Abstract
Turning to the contemporary films of New Romanian Cinema, the author investigates the fictional reconstructions of the national past (the state socialist decades and the fall of the regime) produced in the new millennium. The hesitant mnemonic project of the films is directed at a deconstructive-performative contestation of the canon of the past. The analyses propose that the films run counter to hegemonic social imaginaries and homogenizing discourses of the state socialist past and 1989 revolution.
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Notes
- 1.
The English version fails to do justice to the original title, which in mirror translation would be The German Chainsaw Massacre.
- 2.
- 3.
- 4.
Băsescu spoke of communism and not state socialism. However, in accordance with Kornai’s argument (see p. 47), my study refers to the pre-1989 regimes as state socialist.
- 5.
Tismăneanu and Bogdan defend the commission’s scholarly work in their respective studies “Democracy, Memory and Social Justice” (Tismăneanu 2015) and “The Romanian Communist Past and the Entrapment of Polemics” (Iacob 2015). For my purposes, the finer details of this dispute are secondary. Instead, I argue that the attempt to define and close discussions on the state socialist past remains fruitless.
- 6.
In the films about the transformations of Romanian society after 1989, contemporary directors employ this strategy of investigating the workings of various social institutions such as the hospital (The Death of Mr Lazarescu, Best Intentions) and foster care (If I Want to Whistle, I Whistle, Outbound).
- 7.
Petrescu also mentions the Rashomon effect in conjunction with the films about the 1989 revolution, a topic which will be followed up later in this chapter (Petrescu 2014a).
- 8.
The oft-repeated view of the centrality of remembering the state socialist past within New Romanian Cinema (see e.g. Batori 2016) seems overestimated. A much larger body of films revolved around contemporary themes.
- 9.
Of course 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days is not by any means the first film to come out of New Romanian Cinema: in her historical monograph Nasta effectively introduces the earlier short films and features that precede 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (see Nasta 2013 Chapter 9, pp 139–154). It could be argued that Cristi Puiu’s ground-breaking 2005 feature, The Death of Mr Lazarescu, precedes 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days chronologically, and therefore should be taken as the model for later works. However, I am not interested in establishing a hierarchy, or even a linear timeline of films or their makers. While some journalists perpetuate this issue by hinting at a rivalry between Mungiu and Puiu (see Zeitchik 2016), the suggestion is problematic as it brushes over the significantly different voices and artistic goals of the directors, whose work is hard to compare.
- 10.
Why this gesture is used to attempt to break the transparency is a different question, and there are various traditions that make use of this device in order to highlight the constructed nature of the diegetic world. Douglas Sirk for example, in his by now classical films such as All that Heaven Allows (1955) or Written on the Wind (1956), used double framing to emphasize the fakeness of the upper-middle-class social idyll that he revisited and criticized in several of his films.
- 11.
The only exception to this pattern is the last episode of Tales from the Golden Age, about the legend of the chicken driver, where the action of the film progresses in a slow, steady flow uninterrupted by hectic camera movements or faster editing. Dramaturgically, this homogeneity of the rhythm is warranted by the blasé protagonist, who seems to participate in the elaborate scheme to steal eggs only by chance.
- 12.
- 13.
In many respects these narratives echo the observations of Harun Farocki in his television footage documentary Videograms of a Revolution, analyzed in Chapter 4, according to which the original historical event itself is inaccessible, and is rather constructed in the process of the contrasting multiple approaches to it.
- 14.
See Chapter 4 for Farocki’s interpretation of the absence of the “terrorists” in Videograms.
- 15.
Parvulescu has further argued that the pre-eminent role of chaotic sounds further contributes to the scenes’ incomprehensibility (see Parvulescu 2013, 369).
- 16.
The term “mnemonic realism” should not be confused with the naïve notion of realism in the context of remembering. It has nothing to do with the question of whether the represented events, characters, and so on have existed or not.
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Strausz, L. (2017). Contesting the Canon of the Past: State Socialism and Regime Change in New Romanian Cinema. In: Hesitant Histories on the Romanian Screen. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-55272-9_5
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