bythe authors of the Romanian New Wave cinema include: seemingly static shots, which, however, are filmed with a camera that is constantly gently moving and observing, and tableau shots. A common feature of all the considered works is the panopticism of the film world: the private and public spaces designed in them easily become a place of constant, panoptical observation. In the summary, theauthor remarks on and briefly discusses the coexistence of the aesthetics of minimalism / realism with the melodramatic elements in the cinematic structure of Romanian New Wave films.

On the Fringes of the Classless Society: Notes on Constantin Stoiciu’s Film Scripts

"Focusing on the film scripts of the lesser-known, but prominent writer and film official Constantin Stoiciu, this essay assesses his contribution to the shared cinematic imaginary of the late ’60s and ’70s Romanian cinema and delineates the main strategies he resorted to in order to insert two of his thematic obsessions, class differentiation and class anxiety, into his narratives penned for the big screen."

Socialist Sink: The Eastern Roots of the Romanian New Wave

There is a tendency in contemporary theories on New Romanian Cinema to irrevocably link the ethos of this movement, which emerged in the early 2000s, with similar cinematic new waves that occurred ...

Childhood images and visual representations: Romanian post-communist cultural configuration of the past

The literary and visual representations of the Romanian recent past have helped recollect the world of childhood and its contextual frames, contributing to the process of coming to terms with the communist past. Focusing on the treatment of childhood memories in the post-communist Romanian cultural productions, the research reveals the changes under-gone by the childhood images and representations in the visual memory discourse. The image of the pioneer children offering flowers to the communist leaders was well instilled in the Romanian collective memory by the communist documentaries picturing the Romani-an life during the “Golden Age.” What followed was the image of the abandoned children: from the Romanian orphanages, immediately after the 1989 political regime change, to their immigrant parents, especially during the transitional years. Are these images recol-lected by the New Romanian Cinema productions and are they correlated with the abun-dant literary autobiographical works? The present study focuses on this topic of child images and childhood memories in connection with the remembrance of the communist past, pursuing an in-depth analysis of these post-communist Romanian cultural produc-tions. It argues that despite the insufficient interest in exploring the topic of childhood during the communist regime and the lack of significant collaborative projects reuniting literary figures and cinema directors, the cinema representations of childhood can consid-erably widen the narratives of the past, suggesting new directions in the post-communist exploration of the alternative memories of the past.

Romanian Cinema in the 1960s: Socialist Modernity vs. Cinematic Modernism

Romanian Cinema in the 1960s: Socialist Modernity vs. Cinematic Modernism

“Should I Stay or Should I Go?” The Promise of Europe and Female Identity in Francesca (2009)

Abstract Starting from the premise that intra-EU migration has generated a repertoire of representations, narratives and stances in Romanian public imagination, within a transnational context, the present article explores an area that has attracted little scholarly attention to date: Romanian New Cinema films that tackle this theme. The analysis focuses on “Francescaˮ (Bobby Păunescu, 2009), a film centred on a female character who is on the verge of deciding whether to emigrate or not. It examines how female identity and agency are shaped in connection to symbolic constructions of the “West” as a destination space for Romanian migrants, through modalities of expression specific to the New Romanian Cinema.

Notes on Fatalism and Melancholia in Romanian Cinema: An Imagological Approach

Notes on Fatalism and Melancholia in Romanian Cinema: An Imagological Approach

Lucian Pintilie and Censorship in a Post-Stalinist Authoritarian Context

The objective of my work is to shed light on the way in which the post-1953 ideology of the Romanian Communist Party influenced Romanian theatre and film director Lucian Pintilie’s career, resulting in a ban to work in Romania. Reacting to the imposition of the cultural revolution and against the laws of coagulating the socialist realist work of art, Lucian Pintilie managed to mark the Romanian theatrical and cinema landscape through the artistic quality of the productions and the directed films, replicated by the renown of the imposed interdiction.

A psychoanalytical approach to Cristian Mungiu’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days

Cristian Mungiu’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days ( 4, 3, 2 for short) is a classic of the new wave in Romanian cinema. Centred on the paternalistic and patriarchal relationship between political power and women, this analysis reveals the psychological effects of traumatic situations and how unconscious (hidden, often irrational) drives determine human behaviour in subjects living under totalitarianism. This article provides a reading of the film through such concepts as the (male) gaze, the law in relation to the figure of the father and the Lacanian orders of the symbolic and the real, the split personality of the abused woman as both subject and object, and life/death instincts in the face of totalitarian intrusion into the reproductive rights of women. This kind of analysis sheds new light on the nuances of the film and the significance of the silence in it by exposing the symbolic reality of communist totalitarianism as opposed to a seemingly authentic Lacanian real that is hidden in the silence and in the materiality of the female body.

Narrating the past: Cultural memory and Romanian identity in Aferim!

