Romanian Film

In den Geschichten, die das Kino erzählt, werden Identität und Differenz re_produziert. Die vergleichende Untersuchung der Kinofilme FURIA (R. Muntean, 2002) und KNALLHART (D. Buck, 2006) zeigt Überschneidungen und Unterschiede, die sich in den Darstellungen natio-ethno-kulturell markierter Figuren in dem rumänischen und deutschen populären Filmbeispiel finden lassen. Es wird nach der Funktion der Narrativierung von Differenz gefragt, und danach, wie die fiktiven Darstellungen der beiden Filme mit der außerfilmischen Wirklichkeit zusammenhängen. Im Ergebnis der Analyse wird die stereotypengestützte symbolische Ordnung erkennbar, der die Darstellungen beider Filme übereinstimmend folgen, und mit der sie sich als Bestandteile eines rassistischen Diskurses der Differenz, genauer als Inszenierungen von Weißsein, einordnen lassen.

Un caz care în contextul actual ar trebui să capete noi semnificaţii, contrastând evident cu cel al primilor torţionari pedepsiţi cu închisoarea, Ion Ficior şi Alexandru Vişinescu, este cel al lui Franz Ţandără, torţionarul desprins parcă din romanele lui Dostoievski, care decide să-şi caute singur pedeapsa în primii ani după 1990, adresându-se Asociaţiei Foștilor Deţinuţi Politici şi chiar Poliţiei, dar întâlnind un sistem care nu are încă formulate legile pentru pedepsirea crimelor împotriva umanităţii şi nici instrumentele instituţionale pentru a începe procesul comunismului, proces mult aşteptat de opinia publică al anilor '90. Această lacună la nivel legislativ şi instituţional, prelungită în fapt până în 2006 (momentul oficial de condamnare a comunismului), a generat efectul contrar la nivelul discursului mediatic, unde nevoia de justiţie retroactivă 1 a îmbrăcat cele mai diverse forme, cea mai frecventă fiind cea a discursului urii, eliminând orice nuanţe sau delimitări între false şi adevărate victime, între opresori şi diversele devoalări ale colaboratorilor cu fosta Securitate, câţiva dintre aceştia fiind chiar foşti deţinuţi, condamnaţi politic cu ani de temniţă grea la activ, ale căror merite au fost trecute sub tăcere (cazurile lui Adrian Marino sau Nicolae Balotă, a căror colaborare forţată de anii de puşcărie a umbrit pe nedrept rezistenţa lor morală contra totalitarismului, problemă studiată cu atenția cuvenită acestor nuanțe sensibile de Gabriel Andreescu) 2. Dorinţa aflării adevărului deplin despre sistemul opresiv şi impulsul justiţiei retroactive par să alimenteze deopotrivă discursul mediatic şi cel al reprezentărilor artistice despre comunism din perioada 1990-1998 sau chiar 1998-2006, dar acest fapt ar schiţa un tablou prea simplist al dinamicii interne acestor opere literare sau cinematografice. În mod ironic, condamnarea oficială a comunismului a fost făcută de un preşedinte a cărui colaborare cu fosta Securitate a fost dovedită, în 2019, de Consiliul Național pentru Studierea Arhivelor Securității (CNSAS). Anti-comunismul retroactiv al politicienilor din ultimii ani a primit astfel The Afternoon of a Torturer-the Anatomy of an Impossible Case The author begins with the theory of the three representations of the Communist past, visible in the post-communist narrative discourse, both in literature and cinema, already discussed in previous articles. The present article brings forward new insights regarding the second representation, still inspired by the anticommunist stance, but already surpassing its limitations towards other narrative options and perspectives. Lucian Pintilie's film The Afternoon of a Torturer is considered a key example due to the controversial aspect of the character portrayed, due to the factual dimension of the case and its implicit ambiguities. Keywords: typologies of representation, figure of the survivor, figure of the bystander, retroactive justice.

Volumul prezintă cele șapte filme ale lui Alexa Visarion, așa cum sunt văzute de către lect.univ.dr. Vasilica Bălăiță, dar și prin prisma unor interviuri cu regizorul și a unor conferințe susținute de acesta în cadrul Școlii Doctorale a Facultății de Teatru din Iași. Sunt suprinse portrete ale unor actori, modalități de joc, sensuri de interpretare în opera filmică a lui Alexa VIsarion. Index actori: Mircea Albulescu, Leopoldina Bălănuță, Mircea Diaconu, Ștefan Bănică, Octavian Cotescu, George Constantin,  Dana Dogaru, Carmen Galin, Vladimir Găitan, Ștefan Iordache, Marius Manole, Dorina Lazăr, Grigore Manolescu, Horațiu Mălăele, Camelia Maxim.

This chapter examines the ways in which Eastern European cinema has become Europeanized. It looks at how the idea of Eastern Europe and its cinema has been shaped vis-à-vis the West, and redefined after the collapse of communism. Contrary to the received wisdom that a new paradigm emerged in 1989, this chapter argues that it is only since 2000 that Eastern European cinema has enjoyed recognition after the near collapse of its film industries in the 1990s. In the three case studies of the Hungarian filmmaker Béla Tarr, Eastern European female directors and the Romanian New Wave, the chapter analyses the emergence in Eastern Europe of a new complex model of film production aligned with its larger European counterpart. This producer-driven model is based on three further aspects:  the national film institutes, international co-productions and participation in film festivals.

The paper offers a review of how film "speaks" and "thinks" with the help of kitchen scenery about a particular social reality and culture and, on a symbolic level in a more symbolic vein, about the human condition. Michael Haneke's influence is perceptible in Cristi Puiu's films: Moartea Domnului Lăzărescu/The Death of Mr Lăzărescu (2005), and Aurora (2010). The characters' POV and the camera's POV mirror each other. Both frame and fragment the victim's body in a violent manner. The cinematographic camera operates on reality violence such as it cannot be apprehended in a global and synthetic manner but only as a heap of bits and pieces to be explored from a psychic distance. The psychic stance of the character is mirrored in the camera perspective that transposes the viewer in the mental state of the psychopath character, Viorel from Aurora. The character acquires self-identity by an act of violence or by "consuming" the other. Incorporating the other eliminates the external reference-frame that serves as a comparison element necessary for the assertion of the difference of the self. As a result the ego is condemned to contemplate the horror of his own existential condition-that is lacking a well-defined social self.

The article analyzes the extent to which the Romanian film and novel after 1989 propose a contrasting vision on
the recent past as compared to the official, hegemonic discourse of the political realm. One important event was the
official condemnation of the communist regime in 2006. Another objective of the paper is to analyze the artistic response
of films to media and political events. The questions asked are: do the films from this period challenge the hegemonic
anti-communist discourse? What are the strategies employed? How has the film or the novel influenced other discourses
as well? Three typologies of representing communism are proposed and discussed.

The paper offers an overview on the cinematographic work of Radu
Jude. An established director with fourteen films in his portfolio, Jude explores a variety of genres such as classical melodrama (“Alexandra”, 2006), comedy (“The Happiest Girl in the World”, 2009), parodical intertextual essay (“A Film for Friends” 2011), historical western (“Aferim!”, 2015), documentary (“The Dead Nation”, 2017). The paper explores the idea that, despite the diversity of cinematic approaches, Jude maintains a personal and coherent view and discourse on the
fictional world he depicts. This worldview can be metaphorically rendered as the “death of the author”. Radu Jude’s movies perform or rather take as working principle the decay of the concept of author as a unifying stylistic feature. But, at the same time, this concept is a critical post factum construct that modifies and corrupts the object it is supposed to describe and explain.

Our study aims to investigate the Romanian post-communist cinema and how it mirrors the different phases in the process of EU-integration, opposing mainly the transitional period and its post-2007 counterpart through some key features of Romanian society depicted in the national cinema (especially the migration process and its effects on the rest of society). Before the EU integration Romania had a cultural Katharsis, short time after 2007 the Romanian society focuses its attention on what could be called Anagnorisis (the fascination with the non-mediated contact with the real).