In contrast to the internationally celebrated New Romanian Cinema, Aferim! (Radu Jude, 2015), set in the distant past, invokes the historical filmmaking tradition as represented by Sergiu Nicolaescu’s historical epics, including references to the literary adaptations of the socialist era La moara cu Noroc / The Mill of Good Luck (Victor Iliu, 1957) and Moromeții / The Moromete Family (Stere Gulea, 1987). The article identifies notions of Romanian identity in relation to changing ideas of nationalism to show how Aferim! uses representations of violence as a means of illuminating and interrogating romantic-heroic visions of the history of the nation and encouraging national self-knowledge.

Consciousness and spirituality in New Romanian Cinema

Representations of the individual, family and collective groups within New Romanian Cinema reveal the nation’s social, political and psychological transformations, as well as its values and beliefs in times of intense transition. Focusing on Behind the Hills (Cristian Mungiu, 2012) and Sieranevada (Cristi Puiu, 2016), this article analyses the new cinema’s dual position (apolitical yet engaged) and reflection on such aspects as religion, ideology and globalization; it emphasizes mechanisms of identity (trans)formation, the shaping of global citizenship and the shifts in public discourses, such as film, to continue to engage individuals and groups in social debate and events.

New Romanian Cinema, women’s self-empowerment, and hegemonic masculinity: Female figures in Cristian Mungiu’s Occident (2002) and Radu Muntean’s Boogie (2008)

ABSTRACTThis essay analyzes the representation of female figures in two films of the New Romanian Cinema (NRC), Cristian Mungiu’s Occident (2002) and Radu Muntean’s Boogie (2008). Drawing on Karen Hollinger’s (2012) statement that film is polysemic, my analysis departs from the claims of the extant scholarship on women’s portrayal in the NRC. By investigating the manner in which fundamental concepts of gender analysis like agency, empowerment, (sexual) objectification, patriarchy, and hegemonic masculinity shape female characters, I show that Occident and Boogie offer views of women that are vastly different. I argue that Occident proposes a nuanced gender representation that breaks with patriarchal views of female characters as it presents confident and self-empowered young women who assert their agency by emigrating to the West. I maintain that Muntean’s film is more sexist than acknowledged so far because, in contrast to Occident, it relegates female figures to a subordinate position — either as sexual objects lacking agency or in stereotypical domestic roles as mother and wife — over which a relentless and unquestioned hegemonic masculinity looms large. Ultimately, my analysis shows that there is no shared agenda vis-a-vis gender in these specific NRC films. While the scope of this essay is narrow since it focuses in detail on two NRC films by two directors, its findings can serve as a spring board for future inquiries that would scrutinize other NRC directors and their films in order to establish a broader gender analysis of the NRC.

The Battle of the Brands

Abstract The international recognition of Romanian literature faces a double challenge: first, the limited circulation of the Romanian language; second, the small number of translations and the non-systematic branding that this literature has enjoyed so far. This article discusses (1) the meanings of “branding”; (2) the ways in which the nationalist imp keeps hindering the branding of Romanian literature abroad, and highlights the historical and contemporary shortcomings of the branding of Romanian literary texts and authors; and (3) the current state-of-affairs, followed by a scenario for future action. The last section suggests ways of improving this branding by piggybacking on the international success of Romanian cinema and on a few award-winning Romanian writers, but especially by attempting to help create a class of professional middle-persons (cultural managers, literary agents and advertising professionals) who would systematically promote Romanian literature.

What's wrong with the Romanian New Wave? Auteur cinema, the communist and the production of the violent working class

ABSTRACTThis article argues that the much celebrated Romanian films such as Reconstituirea/Reenactment (Lucian Pintilie, 1968) and New Wave productions such as Sieranevada (Cristi Puiu, 2016) are plagued by its classist descriptions of two figures: ‘the uneducated communist’ and ‘the violent working class’. By contesting a simple gap between socialist and post-socialist temporality, I argue that these figures were already deployed during socialism to produce the working class as uneducated, violent and irrational. In this article, my first goal is to trace the emergence of the auteur Romanian cinema, with a focus on Reenactment, in relationship to the loss of European trust in socialism in the mid-1960s. My second goal is to deploy Croaziera/The Cruise (Mircea Daneliuc, 1981) in contrast with auteur films such as Sieranevada to point to a different realism which takes seriously the experience and positionality of the working class.

Realism under construction

Abstract This article interprets Jude’s short film through its realist-modernist attitude that I argue is the distinguishing characteristic of the New Romanian Cinema. The seemingly transparent images highlight how the represented social world remains ambiguous, and reflexively foreground the processes in which the hesitant spectator assigns meaning to them.

Vision and knowledge

Abstract The article discusses It Can Pass Through the Wall in the context of New Romanian Cinema, arguing that its subject is a search for knowledge and the difficulty of finding it, which feeds the characters’ curiosity. It also suggests that the film can be regarded as a metaphor for the position of every film viewer.