"Louis Daquin’s Ciulinii Bărăganului (1957): Film Adaptation as Panait Istrati’s Conditional Rehabilitation" in:
Dana Radler, Aurora Băgiag, Teodora-Anca Şerban-Oprescu (eds.), Panait Istrati. Littérature et société. Panait Istrati: Literature and Society, Bucharest, Editura ASE, 2021, 179-194.

The allegorical film about a young Romanian victim of the Polish justice system is an upside-down dystopia, in the three-dimensional mirror of the real. A typical Kafkaesque character passes the path to death in a world that refuses to hear him. We see dystopia as a study method, not as a purpose for the analytical investigation. In addition, we do not start from the idea that this is the opposite of an ideal world, but it's the utopia converted into a degraded version which unfolded badly. I applied two scales of understanding to a deep and challenging scenario: the sociological theories about the world as a dysfunctional mechanism and the archetypes of the contemporary imaginative.

In this paper I show that despite the erasure of individualism attributed to socialism by the liberal West during the Cold War, the concept of the socialist “hero” or “leader,” as it appears in film narratives from the socialist age, in fact opened up individual personalities for expression much more than Western societies allowed. 

To illustrate my thesis I look at Sergiu Nicolaescu’s 1975 film "Scorching Days/Zile fierbinti" and I analyze its reception in its native Romania as well as socialist China in the 1970s. Despite the postsocialist rhetoric equating this film with indoctrination in its native country, in China the film became a powerful symbol vying for a restructuring of the socialist system. By highlighting the comparative reception of the film in the two countries, I hope to show that socialist realism didn’t always make cinema into a straightforward case of toeing the party line. Furthermore, I plan to show that the leader (played in this case by the film’s director) represented not only the type of renegade character that mirrored individual behaviors in socialist environments, but that his active political engagement in the film actively influenced policy in post-Mao China, where the character of the engineer became a symbol for social change. This will lead, implicitly, to an analysis between the “capitalist” versus the “socialist” film protagonist, concluding that, ironically, it is capitalism rather than Communism that levels differences under the deceptive promulgation of individualism, and consequently uniformizes society while discouraging expressions of individuality.

The aim of this paper is to revisit a number of concepts outlined in
Friedrich Schleiermacher’s 1813 Academy address Ueber die verschiedenen
Methoden des Uebersezens and other writings by him, and link them to fi lm subtitling.
It is not our aim to retrace the passage of Schleiermacher’s concepts between
languages and theoreticians who gave them new life in the twentieth and beginning
of the twenty-fi rst century; instead, we return to Schleiermacher’s text itself and
focus on the translator’s creativity with respect to cultural identity and alterity.
Our theoretical refl ections inspired by Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics are complemented
by the case study of a contemporary Romanian fi lm, The Death of
Mr. Lazarescu (2005), and its French and English DVD subtitles. We examine some
of the challenges involved, and the choices made by the subtitlers in view of presenting
to Western audiences a cultural product from Eastern Europe, the continent’s
internal other. This leads us to a number of considerations about Schleiermacher
and fi lm, especially in relation to ‘die feinste Linie’ (‘the fi nest line’) between identity
and alterity, which is reconfi gured through the various degrees of the translator’s
creative decision-making.

A director's profile providing both an overview of Romanian auteur Lucian Pintilie's personal life and the challenges he faced as a dissident filmmaker during Romania's communist years, while also examining his incredible contribution to Romanian film history through his extensive filmography.

The article examines the Romanian and American reception of Cristian Mungiu’s 4 weeks, 3 months, 2 weeks (2007), arguing that the film’s representational minimalism indirectly caused an excess of interpretation across cultural contexts. This overinterpretation was possible because the film’s aesthetic minimalism encouraged viewers to decode the story through the lens of their own cultural and political predispositions. The historical and social background against which American viewers consumed this story of an illegal abortion during communism shaped its meaning (and perceptions about its political relevance), plugging a rather obscure art-house Romanian film into the larger national debate over reproductive rights in contemporary United States. Thus, in its transition from the domestic to global marketplace, 432 was transformed from an act of amoral probing of the Romanian individual and collective memory about communism into a film about the controversial nature of particular individual choices, within the liberal capitalist paradigm.